DPrime Review: Borderlands: Zombie Island

Borderlands new DLC is Doctor Ned’s Zombie Islands. Once you get into a game of borderlands there isn’t anything special you really have to do to start the DLC, you, just walk up to a fast travel machine and pick Jakob’s Cove. You arrive here on your search for the Vault but you are in for a little surprise. Once you arrive you are greeted with a nice comedic story from your old friend Marcus (the bus driver). He says Dr. Ned (that is no way Dr. Zed just in a different disguise) was trying to save people from death but he made flesh eating zombies and your there to stop them.

After the nice story you have to walk around part of the island and encounter you first brain eating enemies. At the beginning you only fight Zombies and Defilers, which vomit on you restricting your movement. Eventually you reach a town with a friendly claptrap who works for Dr. Ned. He gives you new missions, information, and alerts you when there are new missions at the Jakob’s Cove bounty board. First he sends you to Hallows End, where Dr. Ned’s tree house is where you fight a few new enemies such as the Suicide Zombie, Torso, Tankenstein, and the Loot Goon. Once you meet him he tells you to help find an antidote to the zombie outbreak. (To avoid spoilers that is all I’ll say about the story of Zombie Island).

Zombie Island is really big for DLC, it has six huge areas each with there own set of missions and tasks that need to be accomplished. There is:

Jakob’s Cove: The center of operation, it’s where you get most of your missions and almost every area is attached to it.

Hallows End: Where Dr. Ned normally resides, where the Jacko-lantern side boss lives, and where (spoilerish) Undead TK Baha stays.

Generally Hospital: Where you fight zombie skag  bosses, gather the antidote, and where you meet your first plot twist. Also where you fight Corpse eaters and Undead Rakks.

Dead Haven: Where you Contact the Jakobs Gun headquarters, find out what Dr. Ned is really up to, and fight the side boss Frank.

Lumbermill Yard: Where you help a claptrap and find a new backpack SDU, fight your first Wereskag, and fight around twenty hordes of zombies.

Saw Mill: Contains a few shops a saw mill setting for a boss fight and a very bloody, gory cave to end it all.

Zombie Islands has somewhere around 10-15 missions with around 7 hours of game play just to beat all the missions, not including looting, exploring, and gaining experience (most likely for weapon proficiencyby this point). This expansion seems almost a third of the size of the actual game (which makes since it’s a Gigabyteto download). I takes longer to beat the missions here than the actual story of Borderlands, which doesn’t say much since a lot of the time you spend is doing side missions. But it is probably one of the best add-ons for a game in a really long time.

Soon after you start playing though you realize they could have spent a little more time working out the bugs. Almost anytime any character talks you hare them studder and repeat themselvesquite often. A lot of the characters will explode in sound and say all the dialog that is programed within them and it will most likely hurt you ears and sound really annoying. There is only really one other flaw that I could find, there is this one mission that you have to pick up corpse eater eggs and there aren’t enough of the type you need to kill and they don’t re-spawn unless you save and exit the session. So for that mission you have to exit and come back around 3 or 4 times.

What I Liked:

Length: To be finished with this DLC it takes around 9 hours which is money well spent for $10.

Funny: They focused a lot on being witty and funny and it will probably crack you up at least a few times.

Creativity: They were pretty creative with the story and ending of Zombie Island and they did bring some new use to powers you choose in the past.

Difficulty: If you play on insane mode then the enemies will be strong and fun to fight, the bosses aren’t to hard or easy they were just about perfect.

What I Didn’t like:

Flaws: The flaws in the game like the egg missions and the explosion of noise are annoying and bothersome.

No Level Cap Raise: They have yet to raise the level cap which was a little depressing but it was still fun.