Myself and many others were SO excited when 2K announced Borderlands 2 for Vita, PORTABLE BORDERLANDS?! YES PLEASE...

I am not going to go and review any of the game story itself it's an old game and they haven't change anything in-game so let's talk about how it works on Vita.

The game is £24.99 and comes with ALL the DLC, which is pretty impressive and cheap. But I definitely wouldn't pay any more for it now I've been hands on.

Firstly, you cannot skip the opening cut scene so whenever you want to make a new character you have to watch this 10 minute long cut scene that you've already seen at least 3 times if you've played it on console. I'm guessing this is purely to let the game load in the background - but still...

So this is clearly just a port to Vita and that's made obvious as soon as you enter the title screen, the font is unreadable - like I had to put the vita up close to my face to read what button to press. But once you've made it past this obstacle you enter the game, which unsurprisingly has had some major cut-backs.

A lot of the textures have been simplified and the sound has been compressed so it sounds quite tinny through the Vita headphones - however I put my Sony 2.0 headset on with this and the virtual surround made such a difference. It doesn't look 'bad' as such, it looks like you're playing The Walking Dead point and click game by Telltale - which again isn't necessarily a bad thing.

There is a cross-save function which is quite a nice additive, however I had my Borderlands 2 on Xbox so I'm guessing this won't work?! (I haven't tried, as this feature has been down for me since I got the game). And you can play online, but with 2 players rather than 4 as I'm not sure how the Vita would cope with anymore players.

I REALLY wanted be able to praise this game and give it a brilliant review but it just doesn't work, I've never experienced any in game lag as much as I do with this. And just fighting the first boss proved to be more of a challenge to guess where the lag would take me rather than a level struggle. As soon as there are more than 4 enemies on the map the game then begins to struggle, which is such a shame because it has such huge potential on the Vita.

Also you could have a sniper rifle with 99% accuracy aimed at an enemies face whilst they're standing in-front of you and miss. I have turned to running around and wildfiring now as I'd have more of a chance to hit something.

The control system is an absolute ball-ache too, my hands keep cramping up and I've got it set to what I feel is the easiest set-up. You only have 5 different schemes - you cannot remap your own. And you have to use the back touchpad, which is irritating because no one holds a vita without their fingers resting on the touch pad. So I've been playing the game constantly punching the air...


However this hasn't stopped me from playing it, I adore Borderlands and think I'm a bit bias so I've been playing through it whilst snuggled in bed with the lights off on my Vita, and I think my overall love for the story is outweighing my hatred for the constant lag and aiming issues. I guess I'm a sucker for bad ports, but if you like Borderlands 2 and don't want a bad port, then don't play this game. Really.

Don't mind me, I'll just sit here with hand cramp playing this version until the prequel is released.