Pandora, a desolate planet littered with the detritus of industry and alien technology, a prime place for a Vault Hunter to make a fortune… you’ll just have to survive bandits, mutants, beasts and an ego-maniacal corporate dictator first!

Good: This game has a surreal setting, bringing a strange mixture of the silly and serious that’s tied together by over the top violence. Funnily enough, I actually rather enjoyed the main story thanks to it’s twists and turns, and the characters you meet along the way cut a good balance between bombastic and realistic. This overall style is enhanced by the cell-shading used in the graphics, lending it an almost cartoon-like feel.

There’s a good range of classes, from the magic using-siren to the turret-wielding commando, sneaky assassin to the raging gunzerker… enough that you should be able to find something to fit your taste. There’s also a couple of DLC classes, including a robot-obsessed engineer and a partially reformed psycho.

With big maps, dune buggies and a massive collection or randomly generated weaponry, there’s plenty of things to do – though the game functions best as a looter-shooter. As a side note, the large number of components that go into a weapon (coupled with sci-fi tech) let you have some really fun combinations – guns that turn into a grenade when out of ammo, shotguns that fire explosive buckshot, or pistols that spray acid.

Bad: So, here’s the problem… there is an awful lot of DLC, and to be frank, some of it is rather pricey for what it is. The expansion packs are probably o.k. but I do wonder about selling playable characters for £8 – it seems a bit much for what you get, considering the price of the base game. On the other hand, both classes bring a new playstyle to the table, and the storyline DLCs were a lot of fun… so your mileage may vary.

The other thing to keep in mind is that this is a looter-shooter game… don’t go in expecting intricate combat or an RPG experience, just gun-play and loot. That said, the environment itself is actually quite well fleshed out, so exploring isn’t entirely unrewarding.

Opinion: It’s a solid game that does what it set out to really well, a gun-play and looting romp with a Mad-Max feel. That said, the core game and the multitude of DLC makes it pretty pricey considering it’s age, so I would recommend getting it in a sale if you decide to pick it up.