So recently clocking Borderlands what did I think of the game as whole?
Yes I know this is a rather late review in light of the game being released months ago I’ve just been lazy to actually write up the review.
Welcome to Pandora
I digress, Borderlands is not Gearbox’s first foray into the world of PC games with the release of Gears of War for PC being their debut title.
What does Borderlands promise us? Apparently it promises a compelling storyline, co-operative play and lots of guns all set on a far away planet called Pandora.
You’re placed in the shoes of a treasure hunter who arrives on Pandora to look for a legendary ‘Vault’ which apparently contains riches from a long lost alien world but only opens every few millenia.
The Vault: it's more likely than you think
From the get go the game opens up with a slick opening like something out of a Tarentino movie, you get the choice of four class types: Brick a close combat character that relies on brute force and raw power your general RPG Tank. Lilith a Siren apparently gifted with the ability to enter another dimension for a limited amount of time before re-emerging otherwise known as ‘Phasewalk’; she is a mage/assassin hybrid type of character.
Phasewalk: The only way to travel
Mordecai your typical hunter archetype blessed with the ability to kill stuff from really far away and able to summon a pet Bloodbird that can attack and help scavenge supplies, finally you have Roland a former mercenary who specialises in close range weapons, is able to deploy turrets and later on is able to regenerate ammo for weapons.
The characters are introduced by the bus driver who you find out later is the owner of a chain of weapons/ammo vending machines.
Personalities (Left to Right): Roland, Mordecai, Brick & Lilith
After you select your character you’re kicked off the bus by the seemingly friendly bus driver and are welcomed to the world of Pandora by a robot with an attitude called a Claptrap, you’re run through a quick tutorial, and starter missions that outline basic controls, skills, combat and questing in general.
Then from there you are then left to your own devices to complete quests that allow you to collect various special guns or artefacts that can be combined with your skills (In my case I played as the Siren and was able to make a fiery exit out of Phasewalk) think of it like the artefacts that modify your stats in S.T.A.L.K.E.R unfortunately the variety of artefacts on offer from missions is rather limited at least in the case of the Siren…
The questing in-game is in the form of a bounty board that allows you to access missions be they side missions or important storyline missions of course it’s highly advisable to do the side quests as sometimes the swag you receive is worth it; missions vary from simple scavenging for particular items to going to ‘dungeons’ to fight giant beasts or defeat warlords/barbarians.
Werk, Werk, Werk (Top to Bottom): Bounty Board & Quest Log
The gameplay is still very much standard FPS fair but with an elements of RPG showing through such as headshots not always being an instant kill specially if the weapon you’re using is weak or the enemy is at a higher level than you of course there are skills that allow you to do more critical damage to score instant kills.
As previously mentioned skills can be be trained up each time you level and you’re freely able to put the skill points into whatever character development branch you want, these points can be freely redistributed by paying a small fee to reset all your points.
Weapons can be buffed with the aforementioned skills and Proficiencies – meaning the more you use a weapon the more proficient your character becomes which results in better damage, higher fire rates and faster reload times.
Leet Skills (Left to Right): Character Skill Branches & Weapon Proficiencies Menues.
On the subject of weapons the developers claim that there are over 17 million weapons in game with 750 thousand variations as of release, the weapons in game are indeed plentiful and for those of us who are pack rats will end up with full backpacks after missions of course all the common weapons are not worth keeping and are usually sold at the next vending machine.
The weapons that are worth collecting are the semi-rare weapons that drop off bosses and legendary weapons that can be either found or bought; these weapons tend to have a little red text related to the weapon’s name and insanely good stats ranging from crazy damage percentages to ammo regeneration this applies to shields in-game as well with rarer shields being able to quickly regenerate both shields and health.
Sick Loot: Inventory System
Death is dealt in its own way; when your health hits zero you are given a small amount of time to quickly kill an enemy which immediately revives you with full shields giving you an opportunity to make an escape or take cover until your health recovers.
Otherwise if you are unable to kill anything in time you are revived at a ‘New-U’ station for a fee.
