Viva La Robosistance!

While it’s clear that The Secret Armory of General Knoxx went on to have great influence on the first sequel in the BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. series, Borderlands 2, it’s harder to know what kind of direct influence the expansion had on its immediate follow-up, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution. Video game development cycles being what they are, this fourth and final expansion for the original Borderlands was likely in early development when the General Knoxx expansion was released. But with five months between the two DLC releases, there could have been time to recalibrate and take some ideas from one expansion to put into the next. Likely only the devs themselves know, and there isn’t a lot of reporting on that front to be found online at this point.

Whatever is the case, it is easy to note that the whole development cycle for Borderlands likely gave the devs thoughts on what they should put into this last expansion for the game. People either loved or hated Claptrap, the wisecracking, annoyingly voiced little robot (well, really, series of robots) that popped up everywhere in the first game. Taking that and using it to make Claptrap the “villain” of the final expansion made a certain amount of sense. “You always wanted to shoot Claptrap. Now here’s your chance.”

But on a technical front, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution does feel like a bit of a mixed bag. While it gives players more skill points to play with (as each expansion for Borderlands had done up to that point), new gear to collect, a new story to play through, and new areas to explore, it’s not as though this fourth and final expansion did anything really new with the game. You run around, you shoot versions of enemies you’d seen before, you fight bosses you’d fought before… it all really felt like a rehash of everything you’d seen in the game up to that point. A retread of previous, better material.

Some of that was by design. The whole point of the expansion seems to have been letting the first game take a victory lap before the developers shifted gears fully over to Borderlands 2 (which would come out just two years later). That’s why you fight bosses from the previous expansions (and even, sort of, the main game). That’s why you fight versions of enemies you battled previously. That’s why so much of this feels like a retread of previous material: it’s the game saying, “wasn’t all this great? Don’t you remember the fun we had?”

We do, Claptrap, because we played through the main game and the expansions. But those all still exist, and we can go back and play them again if we want. Instead of retreading old material with a slightly new coat of paint it would have been really nice to truly get some new material to play through, especially with a five month gap between this expansion and the previous (the longest expansion gap this first game saw). It was nice to get one final expansion to send off the original game in style, it just would have been nice for the expansion to be as revolutionary as the title of the DLC itself.

In Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution you get sent to Tartarus Station, an outpost at the ass end of Pandora, where you’re employed by Mr. Blake, of the Hyperion Corporation (we’ll be hearing from them again soon). It seems that Hyperion has a small bit of an issue: their CL4P-TP robots, which were previously dotted all over the planet as helper bots, have banded together and risen up. No longer are they content to help the humans populating the far reaches of the planet, taking their abuse and saying, “okay!” Now the Claptraps are out for blood, and they want Pandora for themselves. It’s up to the Vault Hunters to find a way to depower the Claptraps and take out their leadership, putting an end to their glorious revolution before it can truly begin.

Functionally Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution feels like any other portion of Borderlands. You’re dropped into a run down bit of town where Tanis gives you a mission to investigate weird goings-on in Tartarus Station. You wander around, shooting at versions of familiar enemies while exploring wide stretches of deserts and other abandoned areas. Occasionally a boss enemy will show up, but more often than not it will be a boss you’ve seen before, just with a little “claptrap” dome put onto its head. You’ll spend a lot of time doing things you’ve done before, right up until you get to the final boss of the campaign who does, finally, give you a new experience.

There are two types of enemies in the game. One set are enemies you’ve seen before that have been “claptrapped”. These enemies, like bandits, spiderants, and skags, will have little domes put on their heads, showing they’ve been taken over and roboticized by the robot revolution. But, otherwise, these are the same enemies you’ve seen before, acting the same as always. It’s a slightly different skin slapped onto functionally similar foes, making it feel like the developers did little more than change some art assets and call it a day.

The other enemy types added into the expansion are the Claptraps themselves. These little robots come in droves, but they functionally don’t act all that different from bandits. Some will shoot, some will run at you and melee, and some will run at you and explode themselves. Their behavior isn’t all that different from bandits in any of the ways that really matter, they’re just “new” in the sense that they have vastly different art assets from the bandits, so technically they count as different enemies. It’s enough that you probably will be amused at fighting something “new” for a little while, but eventually the amusement wears off and you realize it’s just more of the same.

That also goes for the bosses in the expansion. Three of them are rehashes we’ve seen from the previous adventures. General Knoxx and Zombie Nedd both show up, and other than the little domes on their heads they’re the same fights as before. We also finally get a battle with Commandant Steele (who, remember, was killed by the Destroyer right before the final fight of the main game), but we can’t really call this a new fight. Steele, despite clearly having Siren markings and, presumably, having Siren powers, fights just like the female assassins from The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. She’s just yet another reskin of a different enemy we saw before. We had a chance for something new here, but the devs took the easy way out again.

The one truly new fight we get comes right at the end when Claptrap reveals his secret weapon: the Mega Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap. This is a massive tank under Claptrap’s control that you fight right outside Fyrestone (the opening area from the start of Borderlands). This is a cool fight that requires new strategies to survive, and I really liked the experience of fighting it. It’s a hard fight, but a cool one, and it shows that the devs, with five months of time on their hands, could have added in new, interesting ideas if they’d actually wanted to.

Unfortunately the Mega Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap is the only real new idea the expansion has. While new areas to explore are nice, hardly anything interesting is done with them. While new achievements to get and new gear to find adds more to do in the game, nothing here really felt fresh or groundbreaking. This is a victory lap for Borderlands that barely felt like it even wanted to try. It gave players a bunch of rehashed assets, and said, “go waste a few hours on this since, we guess, you still want to play the game.”

We did want to play it, but after all the cool, new stuff in The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, we expected Borderlands to continue providing new experiences. Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution was certainly more to do, but that didn’t make it really feel “new”.