Inside the Mind of Madness

With Borderlands 2, Gearbox had a hit that kept on hitting. The company had a game people loved, and they followed it with a season of expansions that (by and large) people really seemed to enjoy. Then they followed that up with a second season of all new content, mini-expansions adding even more of what everyone enjoyed – guns, guts, and carnage – to keep players hooked in and ready to roll. When they then released Borderlands: The Presequel, they assumed they’d have another hit of the same scale. Massive game, big player base, multiple expansions. Things didn’t work out quite to plan.

You can come up with many and varied reasons why Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel didn’t succeed at anywhere near the same level. There was likely some player fatigue, too much Borderlands in too short a period without time to cool off and miss the games. A story for the midquel that didn’t live up to expectations. Gameplay that wasn’t varied enough from Borderlands 2. Hell, my review of the game is rife with complaints, but it’s all baked around a core game that could have worked if things were just a little different. The game could have been many things, but for Gearbox the big issue is that it underperformed.

Because of that, the big plan for a long tail of expansions was canned. Instead, only two were released, and only one was a “real” expansion that provided the kind of content players had been expecting. The first expansion, “The Holodome Onslaught”, was just a glorified battle arena that the company charged full price for. Reviews online were not kind, and that likely soured the player base when it came time for the next expansion to roll out. This one was bigger, and it was better. It was the “Claptastic Voyage”, and it show everything that the midquel could be while also, in the process, compounding all the issues players had with Borderland: The Pre-Sequel.

In the expansion, Jack has a new mission for his team of bounty hunting Vault Hunters. It seems that Hyperion management hid a key bit of code inside Claptrap’s memory banks and Jack wants it back. The code will let him consolidate power and put all his plans into motion, but Hyperion was smart and hid it under layers of security code such that Jack, who is a programmer himself, can’t just hack it out. He needs a way deep into the code, a way to get inside Claptrap to get to the source.

So he digitizes the Vault Hunters and sends them, quite literally, into the mind of Claptrap. It’s a weird, strange, digital world filled with all manner of Claptraps, each a representation of the inner workings of the main Claptrap. The Vault Hunters have to battle their way past security protocols and defense mechanisms, all to get to the H-Source, the core code that Jack needs. But just getting to the code won’t be the hard part; actually putting their hands on it, once a true threat within Claptrap’s mind is revealed, will truly push this adventure to places no one could have expected at all.

I appreciate that sometimes the Borderlands games are willing to do strange storylines and put out really weird expansions. “Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep” was one such expansion, and it completely revitalized Borderlands 2. It changed up so many things – artwork, music, characters – while still providing the core experience fans loved, and the expansion got rave reviews for just how far it pushed that core experience and made it into something new. You can tell while playing “Claptastic Voyage” that the company had hoped they could do the same thing for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel with this expansion.

In some ways it does work. I appreciate the new art coupled with a new world that redefines the style of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. Clappy’s mind is a mish-mash of sci-fi concepts, from Fantastic Voyage to Tron, and, stylistically, it’s a delight to look at. It was clear that the designers strived to rework the game and make something visually appealing that players would enjoy. Being freed of the constraints of having to keep anything grounded or “normal”, even within the bounds of this universe, allowed the team to make something even stranger and weirder than normal.

With that being said, much of this expansion just doesn’t work for me. For starters, the level design of the expansion is even worse than the main game. Being freed up from normal world-building constraints is great, in theory, but the designers already struggled making levels that players could parse and understand. This expansion compounds that issue, with weird levels that twist and turn in ways that are hard to see or understand. I died more than a few times jumping for some place I thought I could land all because I didn’t see where I was actually supposed to go. It was a struggle enjoying the exploration experience more often than not.

I also felt that some of the boss fights were more obnoxious than entertaining. The developers apparently felt that what players wanted was bigger, harder, more elaborate bosses that were impossible to kill. Even with all the good weapons that this expansion would drop regularly (seriously, I couldn’t help but stumble over pink seraph and orange legendaries constantly) I still felt like many of the bosses were nothing more than bullet sponges meant to waste my time while I died over and over again. It was tedium dressed up as active battles.

The real issue with the expansion, though, was that I was annoyed by it, not entertained. Beyond the level issues and the boss problems, the story of this expansion is utter nonsense. Jack wants a key, you go in to get the key, and then the story faffs around, making you do a lot of nonsense jobs just for the sake of when the code you want is right in front of you for most of the expansion. “No, we know it’s right there. But you can’t have it yet. Go do this thing that doesn’t matter, and then that thing that also doesn’t matter. You have to wait.” It’s bad storytelling, which honestly matches most of the main game which also featured a lot of bad storytelling.

Of course, the fact that we’re trapped inside Claptrap’s mind doesn’t help matters. One Claptrap is bad enough; he can be amusing when you talk to him once in a while, but the longer you spend with him the less you like him. Being forced into a world where everything is a Claptrap makes that problem much, much worse. I’m not even a Claptrap hater and I found him grating on my nerves by the time this expansion was over. This expansion really proves that Claptrap is a seasoning and not the main dish.

Much like with the main game of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, there’s a core experience in “Claptastic Voyage” that I think could be fun. It would just require remaking the levels, reworking the bosses, and rewriting the whole story to get there. This expansion has promise, but the overall experience is so obnoxious and annoying that, like with the main game, I don’t think I’m ever going to want to play through it all again.