Opening the cabinet, we are treated to a quest completion screen. The flavor text reads: You just moved five feet and opened a locker. Later, when you’re killing skyscraper-sized monsters with a gun that shoots lightning, you’ll look back on this moment and be like, "heh."
Indeed. We are awarded:
- Basic Repeater
- Manufacturer: Dahl
- Damage: 11
- Accuracy: 89.3
- Fire Rate: 12.5
- Reload Speed: 1.5
- Magazine Size: 7
Not bad for our first gun, I suppose. Once we exit the screen, the female voice pops up saying that the time of the four Vault Hunters that opened the Vault before this one has passed, and it was my time now. I can dig it. Claptrap starts up about me being his minion and how we’re going to take own the apparent bad guy here, Handsome Jack. Fellow Psychos, do I really have to play second fiddle to a blind robot? I guess I owe him one...
I examine Claptrap’s home before setting out, getting familiar with my gun. Each weapon manufacturer within the Borderlands universe has a specific gimmick associated with their produced weaponry. In the case of Dahl, the gun has a burst fire mode which kicks in when zoomed in. I’m not opposed to this at all, since the more bullets I can fire at this point, the better. Within one room of the home is a hidden Vault Symbol, which is essentially a hidden collectible. This earns me a Badass Rank, and getting a certain amount (or a certain percent) of these nets me a Badass Token, which can be used to increase the percentage bonus to a particular character stat if it’s in the group that pops up. Let’s see what my Badass Rank is real quick… 11541. Not bad. The highest buff is +8.4%. I should point out that unless you specifically turn them off, this applies to every character you create, and every character gets you more and more ranks. I’m not turning them off, because they’re here in part to assist in starting new characters. Plus, I earned those on my previous playthrough.
After looting the place dry, we move forward with a blind Claptrap, not telling him where the obstacles in his way are despite him telling us to. Gotta have a little fun with this, at least. After that, we learn that Claptrap is thankfully very familiar with the glacier we find ourselves on, commenting that we’ll find his eye on Frostbite Crevasse. When I heard that on my first playthrough, I honestly thought he was trying to speak on the issue as though he had a preferred art style or something. We get two more pieces of information. One, the Bullymong that specifically took his eye is called Knuckle Dragger. Two, that the main destination the female voice has for us is a place called Sanctuary; it’s the only place we’ll be safe, she says, and that we’ll need Claptrap to get there.
Speaking of Bullymongs, we get to shoot some now. Finally, some combat! Bullymongs are an interesting yet basic enemy. At their base level, they’re four-armed gorillas with little legs which they hardly use, in essence. Their primary tactic is, quite understandably, to pummel you to pieces, although there are later types that will throw things at us we’ll see later, chiefly ice. When seriously wounded, most every enemy has a change in animation, typically them limping. We dispatch these enemies quite easily with our pistol and buzzaxe, which is our melee weapon. Neither seems to have an edge over the other in terms of damage. Thankfully, these enemies have opened up a path for us.
Taking this newly created path, we round the corner to be greeted with the ground heavily shaking much like an earthquake. Claptrap comments that it’s either Handsome Jack’s drills trying to find the Vault or my mother got out of bed. That’s a line you can cross with this Psycho, Claptrap. I doubt he even had a mom. The scenery around us gives an obvious point of interest – a Hyperion barge crashed into the glacier and frozen over. Just as we see this, Claptrap rolls off a cliff. I’m seriously hoping we get this guy fixed soon. Dropping down, we begin to dispatch more Bullymongs with Krieg going "Bathe in the MEAT CHUNKS!" You uh… you hungry, Krieg? You’re hungry, right?
A bigger Bullymong comes at us this time; I’m forced to aim at its critical spot, the head, to easily dispatch it. Once that’s done, I free Claptrap before he starts talking again. It’s worth mentioning you get some funny lines from Claptrap if you wait a while; he’ll start to speak and continue humorously, finally falling silent. We receive a call on out Echo communicator from none other than Handsome Jack himself, and he essentially states that the whole welcoming party for the Vault Hunters, as we’ve already gathered, is a trap to keep them from interfering. He then tells us we’d be doing him a big favor if we just offed ourselves now. Well gee, Handsome Jack, I’d love to, but y’see, Krieg’s hungry. I’m hungry. And you sound really tasty right no-
MOVING ON
We approach the barge as Claptrap proclaims his eye switched back on... and it can see us. Fuck. Who should show up, then, other than...
