I downloaded Borderlands 2 back in June of 2019 after it became one of that month's free PSN games, as I always heard that it was fun to play with friends. After noticing that it was in my backlog years later, I asked my friend if he wanted to go back and beat Borderlands 2 with me, but because 2K Games apparently hates it when two people want to play the same game on different consoles by making it a nightmare to set everything up, I decided to beat the game on my own. This process took well over a year, and that is entirely due to just how unfun Borderlands 2 was for me to play.

Before I go ahead with why I hated this game so much, I just want to address the whole sentiment that this game is more fun with multiple players, because you can apply that to pretty much every game ever made. Playing with friends is fun by default, regardless of what game it is, so me playing the game alone doesn't excuse how bad Borderlands 2 is. Anyway, I hated pretty much everything about this game that other people seemed to love, and one of these would be the gameplay loop itself. Wandering around empty areas and shooting endless amounts of bullet sponge enemies that take forever to kill made this game feel like a chore the whole way through, and the enemies themselves aren't placed with any sort of purpose or intricacy whatsoever. One of the main selling points of the Borderlands series is how no two weapons are the same, and while it is interesting to have your loadout constantly change throughout each playthrough, the dependence on RNG made almost every weapon that I earned feel obsolete when compared to what I had already found.

If the game was just unfun to play, then I would've just dismissed Borderlands 2 as a boring looter shooter, but what makes this game a complete disaster for me is its writing. No character in this game ever shuts up, and the game's sense of humor reeks of 2012 internet culture with how loud and obnoxious it is. When I wasn't bored by the gameplay, I was annoyed by the dialogue, and I couldn't stand hearing these characters constantly run their mouths before I had even reached the halfway mark. Not only that, but this constant barrage of annoying nonsense is used to tell a boring story that somehow expects you to care for its one-dimensional characters, which was flat out impossible for me to do because of how aggravating they all were. It doesn't help that this game is coated in an ugly artstyle that looks like a bad mishmash of Mad Max and a comic book that was written and illustrated by a 13 year old. I will admit that the music wasn't that bad, although that isn't to say that it wasn't generic. For me, Borderlands 2 was zero fun to play, and I don't think I ever want to play another game from this series ever again.