The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

This is a really fun dlc, it not only has a theme to it that feels put of place in the main game, but also adds to the overall late in a way many dlcs fail to do so in this day and age. Ned is a fun addition to the cast and the horror elements work wonders with the main games sense of humour.

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is a classic horror-inspired homage to zombie flicks, horror movies, and all things vaguely mystery. You'll encounter callbacks to the Exorcist, Teen Wolf, Scooby-Doo, The Descent, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Hours, Half-Life 2's elevator sequence (and its own reference in Left 4 Dead), and just about a million other things I probably missed. The small town of Jakobs Cove, a worker town for the nearby gun manufacturer of the same name, is under attack from an infectious zombie outbreak. You come to find that a Dr. Ned - who is totally not Dr. Zed by the way - has been rumored to have an antidote, so you set off to find him and save the town.

The very first thing you'll notice is that DLC is integrated very poorly in ways that kind of undermine the experience I was used to. In the base game, every single area that can be entered can also be fast traveled to. Zombie Island unfortunately throws that out of the window, with the only available fast travel point linked to the very beginning of the area so that you can enter/leave the content. I believe they just didn't want to have multiple DLC areas on the main fast travel network page so the player wouldn't get confused, since the ordering of the list can be glitchy at times. However, BL2 showed us that a simple written delineator between basegame content and DLC in the fast travel list is immediately understandable and useful, so the implementation is just poor here. What this all means is that you will be walking and running a LOT throughout, a feat not made easy by the infinitely respawning zombies and "Defilers," who can each slow your movement speed to a crawl with vomit sludge attacks. It's not easy to avoid enemy encounters here, so compounding that with how much walking there is, you get a lot of time spent.

Thankfully enough, the zombies are fun to kill, as are the new other enemies. It basically feels like facing a bunch of Psychos from the main game, but in slow motion, and you have to use similar movement tactics to keep them all in sight. The Enhanced version of the game includes a minimap which dots aggroed enemies, and that is a lifesaver. I can imagine original GOTY players having a bit more trouble locating where they're being hit. Additionally, you've got the Wereskags, Tankensteins, a couple Rakk reskins, and a handful of boss encounters to round out the enemy roster. Only Ned himself has a gun in the entire DLC, which is disorienting but a nice change of pace.

The locations themselves, excluding Dead Haven as reused content, are all quite novel and fun. This DLC goes for "moonlit green" as opposed to the neverending "sunbaked brown" of the base game, and actual fauna is interesting to see. The Jakobs Corporation is quite active in the plot, and that leads to some extremely funny moments where you're forced to deal with their incompetent and blame-denying HR department amid zombie fights. They try to cover up the outbreak and that leads to a couple of well-thought out side missions that reveal what the workers were up to as they realized what was happening. Some go on and fight, some run away, some opt in for research for a cure, and generally they're all interesting to learn about in their ECHOs left behind. I was very entertained throughout.

If you're playing BL1 on PC in the mid-to-late 2010s, you almost definitely got this pack for free along with the other DLC, so go for it. It's a short and sweet 3-hour romp through spooky swamps and forests with zombies and other classical horror creatures to shoot, and easily the best-written and funniest script for any content in BL1. Outside of one (series of progressively soul crushing) brain-collecting quest(s), the content is fun. Too bad about the fast travel bit though - with better integration this could have maybe surpassed the base game.

Super enjoyable DLC. Gameplay is put in the background to focus on the story elements that borderlands so desperately needed. Wish there was more enemy variety than 1-2 shot zombies but other than that it's pretty good.