Medley of goodness: Borderlands review
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
I’m convinced that, one day, somebody played “Fallout 3” and said, “Wow, this game is cool but too slow.” “Borderlands” was born.
I’m not exaggerating either. Take “Fallout 3,” remove the deep, complex, storyline, add more guns, add more enemies, simplify the role-playing game aspects, add some adrenaline, and you’ve got “Borderlands.”
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The storyline is shallow at best. You are on the post-apocalyptic world of Pandora hunting for the Vault, a fabled cache of advanced technology. Along the way, as you depopulate the planet, you are guided by a Cortana-esque girl who tells you what to do, with no explanation of who she is, but you trust her and go along with it anyway, for some reason.
The game starts you off picking one of four unique and colorful characters: Mordecai “the Hunter,” Lilith “the Siren,” Roland “the Soldier,” or Brick “as himself.” Each of these characters has a unique ability you acquire upon reaching level five, which dictates how you play through the game. As you level up, your health increases, and you gain a skill point which you can use to upgrade your abilities and your skill. Roland, for example, deploys a machine gun turret as his skill. He can then upgrade the turret to either do more damage or dispense health and ammo when you stand next to it. Brick has a berserker rage where he drops his gun and literally pummels to death just about anything in his way.
The gunplay is a blast as you find boat-loads of firearms that are all fairly unique. You then use these said guns to frag everything that moves and collect their loot. The loot is better guns, money, ammo and shields. If the equipment you find isn’t better, you sell it to buy guns and shields that are better. It isn’t complicated at all, and hasn’t been new for a long time, but it’s a lot of fun.
Another element of roleplaying-games that infiltrates “Borderlands” is the quest. It feels like the designers also play “World of Warcraft” a lot, because the quests are pretty similar. “Go here, kill everything that moves, grab item, bring it back.” The quests are literally that simple.
The real gem of this game is the co-op mode. The more friends you have running through the game with you, the more enemies there are and the more (and better) loot there is. You can tell that the game was designed for more players from the fact that the different characters compliment each other. For example, the jeep/tank only reaches its full potential when you have a pilot and a gunner.
One last point is the atmosphere. While Pandora is pretty standard, the almost cartoon art style, memorable characters (the saw/axe wielding Doc Zed being my favorite) and rampant gallows humor gives it a definite charm and helps it stand out amongst the legion of first-person shooters out there.
“Borderlands” is a guilty pleasure of a game. When you sit and think about it, you realize there is nothing it does that hasn’t been done before, and in a lot of ways it is very shallow. However, when you are playing it, you forget the faults and have a blast, literally. I recommend this game.
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
