Two weeks ago, Gearbox released its second DLC for Borderlands 2; Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage. Mr. Torgue is holding a tournament to find the biggest badass on Pandora, and open a new vault, and he wants you to enter the competition! The DLC promised explosions, loot-splosions, and more badassitude than you could handle. What we ended up getting were some extremely lackluster missions with one of the funniest characters I’ve seen in video games.
Right out the gate Mr. Torgue is yelling in your ear, but not in a bad way. He’s more or less the narrator in this DLC, and his style makes the narrative very enjoyable. The rampant comedy that was present throughout the main story of the game is reborn in Mr. Torgue. He squeals out guitar riffs, yells about wanting sandwiches, tells you to punch enemies in the dick, and breaks the fourth wall often to tell you about traps and double crosses. The other noticeable thing about Mr. Torgue is that he has discovered the F word, something that was always vacant from Borderlands, and peppers it throughout his spiels, along with some other choice swears. Really though, this adds to the overall feel of the DLC, and makes it funnier The constant bleeping out of his profanity adds to the hilarity of the ridiculous things that he says to you, and makes going on quests enjoyable, even if the quests aren’t.
The quests are the biggest let down about the DLC. The main point of this side adventure is to find out who the ultimate badass is on Pandora. So on these specific main-story quests, you fight bosses, or waves upon waves of toughening enemies, making you feel like a badass just in the sheer number of kills you’re scoring. But the fluff in between these quests just dampens the feeling. Quests are given that have you literally circle a walkway killing enemies, collecting cookies, racing cars, and having an enemy follow you for about 5 minutes without being able to kill it. The quests really fell short for me, and I was disappointed that a DLC all about being a badass had me looking for chocolate chip cookies and walking a dog.
This DLC also boasted new weapons and a new currency just for the area, but it all seemed pointless. At this point, I’ve built up a pretty good pile of guns that I use religiously, and saving up tokens for some weapons that don’t even come close to them was irrelevant. By the end of the DLC I had hundreds of these ‘Badass Tokens’ that I had no use for. If you come into the game late and play the DLC before playing all the way through the main story, I can see where the guns would be a nice addition. But as it stands, the guns just didn’t scream, “I need to use those!” as I went through. None of them caught my eye the way some of the higher ranked guns usually do.
I really enjoyed the DLC, not so much for the lame quests and reskinned enemies, but more for the personally that Mr. Torgue and some of the other characters brought to it (It was mostly Mr. Torgue, though). I’d recommend this one to any fan of the game. The humor alone makes it worth the 800 Microsoft points, ($10), and Mr. Torgue really is a character that needs to be seen and heard by more people.
Gamenomics & Comicology 