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When asked if I’d buy Borderlands after playing a very early version of the game last year, I answered rather confidently “no”. Has almost a year of refinement and a whole new change of art style changed my opinion?
Well, obviously. I’m reviewing it, which means I bought it, but was it worth the admission price?

The Good

World of Borderlands
Borderlands is being touted in reviews as an RPG-Shooter, to me that invokes images of Bioshock or Fallout 3. Borderlands isn’t an RPG-Shooter, it is an FPS which borrows some RPG elements. There’s a level system for your character and the enemies, the guns all have varying stats and there’s plenty of safes, boxes and toilets to search for loot. There’s a total of four classes each with their own special ability and three skill trees you can progress along to upgrade and tweak them. Finally, your missions are of the familiar RPG quest type, you go kill x number of monster y or kill x monster who drops y loot and return it. Turn them in, get XP, cash and occasional items.

And that’s it. There isn’t some great overburdening plot or screens and screens of dialogue. It very much takes a smattering of RPG elements, works them beautifully into the Shooter genre and keeps your finger on the trigger with lots of action. It is as though Gearbox have discovered the secret recipe for WarCrack and laced Borderlands with it. You’ll find yourself constantly saying “just one more quest” hours after you had originally planned on putting the controller down.

 

Bring a friend
Without a doubt, drop in/drop out co-op is Borderlands’ crowning jewel. As your party size increases (upto 4) the enemies get tougher and require teamwork to bring down. As players leave or get disconnected, then the difficulty relaxes.

Your own progress is maintained from single to co-op play and you’re free to mix and match it up. Do some quests solo, hop online for others and then drop back into single player. As a single player shooter, Borderlands is fairly competant, but the party co-op provides a more unique, enjoyable and rewarding experience. With options for a public or friends-online co-op, there’s no reason for you to be wandering the wastes of Pandora alone.

 

Guns, lots of guns
Thousands upon thousands of guns. Hundreds of thousands even. Guns spawn with differing stats and while the manufacturer’s name gives a hint about the nature of the gun (some specialise in faster reloads, others accuracy and damage) other bonuses are randomly added including stat bonuses, scopes, double fire or elemental damage such as the ability to set foes on fire.

A limited inventory means you are constantly forced to choose between loading up on health packs and swaping, selling or dropping unused weapons. Items have a color coded rarity (like WoW) from white, green, blue, purple yellow and orange, making tossing out or selling your non-white items a tough emotional call. You’ll become attached to your guns and like your garage your inventory will be full of stuff you are holding onto because it might come in useful at some point.

What this variety does is provide a great deal of flexibility as you can steer towards weapons with stats that compliment your play style and character class. Of course, you’re also free to use nothing but SMGs on your Sniper class, if that’s your thing.

 

Play it again, Sam
Beaten the game? Well guess what, the game adapts to your new level and power offering a second playthrough with higher level enemies that’ll prove a challenge even to your new god-like status. Also expect improved loot drops and equipment on your progression to the lvl50 cap.

The Bad

The details
There’s no obvious major flaw in Borderlands, but there are a number of smaller frustrations that suggest a little more care and time might have polished a great game into a must-have. The twitchy vehicle handling, voice comms glitches, random attacks of lag, texture popping. None are game breaking and will hopefully dealt with in patches.

 

Guardian Angel
On arrival in Fyrestone, you meet a Claptrap robot who serves as your tutorial character (Claptraps are recurring characters and the key to expanding your inventory). Before Claptrap though you’ll meet the ‘Guardian Angel’, who tells you to follow Claptrap’s tutorial though the game doesn’t give you any choice. The duplication of guide characters isn’t needed and the Angel’s style just doesn’t fit with the rest of the game. Add to that Angel’s redundant dialogue – such as warning you you’re about to ‘face a challenge’ before confronting the first boss – and Angel becomes more of an annoyance than a help.

 

Couch un-friendly
For a game that offers such a delightful and engaging co-op experience it really is disappointing that the split-screen option feels very much thrown together at the last minute. There’s no ability to fill the two remaining slots with online players and the viewing angle for each player is halved to fit vertically meaning you’ll lose a good chunk of periphral vision and fail to spot enemies chomping on your arms. More frustrating though is that split screen inventory screens retain the same size as their full screen counterparts, meaning you have to use the analog sticks to scroll the screen around as you are using it. Comparing the stats on guns in your inventory becomes a painful and time consuming task.