This is Getting Pretty Awkward

Some characters can carry an expansion, and some can’t. As we observed with Captain Scarlett in her titular expansion, Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty, a weak lead character can absolutely sink the storyline for an expansion. Captain Scarlett wasn’t a well thought out lead, being both the advisor and antagonist of the story, but written in such a way that she screamed, “look at me, I’m so funny.” Her schtick wasn’t very enjoyable, and because you couldn’t invest in her as a character you didn’t really care about her adventure.

We run into a similar issue with Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt. Hammerlock, a big game hunter and creature enthusiast who was introduced in Borderlands 2, is the kind of character that works well in small doses. His little side quests, sprinkled throughout the meat of the main adventure, were amusing. They revolved around him sending you out to kill this monster or that creature, and they worked primarily because the quests weren’t very long and, thus, you didn’t have to spend a lot of time hanging out with Hammerlock.

But the expansion takes Hammerlock out of his side quest role and forces you to hang out with him, and that’s when things fall apart. It’s one thing to be sent off to kill something while you’re already out doing errands. But an adventure based all around killing things for sport raises uncomfortable questions about what you’re really doing here. Is spending your days hunting animals for sport really the best use of your skills after you just saved the world from a megalomaniacal villain? And when you add in the fact that you’re paired up with a British colonizer, killing racially-coded natives in their home territory… yeah, this expansion is problematic from every angle.

When you land in Hunter’s Grotto, you’re greeted by Sir Hammerlock, who needs your help. It seems that he has a big game hunt planned, but his hunting lodge has been taken over by the locals. These natives (named as “witch doctors” and “savages”) are none-too-pleased that Hammerlock (and the Vault Hunters) are there, encroaching on their lands. But Hammerlock has heard of the various, sacred beasts in the area and he has just one goal in mind: he wants to kill them all to collect their trophies.

While you’re there, helping Hammerlock fight off the savages to kill their protected beasts, a strange doctor contacts you: Professor Nakayama. The mad doctor is working on a way to bring back Handsome Jack and he assumes (quite incorrectly) that you’re there to stop him. As you go about your adventure, killing wild beasts, Nakayama continues to insert him into your adventure, sending vague threats and trying, oh so very hard, to make himself your new nemesis. This eventually leads to you having to deal with Nakayama just to get him to shut up. It’s a showdown for… well, some age. Maybe not the ages but… yeah…

I could honestly pick apart the plotline of Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt for hours. I honestly don’t know what the production team on this expansion thought that taking a British colonizer and giving him a storyline about killing tribal natives was a good idea. Even though Hammerlock is Black that doesn’t make anything that happens in this storyline okay. A British man trampling on the rights of local natives is a terrible storyline and it feels incredibly racist even when one of the characters involved in the story is a person of color. Icky is still icky by any metric.

It doesn’t help that the expansion racially codes the enemies you’re fighting. Calling them Savages and Witch Doctors and then dressing them up with tribal masks and giving them primitive weapons and shields absolutely smacks of racism. From the very first battle against them in the expansion I had that thought of, “are we the baddies?” The Vault Hunters in the series aren’t generally good people, even when they’re fighting to save planets and protect civilizations, but this was the first time where I expressly felt like the villain of the story.

It certainly doesn’t help that Nakayama is a nothing villain. He’s purposely written that way, an ineffectual, joke villain who’s absolutely excited that you’re there to fight him even while you have absolutely no clue who he is. He fails at every turn to get you interested in his story (which, again, is how the story is written) and he just doesn’t act like an engaging force in the story. Plus, he’s paired up with the natives, who you view as “savages”, which does nothing to dispel the notion that somehow you’re the villains in this whole piece.

Then there’s the fact that he wants to resurrect Jack, and we’ve hit upon a major theme for the games to come: never being able to let go of Handsome Jack. The series is absolutely obsessed with him, with multiple characters attempting to bring him back from the dead. Hell, the guy even gets his own midquel origin story. This might have been the first time the games introduced the idea of bringing Jack back from the dead, but it wouldn’t be the last, and it absolutely makes this expansion age poorly in retrospect. The series, as a whole, really needs to move on from Jack.

But I think, more than all of what I’ve listed off before, what really holds back this adventure is simply that it isn’t fun to play at all. The expansion is tuned and coded to be more difficult and more time consuming. Most of the enemies are harder to kill, and while the new variety of enemies (tribal foes, Giant Spores, Boroks, and Scaylions included) are nice, many of them are obnoxious to fight. This is on top of an adventure that requires you to hoof it back and forth, repeatedly, across the map, all while the annoying characters drone on around you.

Oh, and there’s the side quests that take forever to clear. They come in early, and you’ll spend far too long doing things like collecting a whole feast of eggs from around the map, or killing the rarest of rare creatures (that may never spawn because they’re all randomly generated). The whole adventure feels like it was needlessly padded out to force players to spend more time in the expansion while other, better things were being developed. It’s all so tedious and pointless, making the whole endeavor feel awful.

I won’t lie, this is probably the expansion I hate the most from the whole series. There are plenty I don’t like, but few annoy me as much as Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt. Hell even Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot, bad as it is, comes by its awful concept in a well intentioned way. But the developers should have known better by the time they got to Hammerlock’s expansion. They had plenty of good expansions they could look back at, picking the best elements to make something that was, at a minimum, fun to play. Instead they made this waste of time and energy that actively makes you hate every second you’re playing it. When it comes to expansions I hate playing, Hammerlock’s expansion for Borderlands 2 absolutely takes the top slot.