I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I would most definitely put this title in my “Game of the Year” list, I’ve also mentioned that this game is not without flaws. Where to begin!
Well the story is pretty bland, beginning as you arrive on a barren planet called Pandora on a quest to find “the vault”, which to me is a bit of parody in and of itself considering the entire motivation of a player playing this game is to simply find more/better loot. The NPCs are either hillbillies, entrepreneur, or scientists, and each wield their own personal brand of crazy. This leads to some funny moments in dialog, and gives some motivation with regards to the quests that offer dialog, but the content isn’t what you’d call compelling, and it’s compiled with probably the worst campaign ending known to man.
Borderlands presents itself in a cell shaded style that really suits it, there isn’t much variety in the environments though. You’re pretty much limited to caves, deserts, and junk yards, and you see similar assets in all the environments. The color palette for the most part has been saturated, which really makes the green lights that are used to mark containers that may contain things your interested in such as cash, ammo or weapons really stand out. There is a downside however, whenever you hit a night time cycle, things get really hard to see, a little more pop in the textures may have gone a long way to solving that. The night cycles are relatively short though, so it amounts to little more than an annoyance. Speaking of annoyances… the game is lacking a world map, you can pull up a map of the region you’re in, but you can’t zoom out to see other areas. This becomes frustrating when you’re trying to pick the closest teleport location. The animations on the baddies in this game are pretty funny, midgets with shotguns blowing themselves over when they pull the trigger, kamikaze grenade carriers running towards you are all good for a laugh time and time again. It’s unfortunate that the same care wasn’t taken for the animation of the player characters, a raging berserker could have been pretty funny too in the coop scenario, but alas it isn’t.
I’ve mentioned that I played this title on PC, and it was the wrong choice in my opinion, the menus seem like a direct port from the console versions, I used the example before of the player invite menu where you would select the player with your mouse, then you’d have to hit ‘I’ on the keyboard, obviously this would make more sense on a controller, where it is select with the dpad, and press ‘A’ or ‘X’ for example. Or dropping an item by selecting it with your mouse then hitting spacebar, and changing items in your inventory, you click an item to highlight it, then click the slot you’d like to equip it in… all of this is very consolesque and very disappoint in my opinion.
This game is a first person shooter at it’s most fundamental, with RPG inspired mechanics, and it is very good at it. There are really only a hand full of different types of enemies, but like in an RPG as you advance in levels, so do your enemies which means more HP to kill. What that means as that you need to be constantly upgrading your weapons and equipment to compensate for the difference. As you might have guessed, the balance here is key to this game being fun, and they absolutely nailed it. The scaling happens so well that most of the time it feels like you could get over run at any given time, it’s really great. The weapons are generated procedurally, ala Diablo, and you find them often, they scale by level and rarity, and come with all sorts of neat effects, like incendiary, corrosive or shock damage, all of which have their strengths and weaknesses, to match the different sort of defenses you run into on certain enemies. The weapon stats break out into damage, crit damage, accuracy, things that loot whoring RPGers will be familiar with, as well as a couple stats that you would expect from an RPG of this ilk, such as fire rate, and reload rate, all of which compile to make some pretty awesome weapons. For example I found a combat rifle that fires a burst 3, but doesn’t do a ton of damage, but since it has a fast fire rate, and next to no recoil, the entire 3 burst will hit critically quickly with no down time, very effective. Crits are handled by skill as opposed to a roll based system, most enemies have a weak spot, by hitting these weak spots you score crits, so while you may have great gear, if you can’t hit the head of a humanoid you’re going to be in trouble. The more you use a weapon type the more proficient you become with it, which yields extra stat bumps as well, all the more RPGy. You also get equipment slots for a grenade modifier, you only have 1 type of grenade so you use the modifier slot to customize it, ie add one of the damage types, changing the damage value, different types of effects like having the grenade split into several more grenades or jump into the air and drop a rain of explosion down. You also have a shield slot, which changes the capacity and recharge rate on your shield. Finally you have a slot for your class modifier, to basically add perks to your character, xp bonuses for your group, and additional points into specific skills in your skill tree are pretty common for these.
To fuel the RPGedness, you select 1 of 4 players which serve as classes, each of which is equipped with a special action to help you in battle, and a relatively short skill tree to spend your skill points in as you level, to customize your character further. You can buy back your skill points to respec your character as you wish, from my experience it is pretty cheap to do so, and will often make sense to do if you go from single player to coop.
The Soldier, which acts as a healer if you can imagine that… but they are also equipped with a turret which was my main appeal to the class.
The Siren, they have the ability to phase step which makes you run super fast and does damage as she enters and exits this state, so as you might imagine, they will often run in and out of a big group of people wreaking havoc.
The Hunter, has a falcon friend that they send into battle, this class obviously works much better from range.
The Berserker, whose ability is to go into a rage and punch the hell out of things. In the end they can take a ton of punishment before going down.
Now despite the fact that there are these classes, none of them are required in your group to be successful, and all stand up pretty well on their own from what I can tell (although the hunter seemed to be the most difficult to me). You don’t need a tank, and a healer, however some of the class combinations when they come together are really awesome to watch. For an example, with a soldier spec’d as a medic and a berserker can be almost unstoppable, the berserker charges in and punches things while the soldier just stands back and pumps him full of bullets to heal him as he does. But the same can be done for any combination, I’d love to see 4 soldiers tear stuff down, would be pretty fun. The coop really shines in this game is really best experienced with a friend.
I think all of the shortcomings in this title, could be defined as a lack of polish that you’d normally find in your big budget titles like an uncharted or ratchet and clank, to pull from recent memory, and I think that all of them could have been solved with some more time. I think it’s also fair to mention that this is a first generation title, it is not uncommon for a first of its kind title to lack the polish of a proven franchise. Don’t get me wrong I’m not giving it a pass for the flaws, but I can honestly say that there is a synergy going on here that any fan of shooting or loot whoring should not miss this experience, even after finishing this game I’m motivated to play more, I want to play the other classes, I want to get more fat loot. Gearbox put out a fantastic new IP, now that the formula has been proven I expect a sequel that is given the time to get the polish that it deserves. Play this game.
