The original Borderlands opened with its four heroes on a bus while Cage The Elephant’s Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked served as both score and essentially introduction. The sequel has a similar opening, with one key exception: The scene isn’t scored with bluesy rock, but with the mournful garage soul of The Heavy’s Short Change Hero.

It’s a surprisingly apt summary of the game. Amid the toilet humor and hilarious deaths, things have somehow gotten worse on Pandora. This really isn’t a place for a better man.

The original game pretty heavily implied that Pandora was sparsely populated, and what little population left was largely dolts, lunatics, and maniacs. The sequel finds all of them driven to the edge by a heavily armed tyrant literally destroying the planet piece by piece.

So of course, you need to shoot him. A lot.

The writing is still uneven. Anthony Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? struggles to keep the somewhat goofy tone of the original while also giving the plot some weight. I could have done without the toilets spraying feces and the bullymongs being renamed “bonerfarts” (literally; the game changes their name), but Burch deserves credit for making the tired old saw of saving the world not only work, but make sense. Of course Jack will crack Pandora in half, because the only thing of value on it is a mineral and nobody cares if the population dies to get it. There really IS nobody coming to save you.

So, again, you’ve got lots of guns. Although finding the guns you want… well… that’s more of a challenge.

In terms of gameplay, it plays like the original Borderlands except moreso in every respect. You shoot bandits, help put the local wildlife on the endangered list, pick up the procedurally generated weapons to see if anything good’s sitting around, unload the vendor trash as quickly as possible, rinse, repeat.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not fun. It’s ridiculously fun. This is a game as much about killing bandits in horrible, painful ways as it is about finishing missions. That said, it’s got a punishing difficulty curve: It’s fairly clear the game expects you to complete side missions before advancing with the story quest and failing to do so will make life hard for your character.