The Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot DLC released a few weeks back but I’ve still not completed all of it yet. Mad Moxxi is this crazy chick who is looking for her fourth husband, but in the meantime decided to run this arena style tournament. The trailer below explains it nicely.  Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot consists of three small 5 round tournaments and three large 20 round tournaments.  So far I’ve completed the three small tournaments on both playthrough 1 and playthrough 2 and one of the large tournaments. The small tournaments take about 30 to 40 minutes each so completing all of them in a couple hours is doable. The larger tournament took just a hair over 4 hours to complete, and that was without having any rounds where we all died and get set back a round.

The way the tournaments are structures is the same for both the small and the large ones except that the large ones have 4 times the number of rounds. Each round consist of 5 waves of enemies. The first wave is a starter wave of fairly simple enemies.  The second wave is “Gun Wave” where all enemies have guns. The third wave is “Horde Wave” where the enemies have melee weapons and charge your position.  The fourth wave is the  ‘Badass Wave” where all of the enemies are extra strong, but there tends to be less of them.  The fifth and final wave is the “Boss Wave” where you have to face one of the bosses from the main story of the game and a few of his side kicks. The bosses have powerful weapons and a lot of health so it takes a lot to finish them off.  After each round Moxxi drops some loot in the center of the level for you to grab before the next round starts.  The loot on playthrough 1 was mostly worthless for a level 50 character, but when I did the playthrough 2 small tournaments the loot drops were much better.

As the first round Moxxi starts adding modifiers that rotate after each wave.  These modifiers vary widely and include things like making only a specific gun type work effectively, reducing gravity, increasing everyone’s movement speed, taking away shields, making enemies take less damage, or making guns less accurate.  These modifiers keep things interesting and challenging. She starts with just one modifier, but every five waves she increases the number of modifier so for rounds 15 through 20 you have 4 modifiers running all at once.  Those waves get really crazy.

You can’t truly die or lose in the Underdome. If you die Moxxi puts you in the Penalty Box for the rest of the wave. The Penalty Box is at the top of the map so you can still shoot at enemies from there.  However, if all of the members of your team die and are put into the box on the same wave then you get bumped back an entire Round. So if you are on Round 8 Wave 4 and all 4 of you die then you start back at Round 7 Wave 1. So, it is important to be careful to keep at least one person alive. using a well rounded team that has at least three if not all four of the character classes helps with this. Having everyone respec to builds that help out the team and using class mods that are team beneficial as well can further boost your chances of making it through without dying.

For completing the three small tournaments you’re rewarded with an extra skill point and an achievement. If you do both playthroughs you can get 2 extra skill points for your character.  For each of the large tournaments you get an achievement, and if you complete all three with the same character you get an achievement for that too. If your team can play a little conservatively to ensure that you don’t all get killed the same wave then the difficulty is not too bad.  The later waves are challenging, but doable. If you’re team does not work together and is always running off you’re going to be spending a lot of time redoing waves after you all died.

While I do love Borderlands and the Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot extension of it I do have some complaints.  First, once you start a specific tournament there is no way to stop it and come back later.  For the small tourneys this is not a bid deal, but since the large ones are 4 plus ours a checkpoint of some sort would be nice. It is not very often I can play 4 or more hours without stopping. Even if it was just at the half way point that would make it so much nice than having to do all 20 rounds (100 eaves) in one sitting.  Another area I wish they had spent more time is on the variety of  bosses and enemies.  There are only like 5 bosses that it rotates between. So by round 20 you’ve seen them all a few times.  With the enemies there are just variations of Skags, Outlaws, and Lancers.  It would have been cool if they had included waves of some of the other animals as well.  Waves of Rak or Slugs would be nuts, but even cooler would be it the game recognized I have the Zombie Island of Dr Ned DLC and included waves of Zombies.

As it is the DLC is fun, challenging, and lengthy, but with more variety in the bosses and enemies it could go from being good to really great. Plus, with the length of the large tournaments it is going to be difficult for me to schedule a time to do the other larger tournaments with three friends. It is a solid addition to the game if you’re ok with playing in long sittings, but for games who only can play for an hour or two at a time it will be tough to get all of the new tournaments completed.