KNUCKLE DRAGGER
THIS IS GONNA HURT
Knuckle Dragger picks up a scrap heap of a car, tossing it to ground level from the barge and teleports in the explosion, wearing the eye we need like a necklace. So begins a pretty simple fight; Knuckle Dragger continuously moves towards you, knocking you back when he finds you or picking up chunks of ice to throw or even lunging at you. When he’s taken enough damage, he summons enemies and flees for a bit, coming back in while you’re busy with the minions. Not too hard or long of a boss for the start of the game; it’s worth mentioning you can kill him while he’s on the barge if you’re accurate enough. After killing him we level up; normally, in any other RPG, we’d be able to upgrade ourselves each level. In Borderlands 2 and the original, you don’t start to be able to upgrade yourself until level 6, getting your Action Skill at 5. We loot one Jakobs revolver from the surrounding area; this manufacturer’s trait is the fact that they just focus on powerful shots, nothing fancy. Well, actually, no, that’s a standard the company lives by. The actual trait is that none of the guns are automatic. Instead, you throttle the trigger for quick firing.
Once we acquire the eye, Claptrap directs us both to Hammerlock in Liar’s Berg on the other end of the barge to reinstall it. Approaching it, Claptrap attempts to unlock it, being of Hyperion make much like the barge itself, but it locks down, and all hope seems lost until the female voice reveals itself to be a Hyperion AI, unlocking the door. Funny how there’s so much help from Hyperion shit when Hyperion’s trying to kill me. However, she got me access to a Jakobs Shotgun, so I’m not complaining. Equipped with Jakobs weaponry, we set out to Liar’s Berg, approaching it from above.
It’s at this point that I’m warned that the glacier is run by a bandit named Captain Flynt, who used Claptrap as a torture toy for quite some time before he escaped. Note to self: Skip blowtorch tag. Speaking of Captain Flynt, Handsome Jack comes on over the Echo and offers a million for my head along with my current whereabouts with an unspecified bounty already offered for one Crimson Raider mass murderer Roland still being up for grabs. Flynt himself then speaks up, ordering the marauders occupying Liar’s Berg to bring him my head, then offering me suicide as an option for the second time today as I’m going to town like the Psycho I am on his boys and any Bullymongs that show up. It’s worth noting you should really just default to the shotgun you just got (drops up until now were specific in that it would always be a pistol, shotgun, and so on. I think this also applies to the manufacturer as well.) for this, since it’s essentially a oneshot on the Marauders. Marauders are basically the more sane criminal entities on Pandora and not much more as of right now.
Clearing the Berg of enemies, Hammerlock agrees to fix Claptraps eye, then tricks him into going into a live electrical fence so he’ll shut up. I love this guy already. He then exits his shack with a sort of hut-ho march and salute to me.
SIR HAMMERLOCK
HUNTER. SCHOLAR. GENTLEMAN.
He thanks me for rescuing him as I hand him the eye. He had been here for research purposes, and now proposes accompanying the two of us to Sanctuary. Obviously, I’m all for it, but that’ll have to wait since Captain Flynt’s not gonna make it easy for us. Hammerlock briefly becomes Exposition Man as he heads to turn on the main power for Liar’s Berg, and I decide to end it off here once I complete the quest and ascend to Level 3, gaining a shield for my trouble. Shields, to touch on them briefly, act as a second, rechargeable health bar, although there are different secondary effects we can gain from some shields.
Next time, we’ll be doing a lot of subquests and getting acquainted with Krieg’s Action Skill, fellow Psychos. I hope you enjoyed reading this, because it wasn’t too much of an easy matter writing it. This is Krie- I mean IP, signing off.
