Tom

I held off on reading any reviews until after I'd finished playing, but this pretty much sums up how I feel. How exactly it's sitting at an 80+ rating on OpenCritic, I'll never quite understand.

Although Borderlands 2 is undoubtedly the best of the Borderlands games, I think that a big part of its success can be attributed to when it was released. Looter-shooters were still relatively fresh around that time, and the fact that Borderlands offered couch co-op made it one of the most accessible examples. Since the Xbox 360 era, though, interest in the genre has fallen off quite a bit. The fact that the Borderlands franchise has gone backwards during that time obviously hasn't helped, but I'm not convinced we'll ever see another Borderlands game hit the same heights as BL2, even if Gearbox does someday find a way to improve upon its formula.

There's this one part in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest where you need to press one of the face buttons to use your weapon in the overworld and stab a tree in the face. My brother and I spent hours trying to figure out the intended solution and ended up calling one of these premium-rate video game tips and tricks phone lines to get help. Understandably, our parents went nuts when they got the phone bill a few weeks later, and we both got grounded for a week.

To this day, that remains the only time I've ever faced real-world consequences because of a video game, although I'm pretty sure we just spent the week playing more video games, so the punishment wasn't all that bad.

Vlad Yeah. I think it needed something like that to give players a reason to keep coming back. It’s a shame really, because the map traversal mechanics and creative ways to kill enemies made the first few games a lot of fun to play, but having sunk countless hours into the third game, I really struggled with JC4, as it felt too much like retreading the same old ground.

All that said, I expect we will get a new Just Cause game eventually, and by then, enough time will have passed for it to feel fresh again.

It’s worth noting here that the original launch price for the digital PS5 was ¥39,980 in Japan. This “cheaper” model is still considerably more expensive than that despite launching more than five years later.

As much as I love me some Just Cause, the franchise had started to run out of steam by the fourth game, and the sequels to Shadow of Mordor and Watch Dogs both felt like backward steps (so much so in the case of the latter that I had zero interest in checking out Legion).

I’d love to see a Sleeping Dogs remake though. The original was one of the best open-world sandbox games from the era and and one of four fantastic games set in Hong Kong that begin with the letter S (Shenmue 2, Stranglehold, and Stray being the others).

Brady In hindsight, I should probably have written this as a best fusion combos list, as that's where the big damage really starts to come into play. Even underwhelming balls like Black Hole can be OP when fused with stuff like Flash and Sun.

zach You can’t start from there, but you can fast travel there by using the payphone at the supply camp right at the start of Matrix 11, as shown in the included video.

Wow. You weren't kidding! Maggot + Noxious (and also Maggot + Virus) has some crazy damage potential, particularly with Flagellant or Shieldbearer keeping all of the baby balls in play. I'm not sure that I can place it any higher than A-tier, though, as I still think Sisyphus is the best character for status effect builds, and using him obviously prevents baby balls from spawning.

Sounds like maybe I didn’t give it enough of a chance to shine. Will try a few more runs with it later and then reevaluate its position. Thanks, Brady.