I like almost all games from the fast pace games such as Call of Duty and Halo 3 to the slower games like The Sims. FPS games have always been my favorite types starting with GoldenEye and Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64, all the way til the current Halo ODST and Wolfenstein. When I first saw Borderlands I was excited to start playing it, the cel- shading, the large variety of guns and the co-op made me feel like a kid in a candy store.

Borderland is Gearbox’s newest FPSRPG’s out for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. Borderlands takes place when Earth is colonizing distant planets in the galaxy. Our story begins on a planet at the edge of the galaxy called Pandora. You get to play one of four characters:

Roland “The Soldier” the character that has no specific skills except to shoot with his Assault rifle and his shotgun; Lilith “The Siren” is a western knockoff of the Invisible Woman; Mordecai “The Hunter”… well what more can I say, he has a sniper rifle and shoots at animals and people (like Dick Cheney). Then there’s Brick, a large possibly steroid taking Brute. Only a few NPCs are well rounded individuals, but of course the rest of them are often similar and don’t talk because they aren’t that interesting.

The game is centered around you and possibly your friends, if you have any, taking quest from everyone and their mothers to find “The Vault” a secret treasure trove containing “advanced alien technology, infinite wealth, fame, power, and women” (supposedly). As you go through this huge sandbox world you’ll find many variations of the same enemies over, and over, and over.

There are two ways to get around Pandora: Your first option is the most obvious, a car with a large rocket launcher on top or a machine gun (your choice). The second option is teleporting from one save spot to another, which is sometimes over done. Loading screens do take a bit (maybe about 20 seconds), but of course this could be a result of my computer (although I doubt it, I just built a new computer for myself). They do try to make the loading screens look useful by putting little tips about the game, of course some are useless like “Once you reach level 5 you can unlock your characters action skill” when I’m at level 27.

Borderlands uses the Unreal 3 Engine just like many other games now-a-days. As stated previously Borderlands is cel-shaded making the characters and scenery pop, showing details to important objects and people. Of course other games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is cel-shaded and has received much criticism initially, but has since become one of it’s key features of the game.

Sometimes if you aren’t careful or in a boss fight by yourself, you will die. There are 3 ways you can respawn (all of which don’t require you to start over from your last save). The first way to respawn is if you are playing with your friends they can run up to you and heal you before you run out of time (similar to Left 4 Dead). #2 is when you are playing by yourself and you kill the enemy that killed you, you earn a “Second Wind”. Last but not least you can just die, and you will respawn next to a save point but some money will be subtracted from you. On the positive side none of these incur a penalty against you.

Every time you fight an enemy there is chance of them dropping stuff, weather it be ammo, money, or guns. In the game trailer it is stated that there are 87 bazillion guns, and I think we can all agree that that’s alot of guns. I’m not exactly sure how many there actually are, but I’m probably at 623 types of guns give or take 3 guns. The variations of guns are similar to the differences in the enemies. One pistol will do 22 damage, 45.6 accuracy and a fire rate of 2.2 and a second gun may do 22 damage 45.5 accuracy and have a firing rate of 2.2. It is impossible to store items, other than holding them in your back pack with room for only 9 things (it progressively gets larger with more quests). With these small differences there is no way to tell how many guns there really are.

As stated earlier there are multiplayer elements to the game. You can play with a group of 4 in co-op or you can go into the arena and fight your friends in a multiplayer death match. Online co-op mode consists of you and up to three other people going around completing the same missions that are in the single player campaign. To compensate for the additional characters the A.I. in the game becomes significantly more difficult, but as soon as the characters leave and you are by yourself again, the game will automatically reduce the difficulty on the enemies. Now it is my recommendation to play with people you know because when you play with random people you can’t necessarily rely on anyone staying with you when a difficult part comes up.

Overall Borderland is a good buy and I would suggest this game to anyone who likes FPSRPGs. Even if you are strictly an FPS person or strictly an RPG person I would recommend it because it doesn’t go that far out of either realm to make anyone uncomfortable. The co-op, the graphics, and the 87 bazillion guns equal one good game. If I were to put a numerical rating to this game I would give it a 4 out of 5, but I would prefer to just say this is a excellent game and it is a must buy

Popularity: 1% [?]