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The first Borderlands surprised many with its successful marriage of cartoon-style visuals and loot-driven first-person shooter gameplay, all tied in a brilliantly comical knot. Now, three years later, we have a worthy sequel on our hands which ups the ante in just about every way. All the trademark zaniness makes a return, but to a surveying eye it's clear developer Gearbox has been busy improving the core fundamentals of the game - plus making some curious arrangements for each platform.Similar to the likes of BioShock Infinite and Mass Effect 3, the developers are using a modified version of the popular Unreal Engine 3 to realise the game on every format. In each case, Epic's middleware has had a mixed history of translation to current-gen console formats in particular, with a general preference for PC and 360 architecture established over the years. However, the changes made to the core engine here are pretty radical, which we dare say encourages the prospect of change.
This customised, in-house version is dubbed the Willow Engine, where the focus has gone into pushing out massive draw distances, allowing the world of Pandora to stretch out farther outwards than ever before. The results are pretty spectacular, and the PC version takes this a level further through its support of PhysX, which has a dramatic impact on the game, which we'll look at in more depth later on.
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