Borderlands fans, it’s time to start getting excited. Borderlands 2

There Shall Be Four Classes

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A few of the options available for Maya.

Thy Skill Trees Shalt Bear Much Fruit

So many options within each skill tree.

Thy Shall Be Ranked As a Badass

Thou Shalt Wield Many Weapons

Hmm. That explosion's not big enough. Better find a bigger weapon.

Thy Weapons Shall Be Elemental, My Dear Watson

At launch, Borderlands 2 will be packing four very distinct characters for players to choose from. Each has his or her own baseline personality and areas of expertise, but can also be heavily modified. Importantly, each character also has an action skill – an ability unique to that class that's used throughout the game and helps inform the way they play. These are on a cooldown system and can be drastically altered through choices in each character's three skill trees. So, a quick class overview:The Gunzerker class is represented by Salvador. He’s all about dealing damage and tanking enemies – drawing their attention to reduce damage done to the rest of the group. His action skill reflects his focus on damage, letting him dual wield any two weapons for a short period. Want to pack a rocket launcher in one hand and a fire-infused shotgun in the other? That’s the Gunzerker’s style. Like every character’s action skill, it's able to be modified heavily, making it last longer, reducing the length of the cooldown and providing all sorts of other boosts to health, defence, movement speed etc. Players can also sink points into quicker reloads, increased accuracy and a whole lot more.The Siren class is filled by Maya. This is the only class that returns from the first Borderlands, but the two Sirens are very different. For one, the original Siren had a phasewalk action skill, which turned her ethereal and allowed her to run through enemies. In Borderlands 2, Siren players can use the phaselock. This nifty ability holds enemies in place, helpless, in the air, for a period of time. Using skill points it can be modified to turn enemies against one another, or slam the phaselocked enemy into the ground dealing area of effect incendiary damage. In terms of general skills, Maya can be customised as a straight-up damage dealer, or be taken down more of a healer path. She has strong crowd control bonuses too.Axton is the Commando of the group. Like the Soldier class from the first game, the Commando can drop turrets using his action skill, and over the course of the game this ability can be modified in a bunch of interesting ways. It can be altered to deploy across large distances, raise accuracy, add group buffs and – of course – deal more damage through increased firepower. Missiles? Don't mind if I do! It's cool seeing the turret's look change as it gets bulked up too. The Commando can kick ass with basically every weapon, and encourages an aggressive style of play. This is further emphasised by some of the skill tree options available that help boost damage and health, and lower reload times.Last but not least is the Assassin, Zer0. His action skill – Deception - sends out a holographic decoy, allowing him to enter a stealth state and do some covert killing while enemies are looking the other way. That's not the cool part, however. When Zer0 enters Deception, players can actually see the critical hit zones on enemies, as represented by red octagons. Aiming for those zones means critical hits, and way more damage. Cooler still, players can modify him to amp up the critical hit damage even further. Zer0's shaping up to be a really interesting character, because players can either focus on melee damage – he's the only character to carry a sword for melee attacks; dashing in and slashing at enemies, or they can stay at range: Zer0's all about sniper rifles. Either way, you're not doing area of effect damage with Zer0, he's all about targeted, high impact damage through critical hits. In other words, he's very much a skill-based character.So they’re the four classes. Not happy with your character’s appearance or skill build? Just hit up a Quick Change Machine to alter your look or pay a fee to redistribute skill points.One of the strengths of a truly great action RPG is class diversity – not just between classes, but within them as well. Borderlands 2 already demonstrates more options for compelling builds within each class than the original, and that’s most definitely a good thing.Each character has three skill trees, and with so many choices, players will be torn choosing where to sink their points. What are the coolest perks? What will help them most? What suits their play style best? You won’t be able to fill all three trees.Let’s take Maya the Siren as an example. Her three skill trees are Motion, Harmony and Cataclysm. The Cataclysm path alone is packed with awesome modifications. The first tier can increase the likelihood of status effects with fire, shock, corrosive and slag guns, and/or increase magazine size and reload speeds for guns. The second tier can add explosive AOE to the phaselock ability and/or add fire damage to all shots fired while in ‘fight for your life’ mode. Tier three