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Revisiting Borderlands 2’s brand of loot-happy gunplay as part of its surprise final DLC pack, Commander Lilith & The Fight For Sanctuary

- Aaron Potter

If you told me six months ago that I’d be firing up Borderlands 2 again to play a new bite-sized campaign, I simply wouldn’t have believed you. Heck, even Gearbox’s long-awaited threequel, which was merely a faint glimmer in my eye by that point, seemed more likely. And yet here I am jumping into Commander Lilith & The Fight For Sanctuary, the latest – and presumably final – piece of DLC for everyone’s favourite cel-shaded looter-shooter, offering up new plantriddled enemy types to kill and a new Effervescent gun tier to do it with. Hopefully, by its end I can consider the story gap between 2014’s Tales From The Borderlands and the upcoming Borderlands 3 satisfyingly filled.

The story kicks off about as explosively as you’d expect from something with the words ‘commander’ and ‘fight’ in its title, with the sky-high haven of Sanctuary quickly under siege at the hands of a new antagonist, Colonel Hector. It’s immediately made clear that this grizzled army-type won’t ever hold a candle to the sweet-talking dementedness of Handsome Jack, but it’s a relief to have another baddie to aim my anger towards rather than just another vault like in the first Borderlands. Hector is someone with a particularly personal grudge against the planet of Pandora and all that it represents (for reasons that I’ll eventually learn about later), feeling the need to unleash a deadly gas-like toxin that forces my ragtag team of Crimson Raiders to fall back and find a new base of operations.

Psycho killer