Borderlands: Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot Review

Mad Moxxi, the ... titular character

Amongst it’s many other accomplishments (well, depending who you ask I guess), Gears of War 2 can be lauded for the popularisation of the “Horde” style of multiplayer.  Allowing players to team up against a superior-numbered AI controlled enemy force managed to hit a real chord with shooter fans everywhere, and has since spawned many similar modes amongst the FPS genre.

Borderlands: Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot puts it’s hand up and declares “us too”, by adding a completely new area based upon wave-style arena combat.

As the story goes, Mad Moxxi (the Underdome’s well-endowed, carnival-themed owner) has made her way through three husbands, all of whom didn’t seem to survive the relationship.  In the search for a suitable suitor for her fourth wedlock, Moxxi has constructed the Underdome, three huge arenas based upon different areas of Pandora.  There adventurers pit themselves against hordes of enemies, while the crowd watches on in the happy knowledge that, win or lose, violence will be plentiful.

The back-story sounds entertaining enough, but truth be told there’s surprisingly little Mad Moxxi to be had in Underdome.  After her introduction, she’s basically consigned to her role as announcer.  And although much of her commentary is amusing enough, it can grow old quite quickly for reasons I’ll explain shortly.

Randomly selected boss fights can be a real challenge

Each round is sliced up into five seperate waves, each with a different theme.  Each round ends by facing a randomly selected boss from the story mode, some of whom you may not even remember were bosses in the first place.  They are all humans, however, so you’re not going to have to worry about fighting Moth’Rakk all over again.  As the round count climbs, random combat modifiers are also introduced to keep things fresh.  Between each wave there is a supply drop of ammo and health that scatters randomly around the arena, and at the end of each round Moxxi rewards you by dumping a large selection of randomly generated weapons into the spawn area.  All of these are timed drops, however, so you have to be fast if you want to restock and add to your arsenal.

If at any point a player dies they’re sent to the penalty box high above the arena for the remainder of the round.  From here they can still shoot and attempt to take part in the action, but given the limited field of vision and lack of resupply drops, they’d better make their shots count.  If the remaining players clear the round then they are dropped back into the arena, but if everyone ends up in the penalty box then it’s back to the beginning for everyone.

The Underdome's foyer

The first few challenges you’ll be able to pass using two players without too much fuss.  But where Max Moxxi starts to lose it’s lustre is when the extended challenges kick in, which typically require three to four players working together to clear.  The first set of challenges are five rounds long with five waves apiece.  The higher level challenges crank the round count all the way up to twenty.  Given that clearing a round usually takes around ten minutes or so, this means that even a perfect run will set you back approximately three hours, which is a long time to keep four people online and playing continuously.  Some concession to the length is given, as the game will checkpoint you with every five rounds you clear (in the likely event of defeat).  This checkpoint doesn’t transfer across sessions, however, which means even the most resolute team will still be throwing up their hands and looking at their watches if they hit their second wipeout.

To stop players from using the Underdome for level grinding, there is also no experience gained from the enemies you kill while undertaking trials.  While the thinking behind this is logical, it does mean that you’ll be killing a lot of enemies for almost no reward, which fails to attract materialistic players like myself.

The new Diablo-stlye item bank

Those hoping to gain valuable loot from the end of round weapon drops will also be disappointed.  Again, while I understand that you can’t just give away high-level loot constantly, Moxxi would apparently be taking this theory to it’s extreme.  In the many hours I sank into this expansion there were two, maybe three high-rarity weapons dropped, and even these didn’t turn out to be very useful compared to my current set-up.  At times it seemed more practical to just wait out the day and see what the gun vending had on offer in the way of decent loot.  So you’ll be given plenty of gear to resell (and if you’re a high enough level, I’m sure you’ve long ago stopped caring about cash), but almost nothing that will help your loadout.

There are a few odd choices cosmetically too.  When you get far enough into a match to start introducing combat modifiers, a gigantic board will obstruct your view between each wave showing which modifiers have been selected.  When you combine this with the mad panic of trying to reclaim as much lost health and ammo as possible, many players have to adopt a strange kind of diagonal strafe between waves as they attempt to look out the side of their screen.

In the end, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot is really an odd combination of customer feedback and Gearbox’s desire to diversify.  Players asked for longer, more challenging multiplayer activites, and Gearbox has decided to push that idea to the limit.  But as it stands, this expansion doesn’t actually deliver much in the way of reward for the amount of effort required to complete it, which means it is probably going to be pushed to the sidelines.  This is especially true with the recent release of the new high-level geared expansion Secret Armory of General Knoxx.

The Verdict:

Pros: A solid, more traditional multiplayer experience for Borderlands.  Entertaining banter, fun and sometimes frantic gameplay.  The addition of a Diablo-style storage locker is also welcome.

Cons: Moxxi is all work and no reward.  Normally I could accept that working as part of a team towards a common goal is reward enough, but this expansion can be cripplingly long, meaning finding a team capable of completing the higher end trials is a challenge in itself.

Overall: I get the feeling that Moxxi is going to be overlooked as far as the complete Borderlands experience goes.  On paper the idea sounds quite solid, and Gearbox should be congratulated for listening to their community’s ideas.  On screen, however, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot is unsatisfying and, to my ire, almost guaranteed to ruin your perfect achievement status. 2 out of 5.