Borderlands

Spending my life as a self-proclaimed hater of “first person shooters” (FPSs if you’re nasty), I have had to re-evaluate my stance on this genre more and more frequently in recent years. I mean, even though I do see the merit in your Halos and your Calls of Duties, I just don’t find myself being attracted to these games like most of the people on my friends list are. But every once in a while along comes a game with a hook powerful enough to make me want to spend 50 plus hours looking down the sights of a shotgun, and seeing the funny bits fly when I pull the trigger. Games like Left 4 Dead with it’s zombies, Team fortress with it’s different classes and awesome art style, and Portal with its… Portals(?) ensnare me with something to do other than shooting the guy’s who are not from my country/planet. To this list of off-beat FPSs we can now introduce Borderlands, developed by Gearbox Software. I warn you, this will at times tend to read more like a love letter than a review.

Borderlands is a first person shooter with heavy RPG elements (or an RPG seen from a first person perspective?), with a strong Diablo-esque emphasis on grinding and loot collection. Stack on top of all this that all enemies, equipment and weapons are randomly generated and you have a game that will keep you addicted, while still managing to pack in a few surprises even after having played it for over 100 hours.

Story

Borderlands takes place in the colony planet of Pandora. A planet colonized and quickly abandoned by the government, and corporations once they saw how little there was in it to profit from, and how difficult it would be to survive in it for prolonged stretches of time. The only people left behind were the treasure hunters, some early settlers, unlucky employees and hordes of criminals who now prey on the civilians left behind. Most of the people who stayed behind did so because of their belief in a legendary vault of untold, and immeasurable treasures. The story in this game is easily the weakest part of the game, and at times it seems like a throw-away part of a whole which seems so well thought out, which is sad, because the characters can be so darn funny and interesting at times. At one point in the story you find out someone has died, and this is never followed through any further, almost as if they wanted to move you, but didn’t care enough to give this branch in the plot any closure.

Gameplay

Borderlands starts off as most FPSs do. You are give a gun, you are given a guide, and you are given some some easy mooks to kill. Where things start diverging from other FPSs is when you kill someone, or complete a mission and are given a set amount of experience, which in turn increases your level, making you stronger, tougher, and giving you more health. You also start getting skill points which you can use to develop your chosen character into the perfect killing machine, healing or looting machine.

There are four character classes to choose from:

*A soldier who can either heal his teammates or summon a turret to assist with the butt-kickery.

*A siren whose power allows her to explode in an elemental flash, become invisible for a few seconds, while she runs to or from danger, and then explodes again to knock out whoever is standing around her.

*The berserker who is an explosives specialist, or an unstoppable punching juggernaut.

*And the hunter, who can either be a deadeye sniper or a gunslinger with buffs whenever he uses handguns and revolvers, with a pet hawk who attacks and slows down enemies. He also drops extra loot for the whole party.

As awesome as single player for this game is, things just get better every time another player joins the game: enemies become tougher, which makes the little puppies you were fighting against in single player become fire, acid, or thunder-breathing monsters which will take a whole team, and a lot of bullets to take down. Treasure also goes up a few levels in awesome with more people in your party, taking your machinegun and replacing it’s bullets with rockets. You are doing yourself a disservice if you never play this game with other people.

The game also features player duels and arenas in which to fight your friends. Ignore these, as they are highly irrelevant. A properly built hunter can kill anyone within half a second of the start of the fight by summoning his hawk. A siren can kill everyone else. None of this is pertinent to your level, or to how awesome your weapons are. The game is made for killing monsters, and PVP battles are really unbalanced.

Weapons

As stated before, weapons in this game are randomly generated, which means that if you are really, very lucky you can find a super rare weapon, which will make your character into a spider killing god. There are different weapon-types in the game, including pistols, sniper rifles, shotguns, machineguns, and even some alien weapons. Every time you open a chest, or kill a baddie you have a chance of finding, say a sniper, or a sniper that does double damage, or a sniper that shoots fire bullets, or acid bullets… Or a sniper which shoots clusters of bullets, like a shotgun, or if you’re really lucky, all of the above. Also it can refill ammo automatically so you never run out. The possibilities here are endless, and all the examples described above are weapons I actually have. And they are all on my crappy character… (my good character has a revolver whose bullets rotate between all the elements in the game, and shoots as fast as an assault riffle).

Weapons are the reason most people who play this game will continue to play it well after their characters have all reached their level cap.

Graphics

Borderlands is powered by the unreal engine 3, so it obviously looks amazing. It has a beautiful cell-shaded style which gives it a bit of a comic-book feel, and gives the characters a lot of personality, and helps a lot with the humor behind them all. The game manages impressive draw distances, which is very helpful for us snipers out there. In fact, the only time I noticed any slowdown and frame skipping was when playing with a full party of level 50 characters we all spread out throughout a huge map and each fought innumerable hordes of spiders, and used ridiculous fast, powerful, acid shooting, explosion spamming weapons, but it soon passed, as those spider did not live for long.

Borderlands is easily one of my favorite games this year, and one of the games I’ve dumped the most hours into (considering it takes about 40-50 hours {more or less depending on skill} to complete all missions in the games, and even at that point your character will only be around level 36). Each character gives the player a different play style, and a different perspective on the game, and how to tackle each mission all over again. But you will continue playing this game with friends looking for the next, strongest weapon you could ever imagine. There is so much more that could be said about the unlimited possibilities for the weapons available to you in this game, but I really must stop; I just finished downloading the newest downloadable content for this game, and it’s zombies…ZOMBIES!!!