New Borderlands 2 trailer rocks “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” lots of shooting

Oh, Gearbox. You so cray. Let’s let the trailer do the talking–erm, singing–for now.

It’s great to get a look at the new vault hunters all working together, but overall there isn’t a ton of new going on in this trailer. It’s mostly just another tantalizing look at stuff we’ve already heard about. Interesting to note that Axton dropped not one, but two sentry guns. At one point our new Assassin Zer0 jumps into camouflage-mode but leaves behind a decoy copy of himself, which is pretty rad, and later on he seems to stun an enemy with his melee attack. Less obvious, but the trailer also shows off a lot more environment types, proving again that BL2 is going to be a lot more visually interesting than the nearly monochrome brown world we last visited.

Also: were those flying skags? As if skags weren’t annoying enough already, right?

Other new stuff: What’s up with Lilith going all X-Men Phoenix-y? She looks possessed or something, and like she’s about to bring the hurt down on the hunters. Did you catch the psycho midget riding the heavy-armored bandit bruiser? How much you wanna bet the bruiser chucks the little one at you? We also see a couple of the new NPC’s we’ll be meeting, each of which appear to be either borderline or full-on psychotic, but I’d expect nothing less. And of course, what would a Borderlands video be without a Claptrap cameo? Crap, probably.

I should mention that I did get my hands on the playable Borderlands 2 demo at E3 this year, and it felt fantastic. The controls were precise and responsive, the skill trees looked interesting (unfortunately we were on a pretty short time limit so I couldn’t pore over the skill list as long as I would have liked), and the enemy AI definitely showed more intelligence than the original’s. At this point I’m thinking of trying to track down a Futurama-style cryogenic tube so I can wait out the two months to the game’s release.