Review by: Brandon "Tourist" Cackowski-Schnell

After a regular schedule of DLC releases, Gearbox waited a good seven months to drop the final Borderlands pack and bring us back to Pandora for one final go. While it has some entertaining parts, Claptrap's New Robot Revolution isn't interesting enough to be worth the seven month wait and is plagued with a number of broken achievements and bad design decisions to make you wish that they had waited just a bit longer to release a pack that both worked correctly and allowed you to take advantage of the upcoming raise in the level cap. As it stands now, until the pack is patched and the level cap is raised there's little to be had here except for the joy of shooting claptraps.

Of course there's plenty of joy to be had from shooting Pandora's unofficial mascot and you'll have many the opportunity to put a bullet in their big red eyes. The Hyperion corporation, unhappy with all of the free guns laying about Pandora due to your killing of the guns' owners, dispatches an Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap to Pandora to do something about all of their lost revenue. Unfortunately for them, upon arriving on Pandora and seeing the squalid living conditions of the planet's claptrap population, INAC decides to start the titular New Robot Revolution and raise up his oppressed brethren by claptrap-ifying the planet's various bad guys, including going so far as to return bosses from past DLC packs in new, robotized forms.

The biggest problem with this DLC pack is that, at the end of the day, there's not a lot of new stuff here other than the various forms of enemy claptraps. Sure there are new maps, but let's face it, Pandora isn't exactly brimming with environmental diversity and once you've been to one giant, desert you've been to them all. The game's "normal" enemies have been reskinned with a claptrap sheen that makes them look like they've contracted the techno-organic virus, however they act the same as they did prior to the changes and unless you get right up on them, you won't notice much of a difference save a name change and a new voice. There's no drastic change in environment and enemy numbers as in The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and no new vehicles such as in General Knoxx so in the end all you've got is a few battles with bosses you've already dispatched in earlier fights and some clever lines from INAC.

What makes the experience even more disappointing is the fact that there's an update to raise the level cap to 69 right around the corner, yet if you picked this pack up at launch, all of your experience gains will be for nothing. Why the decision was made to separate the two is beyond me and if you pick up the patch first and then do the DLC your experience with the DLC will at least give you the bonus of new levels and skill points, but for right now the story, although mildly amusing in parts, isn't worth it on it's own.

To make matters even worse, several of the game's collection achievements are broken, requiring you to unlock them in a particular order lest you keep them from unlocking at all. To add insult to injury, even if you work on unlocking them in the right order there's no way to see how many of each collectible you've nabbed and for three of the collectible types the drop rate is obscenely low. I'm talking "leave your 360 on overnight to farm claptrap kills during the last fight and still don't get enough of what you need" low. Borderlands has had plenty of fetch quests, and there are some epic ones in this DLC pack as well, but at least in those cases you could see how far you were towards your goal by looking in your quest log. These achievements feel like nothing but game padding at its worst and for a franchise I enjoyed so much to go out like this is extremely disappointing.

Don't get me wrong, Borderlands is still one of the best co-op experiences in gaming and the mix of player classes and relentless stream of enemies is very easy to slip back into, however with the ability to play more than one playthrough of the main game and all of the DLC packs, if all you want to do is shoot high level dudes, you don't need to pay another ten bucks to do so. There is a satisfying mention of what the future of Borderlands holds as well as a cute final credits movie that has you ending where it all began but without some extra experience to go with all of the killing, or a way to finally get all of the points in the game, right now that ending is only worth it to the diehard Borderlands fans.