And what better use for the guns then to travel all over the place and kill anything that moves on the greasy world of Pandora. Sadly, that’s not saying much about travelling since every area is just too similar. If i had to say what the biggest problem that Pandora has is, i’d say “variety”. The game starts you in a desert wasteland. The area after that, is a desert wasteland. The area just a bit further? A scrapyard. The one after it? A scrapyard with a marsh. What then? A wasteland. Where does the game end? In a snowy area. It’s like the developers realised they had a bit of  ’samey’ zones and decided to spice it up for the sake of it. I personally wished they did more of it. As fun as the game might be, you can’t spend 30 hours killing bandits in a damned desert wasteland. 

If there's a fire pit in the middle of an arena, it's boss time!

Still, spending 30 hours killing bandits in desert wasteland while driving a buggy with a rocket launcher strapped to it, does change things a bit. Early on you get access to a buggy that you can customize visually, strap a machine gun or a rocket launcher to it and let loose on anything in your path. It’s a nice little way to brake things up, but in the end, it’s just a means to get from point A to point B on the map. Later on you’ll actually get to see how big the game really is, and with that realisation, the game will allow you access to a fast-travel system, a system that you’ll actively learn to learn, but it wont substitute getting around the actual areas with your favorite-color buggy.. down the same damned desert wasteland area.

I think he's pissed. And on fire.

Don’t get the wrong, the game doesn’t look bad visually. The semi-cell-shaded effect really works for it and goes the same road as Mirror’s Edge,  showing that games don’t really need extreme graphics to accomplish a nice looking game world. While most of the game world features a lot of brown hills and shades of gray it also is spotted with bright colors here and there. Yellow rifles shooting red-effect bullets at green corrosive enemies while you’re throwing your blue shock-covered BloodWing really makes a rainbow of colors flood your screen, drowning out all the ‘bad’ browns. The game doesn’t look unattractive and should satisfy most of the graphic-hungry gamers out there. It wont put their rigs to the test, since performance-wise, the game run smoothly on current-gen systems maxed out.

Not intimidating at all.

The ’samey’ feeling that we got from the areas also seeps into enemy design aswell. You have bandits, skags, rakks, spiderands, some lobster crawly things that you fight three or four times, Crimson Lance soldiers and some other guys i’ll not mention here for the sake of  spoilers. While they fight differently and have different weak spots to hit for critical shots, in the end, it’s just not enough to make the game feel rich. Having most of the game populated by bandits doesn’t help the matter one bit. I swear, i’ve killed more bandits then i’ve killed the rest of the enemies put together, and that just does not make for a varied effect. This really cuts down on the enjoyability of the game, especially in one that is so dedicated on actually fighting spectacular enemies in spectacular ways with spectacular guns.

What’s also spectacular is the fact that the AI-area is lacking, but i’d rather chalk it up to the game offering a good experience. After all, it’s hard having fun shooting people when all the guy are actually hiding behind cover or strafing your shots. Sarcasm off. So as such, many of them will just run at you the moment you fire the first shot, and sometimes duck under something. Something that usually is just a bit smaller then they are, so you can still throw a headshot if you’re really good.

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