Row, Row, Fight the Power
Possibly the most fun aspect of Borderland’s weapons are the Elemental weapons made by Maliwan they’re typically weaker in terms of base damage compared to other weapons of the same type but offer the chance of doing one of the four elemental damages: Incendiary, Corrosive, Explosive and Shock.
All four damage types each carry a unique death animation when the elemental damage finishes your victim each of which are show in the image below.
Using the Elements (Left to Right): Bake 'em, Melt 'em, Explode 'em and Shock 'em.
How does the game look? Being developed on the Unreal 3 engine Borderlands looks gorgeous, the pseudo-cell shaded art direction looks great with [almost] endless wasteland to explore with a day/night cycle, effects like explosions from incendiary weapons look great and the character models are a detailed and gritty.
Although it would have been preferable that Borderlands had Anti-aliasing as the cell shaded nature of the game means ‘jaggies’ are more obvious which is a real let down as the game looks great on PC.
The game music is good and fits very well with what is happening on screen as you play, the sound effects are great especially the sound of various firearms such as the various shotguns and revolvers at your disposal all producing a meaty ‘Bang!’ sound (the epitome of this is probably the M3 Pump action in Counter-Strike).
Git off mah lawn!
Finally we get to the point were I post about what I find was bad about Borderlands.
First off is: The AI is a bit too easy most involve either charging mindlessly at you or hiding behind cover and occasionally popping up to shoot sporadicly at you both of which can easily be dealt with so it does get a bit old fighting the same enemies over and over again.
Second network play is horrible in its own way before the game was patched, the game was barely able to play co-op mode with various bugs preventing someone from hosting a private game and the only option was to host a public game, which brings me to the next point relating to network play.
The server browser is simply the worst server browser I’ve used in the years of online gaming under my belt, the server browser only displays what the server’s name is, the characters in-game, what slots are left in the game and which part of the wastelands they are up to.
For those who play multiplayer online will notice is that I’ve failed to mention one of the most important things when choosing a server: The ping which alludes to where the server would be hosted which ends up with people having to name their server in which country their game is being hosted in otherwise you end up joining games in Russia which results in 9000 bajillion ping making the game unplayable.
Worst server browser ever
Although the implementation of co-op is a good idea on paper it doesn’t work too well in practice as I’ve noticed while playing co-op that players don’t seem to realise they have a voice chat button or the ‘Talk To Team’ button to at least communicate with their teammates so it ends up feeling like you’re playing with bots; if I wanted bot teammates I would have played Call of Duty or a scripted shooter and in those games at least the bots communicate to you.
So my recommendation for co-op is round up some mates, all get the game and go forth to conquer the wastelands.
Next is a few niggles I had with the game relating to the interface although it’s slick and great overall there are a few flaws that annoy me as hell the one of the worst being the weapons description box: you’re probably asking yourself why a I’m being anal about it well it’s annoying because when you see a rare/legendary (gold) weapon you can’t see all its stats meaning you can’t determine if the weapon is just rare because its got this giant rice scope on it or because it regenerates ammo. This links on to another problem relating to weapons is that some weapons have descriptions missing altogether such as a semi-rare shield drop called ‘Wee Wee’s Super Booster’ has no description what-so-ever meaning you can’t tell what it does (See video above).
My last complaint is that the game does not have an Anti-aliasing option meaning I can’t enjoy my game without jaggies but otherwise I have no other quams with the visuals.
Your Guardian Angel or is she?
In conclusion Borderlands was a great game, even with its thin plot it was a great shooter to blast through, sound and music was great, excellent visuals, gorgeous game world, fun gameplay and interesting co-op mode so long as you have some mates to game with.
So if you’re looking for a fun RPG/FPS hybrid game for Christmas then grab yourself a cheap copy during the Christmas sales, if you’re looking for a fast pace co-op experience I suggest looking at games like Left 4 Dead: 1 and 2 (for L4D:2 those in Australia are advised to get gifted an overseas version to avoid getting the censored local version).
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