Price: 800 MS Points | Release Date: October 2009 | System:Xbox360

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot

Surprisingly I haven't played all of the campaign of Left 4 Dead 2 or even started to play Modern Warfare 2 and normally I would be all over those games. The amazing art work, the millions of guns and the amazingly fun co-op of Borderlands has been taking up all my time and interest. I mostly play it with my girlfriend split screen, who, despite normally HATING first person shooters, she loves Borderlands and its thrill of leveling up or killing that next Skag to get a bunch of cool loot.

Borderlands, for those who missed the original game, is a FPS/RPG hybrid. But that's kind of a lie, it's not much RPG but it has some elements like leveling up, skill points and loot. The RPG elements are like Diablo 2, because of the loot system and leveling up system.  Every time you kill a baddie it drops money, guns, ammo and you quickly press X and it picks it all up. Since this is random sometime the baddies drop amazing things, but for the most part they drop crap you can sell for money to buy amazing things. Basically the game has a randomly generated gun program, providing millions of different combinations of guns, including different guns types, different stats and elemental powers. So you will always be able to search for the weapon that suits you just right...

The first DLC that came to the game was The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. For 800 MS points or about 8 bucks you got a whole another zone to explore, with multiple sub-zones and new enemies.  While this add-on doesn't change much in the terms of different style of play or formula, it is basically more Borderlands to explore, grind, and get new loot. The whole add-on has a sort of Tim Burton Halloween vibe going for it and all the new artwork and zombie baddies also show this. Some of the new bad guys featured are the zombies, which look like dead versions of monsters you fought in the original game. A giant Frankenstein-type monster that takeah. dragging rest of systs a ton of shots to take down and even a Were-skag boss also feature. The story telling in this add-on is also a lot better -- I feel like the people at GearBox now understand what kind of tone they want with Borderlands and the DLC is a lot more tongue-in-cheek to match the cartoony style. The DLC is a good length, about 4-8 hours depending on how good you are or if you do all the side quests. If you loved Borderlands, or had a good time with it, this DLC is definitely worth the purchase.

The second DLC that came out was Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot and, while the first DLC kept things pretty similar to the original game, this one is an entirely different beast. If you've ever played Gears of War 2's Hoard mode or Halo 3: ODST's Fire Fight you have played this.  Basically it's 3 arenas that you fight five rounds each with five waves of enemies. You're thrown into an arena, wave one will be easy bad guys to kill, wave two will be guys with guns, three will be hoard wave (enemies run and swarm you), four is the bad ass wave with tougher enemies and wave five is the boss wave, with a boss from the game. This is an extremely hard mode and it only it gets harder. Mad Moxxi throws random modifications into each wave. For example, head shots only, vampire mode (where your life drains and only if you kill something does it refill) and others. This makes a tough add-on even tougher. I recommend this add-on on for co-op players only! In other words, if you play Borderlands solo you can skip it.

The reason I say this is because not only is the difficulty extremely high but if you die you start the entire round over. Only if you have another person playing with you does the penalty box come in. The penalty box is a cage hanging above the arena where if one of the players dies they are teleported to it. From there they can snipe enemies below to help their comrade. If your comrade dies they both start all over, if the comrade beats the wave, the other player is teleported back for the next wave. If you play this single player there is no penalty box ... you die you start the round over.

This DLC also adds a much needed bank, unfortunately it is extremely useless. The bank is only in the DLC zone, so if you wanted to use it with the rest of the game, to store items or guns, you would have to teleport all the way back to the DLC zone, thus rendering it completely useless. Had they added chests or banks to store your loot in the rest of Borderlands, this would have been a very cool feature. As it is now its worthless.  Overall Mad Moxxie's Underdome Riot really isn't worth 8 bucks, heck I'd say its only worth about 4 bucks and thats if you have other friends who have the DLC to play it with.

Overall: Borderlands is a fun game and if you loved the original, I highly recommend The Zombie Island Of Dr. Zed.  I would hold off on Moxxie's until the price is down or if you have a lot of friends who you play Borderlands with and want a good challenge.