Claptrap's New Robot Revolution

Ok whose bright idea was it to give this game a dlc where claptrap is the main villain of the piece? I guess in terms of gameplay, there nothing wrong here as everything works fine, however the story told is beyond moronic and only serves to explain why he's the only claptrap unit left in future instalments as the core gameplay sees you murdering claptrap units who believe they're part of a revolution similar to that of the French resistance in WWII. It isn't offensive by any means, just profoundly stupid as it hinges in the gimmick of killing these robots as well as undead versions of common enemies which was already a thing in the zombie dlc of the game. If you really get off on killing claptrap units, then this is the dlc for you, everyone else should instead move along from here.

The fourth and final piece of DLC for the original Borderlands is a complete disaster. If bonus content is meant to enhance or expand the original game and its mechanics, it can be very easily argued that this is not only antithetical to the purpose of DLC, but it is in fact so poorly designed that it made me wonder if I even enjoyed the base game experience, after enjoying it thoroughly at the time.

The story is pretty straightforward: the original Claptrap from Fyrestone gets struck by lightning and gains awareness of how other Claptraps across Pandora are being abused. He stages an armed revolution against every living thing in sight, converting bandits and the wild beasts into "-trap" variants, with various robotic appendages and mechanical brains used to control them. This means absolutely nothing, as they're just reskins - behavior is not altered. Despite being on the same "side," skag-traps and bandit-traps will fight each other to the death without your interference, a solid preview of the expeditious corner-cutting found across the campaign. A Hyperion rep, Mr. Blake, hires you to quell the rebellion and save the company from angry shareholders.

Actually playing this content is difficult because it is easily the least functional piece of software in Borderlands history. Many characters are not programmed to move their conversation to the ECHO if you walk away from them, prompting either a stockholder image or occasionally the wrong character to show up on your HUD while they speak. Marcus Kincaid did not stand behind his desk in his Tartarus shop but instead directly in front of the vending machines, leaning forward to rest on thin air. The new Claptrap enemies are completely unanimated, with wheels that don't move and occasionally not being able to move while they T-pose and an invisible gun shoots at you. The 100% mechanical claptraps are for some reason programmed as flesh targets, so fire is extra effective against them. Around 75% of skag-traps did not have critical hit points in their mouths, making badass encounters extremely difficult. In one instance, a skag pup was submerged in a lagoon in the canyon, and to my horror I discovered that bullets could not pass through the surface of the water because it had been programmed as a wall without collision. When gigantic mechanical gates opened, they used the extremely noticeable "red chest open" sound effect instead of any of the actual gate-opening SFX variants from the main game. Just completely amateur in avoidable areas, introducing problems the base game never suffered from.

The environments themselves somehow outdo the programming in terms of just complete dogshit design. Every place feels like it was sized too large, with you very frequently sprinting for minutes at a time just to reach the next waypoint or area. The worst examples of this were an atrociously large digsite that took actual minutes to navigate the circumference and a cave that was so complex that the developer literally gave up on building a useful map for it and instead made a question mark out of the boundaries as a complete fuck-you. When it isn't a gigantic empty space, it's a completely mirrored area with not a single ounce of creativity filled in. Every box, ammo container, locker, turret, fence, and building is placed in a grid, making the entire world feel completely lifeless. This is completely antithetical to the lived-in world of Pandora in the base game and it is honestly an embarrassing enough mistake that even a layman such as myself can tell when something was just thrown together in a map editor. This also accentuates the flaws of DLC integration, which I have harped on in the past on other BL1 DLC pages, because you cannot fast travel to Robolution areas, you must walk. What this amounts to is a colossal waste of time, all the time, at every conceivable opportunity.

So, what do you do in these shoddy, sterile, gigantic empty areas? Fight re-skins of other DLC bosses, base game enemies, and the dozens of broken, t-posing claptraps. Yikes. At one point you fight Commandant Steele (whose name was misspelled, by the way), making your way through a 20 minute+ area to find the device that could reprogram the original Claptrap and stop the rebellion, and I fucking kid you not it's just sitting on the ground of a huge, completely empty warehouse, completely unguarded and unprotected. Even the optional missions are beyond tedious. In the most frustrating example, you'll be asked by Tannis to collect hundred and hundred of claptrap parts so she can build what is basically a mop person she can talk to. Yes that's correct, Patricia Tannis, all-galaxy scientist and archaeologist, needing machine parts to build a giant doll. However, the mission is split into 5 distinct missions with growing requirements, and the thresholds needed are usually met mid-mission, which means either collecting dozens of parts that count for nothing or leaving them there to return to after more grating minutes of commuting.

Finally, I'd like to talk about sound and visual stuff, because this is the only DLC pack that does not introduce new music to the series outside of a single battle theme which is decent enough. Most of the visual assets are from the base game and Knoxx so nothing feels distinct in that area either, and references to the other DLCs are made in a really desperate attempt to legitimize this content as equal. The OG Claptrap will shout rallying cries through speakers across Tartarus, but he seriously only has 3 total things to say, and you will hear them often. Same goes for the enemy claptraps who all say one of 4 potential jokes upon death. When you are slaughtering dozens at a time, it is not funny or charming to hear 6 of them talking over each other to make the same joke about being RROD'd. The story is written in a similar way that mirrors BL2 in some ways, as it is relentless joke-loaded without timing or cleverness to back it up.

What you get in total is content that genuinely does not feel like it was made by the same people. Oh wait! It wasn't. Gearbox outsourced this to the abysmal Darkside Games to create their BL2 tie-in content for them. Thankfully, its impossible to by BL1 without the DLC anymore, so you can passively enjoy the level cap bump without having to touch the content. A horrific sendoff for BL1 and thankfully the lowest point BL DLC would ever reach.