Welcome back to "Backhanded Box Quotes," a collection of measured, thoughtful criticism from the user reviews of Metacritic, Amazon and elsewhere.
Two games this week released to nearly universal acclaim, unless you're The Wall Street Journal. Borderlands 2 and Torchlight II. But in the great shining ideas marketplace and opinion democracy known as consumer reviews, both games have to answer to a harsher authority.
Borderlands 2
Released: Sept. 18
Critic: neilsmif1980 (Metacritic)
• "I was stuck I couldn't move forward or back just after I got past a really hard part at the beginning of the game. It froze on me! So I restarted it and I had to start nearly back to the beginning?"
• "The game itself is just like Borderlands EXCEPT you have a mini map."
Score: 0.
Critic:Get bodied (Amazon)
• "It becomes tolerable if you do it with some friends around, but so is dying of bowel cancer."
• "It's been a while since I've seen in-game menus as bad as these. It's like PowerPoint threw up on a Cluedo board and died."
Score: 1 Star.
Critic: Sock_Factory (Metacritic)
• "Borderlands 2 is a game where you shoot guns at stuff till it dies."
Score: 0.
Torchlight II
Released: Sept. 20
Critic: disinterested (Metacritic)
• "TLDR: Diablo3"
Score: 1.
Critic: Token 40k (Metacritic)
• "crappy light gamma."
Score: 0.
Backhanded Box Quotes will be an occasional feature of Kotaku's Anger Management hour, unless it isn't.