The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, the third set of downloadable content for Borderlands, released last week. Since then I’ve put over 15 hours into it and I’ve still got a few side quests to complete. So far it has been a blast and I expect the rest of it will be as well.  It is fairly challenging on playthrough 2 but in a good way.  You definitely have to work as a team and use your class mods wisely to make it through some of the larger battles, but I appreciate it not being easy. As always the story is funny if you take the time to listen to it.  General Knoxx is a riot at times.  I’ll not spoil it for you, but the first time you meet him in person has me rolling.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx is huge. It has long roads and large open areas. It was clearly intended to be driven around most of the time, and there are plenty of catch-a-ride stations to help with that. To go with all this driving there are also three new vehicles. The first new vehicle, the Racer, looks almost identical to the Outrunner but it goes a little faster and has a little less armor. The next new vehicle is a 2 person truck called the Monster. It comes with more armor, homing rockets, and a much longer turbo. The Monster is now my go to vehicle for almost every situation. While it does not have the speed as the Racer it more than makes up for it with the lengthy turbo and better weapons. There are some jumps that you just can’t make with the Monster but only a couple of them. The other new vehicle is the Lancer. This is the only 4 person vehicle and it is the most heavily armored. It also goes pretty slow, but with three separate weapons it can take on almost anything. It has a laser cannon, mines you can toss out, and a blast shot that explodes outward to take out anything close. While it is fun for a few minutes to drive around in the Lancer with all 4 of your team it just does not go fast enough to warrant using regularly with such a large playing area.

The DLC brings back a lot of regulars characters from the core game, but also adds a lot of new enemies. The normal crew of shop owners are back and there are a couple Claptraps throughout The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. For such a large area I was hoping for more Claptrap variations, but the ones in there are funny as always. The new enemies include General Knoxx, midgets riding skags, new bandits and prisoners, Crawmerax, and a whole lot of new Crimson Lance including massive mechs called Devastators. The variations of enemies types is a really nice change of pace and requires some new tactics be used.  It is nice after putting so many hours into a game to still find there are new strategies to employ.  Most of the enemies are scaled to levels of difficulty you would expect, but Crawmerax the Invincible is by far the most difficult boss in the game.  On playthrough 2 with 4 level 61 characters he was level 64 when we faced him.  He is absolutely mammoth in size, he has a huge amount of health, he spawns some other pretty tough enemies you have to take out, and hit attacks can drop your entire shield and most of your health in one hit.  The first could of time we tried to take Crawmerax down he slaughtered us within seconds.  After a few times of this we started to work out a solid strategy.  We still died a few time each when we finally finished him off, but as long as one person stays alive his health does not reset so we were careful to focus on staying alive first and foremost. Even with a shield capacity of over 2400 that still took consistent effort to do.  As challenging as Crawmerax was to fight it was also very fun and rewarding.  He dropped two or three of the best guns I’ve ever seen in Boderlands. He also dropped dozens of other guns that we were able to sell to more than cover the cost of all of our new clones we had to pay for when we died.  Even before I finished all of the other missions I was already wanting to go back and face him again.

With this the The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC the level cap is raised from 50 to 61. To go with the new levels there are new weapons and equipment to go with it. In addition to higher level weapons of the same style as previously existed there is also a new level of rarity called “pearlescent”. These are now the most rare gun in the game and I can attest that they do not show up very often. Our whole 4 member team has found 2 so far. We have found quite a few new orange guns that are really nice as well as class mods that are for level 55, 58, and 61. They are nice enhancements and and additions to our arsenal.  In addition to adding a lot of new weapons the The Secret Armory of General Knoxx also removes some weapons and equipment.  Before the DLC released it was fairly easy to mod weapons in a saved game to make then shoot a lot faster, do more damage, or have a much lager clip.  Some of the modded class mods even would allow stacking of mods and other cheats.  For me these overpowered modded weapons take the fun and challenge out of playing and I’m glad that they have been removed from the game with the DLC.  Some times it would be hard to tell if a gun was modded or not, and with the The Secret Armory of General Knoxx now I don’t have to worry about them being in my inventory.

I’ve got a couple missions left to wrap up and then a lot of Crawmerax farming to do still, but with it mostly complete I can say that it is well worth picking up.  The level cap increase and related perks are a blast, and the overall story arc is a lot of fun to play through.  There are also 10 new achievements to pick up with the DLC.  Most of them you get for completing story points, but there are a couple you’ll have to go out of your way to get.  If you like Borderlands then I would highly recommend picking up the The Secret Armory of General Knoxx add-on. It continues the Borderlands style of funny story plots and lots of enemies to fight.