Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Gearbox Software
Genre: RPS
Release date: Available Now

Mad Madame Moxxi is like a praying mantis. The oddly sexy ringmaster of the Underdome loves nothing more than to watch potential suitors get devoured in her brutal arena spectacles. It’s an idea similar to that of Auntie Entity, the principal antagonist in the film “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” only instead of the phrase “Two men enter, one man leaves,” it’s a little more like “Bring friends, you’ll need ‘em!” Read on to see if Borderlands: Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot is worth a spin of the wheel.

So, you’ve found the vault, you’ve uncovered the grisly secrets of The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, and you’ve done enough collect-and-kill missions to last until a proper sequel comes out. But what to do now? A challenge is what you and your buddies need; something to push your characters and their loadouts to the limit. Well, that’s what Moxxi does for Borderlands players; it gives them the opportunity to see their high-level characters buckle under wave after wave and round after round of constant assault from every enemy type Gearbox Software’s creative team has brought to life. It’s one part “Mad Max,” one part “The Running Man” and a whole lot of Smash TV, but with far less cash and prizes.

There are five rounds in Moxxi, each with five waves of increasingly harder enemies to defeat, each with its own unique set of modifiers that augment enemy health, shields, movement and more, just to keep things interesting. The wave-intermission gameplay means no fetch quests or kill quotas to meet, just survival of the fittest until everything’s dead. To keep your party going, ammo and health drop from the sky between waves, creating a mad scramble to collect as much as you can before the next one starts and all hell breaks loose again.

So, Moxxi is a departure from what the Borderlands crowd expects, and when you factor in that there is no XP gain for killing enemies and the only time you see any loot is after a round, you realize just how far from the original game it really is. Character progression and loot mongering are Borderlands‘ topic sentence, so when you strip those away and reformat it like Halo:ODST’s Firefight or Gears of War 2‘s Horde Mode, it kind of devalues the high-idea of Borderlands, the first official role-playing shooter. Now it’s just a shooter, a $10 arcade version of a much grander game.

Still, the gunplay is always a lot of fun, and this is a great opportunity to mindlessly kill a bunch of stuff with friends. And speaking of mindless, the A.I. once again benefits from quantity over quality such as in Dr. Ned, because when you’re under attack by droves of enemies, it’s hard to nitpick. Moxxi adds some character, too; berating and praising you, and emoting according to you and your team’s performance. Apart from that, the audio is mainly crowd noise and gunfire, two things that could only fit so well in the Borderlands universe.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself whether or not your friends will be buying Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot. There’s really no reason to play it by yourself, and if everyone you know has already moved on to bigger and better things, was there ever even a question? Still, if you’ve got a dedicated gathering of Borderlands comrades, this might be worth a spin.

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