has three options. Sinking points into Chain Reaction means that all shots that hit a phaselocked enemy have a chance to ricochet and hit another nearby enemy. Cloud Kill creates a lingering acid cloud around enemies you shoot, doing corrosive damage to any that touch it. Finally, Backdraft adds fire damage to melee attacks.The fourth, fifth and sixth tiers have a single option apiece. Chucking points into Reaper means Maya deals increased gun damage to any enemy with more than 50% health left. Blight Phoenix is a kill skill. Kill an enemy and you’ll deal constant fire and corrosive damage to nearby enemies for a short time. Last but not least is the aptly-named Ruin. This choice means phaselock now slags, electrocutes and corrodes all nearby enemies.And that’s just one skill tree. For one class. Borderlands 2 offers up some meaty play and perk choices. Oh, and we should also mention that you can also modify your character through your choice of which shield mod and relic to equip. The latter are passive inventory items that give you amulet/ring-like stat boosts. Of course, that’s just one way to get passive stat boosts…Borderlands 2’s Badass Ranking System adds a compelling meta game for players that want to roll with multiple classes. Basically, it’s a set of challenges for players to complete. Doing so earns them tokens that they can spend on game-wide perks for all their characters. It’s a little like unlocking achievements, only they provide tangible rewards. Players may have to kill a certain number of a particular enemy type or complete a mission without something happening. Once you have a token the game gives the player five randomly chosen stat-boosting options (from a pool of 12 stats that can be increased). What are the 12? Glad you asked. There are percentage increases for: max health, shield capacity, shield recharge delay, shield recharge rate, melee damage, grenade damage, gun accuracy, gun damage, fire rate, recoil reduction, reload speed and critical hit damage. The Badass system has no upper limit, so the more you play the more you can boost your characters.Your Badass Rank isn’t the only attribute shared across multiple characters. There’s also a profile-specific Stash, so you can save a weapon that may not suit the character you’re currently playing and pick it up with another.You probably remember the claims about the number of weapons in the original Borderlands. Over 17 million weapons, according to Gearbox. It was a big number, but then, when you're dealing with randomised loot, every changeable statistic adds up. No matter. The more important element is how many weapons – and how much variety – the player feels like the game has, and how much fun they are to use. Borderlands 2 is really coming to the party in this regard. There's just so many types of weapons in this game, from pistols and shotguns to sub machine guns, sniper rifles, combat rifles and rocket launchers. There are a heap of weapon manufacturers in the game, each with slightly different styles that influence both visual design and attributes (firing speed, magazine sizes, reload speed and so on), and let's not forget the elemental attributes on top of it all. (But more on that in the next commandment.)Importantly, the visual design of the weapons is much more varied than in the original game, and there are some lovely flourishes in animations and visual effects when firing them. An old school six shooter may be fired with the classic cowboy action of rapidly cocking the trigger. Other guns are hurled at the enemy like a grenade when reloading, with a new one magically appearing in the character's hands.While it can initially be a little cumbersome wading through all the weapons Borderlands 2 throws at the player, it's not long until you learn what styles of weapons work best for you, and build a rounded selection to tackle most any situation. You can generally tell at a glance if a new piece is going to be superior to what you're already packing. Bless those little red and green arrows!Adding a significant layer to the combat in Borderlands 2 is the elemental damage and resistance system. In addition to physical damage, weapons can also do corrosive, shock, incendiary, explosive and slag damage. The latter is new in Borderlands 2 and basically coats enemies, who then take extra physical damage. As you can imagine, slag can be used to great effect in co-op, as coating an enemy helps the entire group.Elemental effects are not just about doing extra damage. They also force players to use the right elemental damage in the right situation. In a wonderfully cartoony nod, enemies give plenty of damage feedback when they're shot. Numbers pop up on screen showing damage done, and if you're using a weapon with elemental damage that an enemy is resistant to, you'll know about it, thanks to the 'RESIST!' pop-ups. Similarly, if you're seeing a lot of 'CRITICAL!' pop-ups you're doing something right.In a broad sense though, it's all about learning a few basics: corrosive works well against armoured enemies and shock is great for enemies with shields, for instance. Oh, and it's not just weapons that can have elemental effects – so can grenades.