The Borderlands 2 Gun Discarders Club

An honest-to-god game review in the Good/Bad/Ugly format, except Steve bolts a "Great" section onto the front because he adores this game and wants that established before the complaining starts. The storage argument the pull quote comes from occupies only the Ugly at the very end; the bulk is the rest of the review, and it's better than the format suggests. The Great weighs BL2 against the original the way you'd weigh The Empire Strikes Back against Star Wars, and hands the Best Humor award to the bandits (one recites Hamlet while charging you). The Good explains, with real affection, why the world design is a theme park. Then the career engineer takes over: the Bad section is a bug tracker, filing tickets for "favorite" items you can sell with no warning, vending machines that sort pricey class mods above the health you're frantically mashing for mid-firefight, and a suspected race condition in the code that decides whether you or the last enemy died first.

One tension worth watching for: an early paragraph rates modders as mentally and emotionally twelve years old, and a few sections later Steve calmly plans to hack the bank-slot counters in his own save file. He grants himself the exemption as a workaround for Gearbox's cluelessness, but watching the collection pressure squeeze that exemption out of an avowed anti-modder proves his design point better than any argument he makes outright. The review keeps circling back to the first game as it goes, and the passage all that circling has been building toward is saved for the finish. Let it arrive on its own.