Borderlands is a tough game to classify. Primarily it is a first-person shooter, but it also incorporates elements of role-playing games. Developer Gearbox calls it a first-person role-playing game. Your character increases in power and skills as you progress through the game. Leveling up means access to higher level weapons, more health and greater proficiency with weapons.
First person shooter gamers and role playing gamers do not really mix that often. The former enjoys the thrill of a headshot and multiplayer melees while the later is hooked by personalizing their character and looting new gear from dungeons.
Borderlands takes a little from each genre and adds enough cooperative elements to create an addictive game best played with others. Whereas Fallout 3 was a role playing game first and a shooter second, Borderlands is the opposite.
Earlier this year Gearbox announced a major change in artistic direction for Borderlands. It uses hand-drawn textures and black outlines to create a form of cel-shaded world that looks more like an illustration than a realistic rendering.
This change works well simply by being distinctive and light-minded. The art style minimizes the inherent dullness of a game set on a desolate dust bowl of a planet and adds a lighthearted sense of humor.
You start the game by picking your character class. Each of the four options has an upgradable special power. For example, the soldier deploys a turret that can be upgraded to heal allies or dispense ammunition while the Hunter unleashes his pet raptor to take out enemies from afar.
The player is given minimum information with no context when making this monumental decision, which is a problem if you are looking to spend a couple dozen hours or more leveling up a character. If you have not fired a weapon yet, how can you know if you prefer to fight with assault rifles as a soldier or rocket launchers as a berserker?
Borderlands is a pretty good single-player game, but playing cooperatively with friends is where the game really shines. Up to four players can play simultaneously over the Internet or via split screen. The intensity of the combat ramps up when playing with others, especially when using a mixture of character classes.
Players share money and experience points, but are on their own to fight for guns and ammunition. Whether you decide to cooperatively decide who gets what weapons, or its first-come-first-serve is up to how you play.
One cautionary tale on co-op, my friend lost his entire character because he was playing on a guest profile and it did not save. If you value your data, make sure it is associated with a profile.
The story in Borderlands is hardly worth mentioning. The focus is so strongly on cooperative play that narrative must have been seen as an action-slowing liability. Quest-givers do not have recorded dialogue, which makes them seem lifeless. Mission and story related information is related primarily through text boxes that are easily skipped over.
Without context, however, the story missions seem less urgent and less monumental. The benefit of that is that you might be less apt to speed through the game and more likely to help friends with their missions through the online co-op.
There are tons of missions in the game, nearly 200 including side missions. Moreover, when you finish you can keep your character and do it all over again against tougher enemies for better loot.
The missions are repetitive, mostly consisting of: Go somewhere, kill some stuff and return. While this can be monotonous because the missions are not driving the story, it does ensure that there is never a dull moment without some alien wildlife or bandits to exterminate.
One characteristic of role-playing games that did not make it into Borderlands is an attempt at a real and persistent world. The few non-playable characters that populate Pandora serve only to hand out missions. The planet feels unnaturally desolate, even for one that supposed to be on the frontier.
Borderlands boasts hundreds of thousands of weapons just waiting for you to find. The programmers developed a procedural system of generating new weapons.
Arms and ammunition are scattered in containers, eerily out-of-place toilets and on the corpses of fallen foes. The world is littered with them, which makes exploration and looting lucrative. The variety adds flavor; the next gun you come across could end up being your new favorite.
With so many weapons, it is surprising how different each one feels. It means that your character is never 100 percent optimized, even when you reach the level cap set at 50. It is impossible to find every weapon in the game.
Vehicular combat is a dark cloud in this game. The vehicles handle similarly to those in Halo with the left thumb stick controlling forward and reverse while the right thumb stick controls direction. This means that the driver has tunnel vision and is unable to rotate the camera around the vehicle to find out what enemies lurk in your peripherals.
This might have been a forgivable offense, but the vehicles also feel weightless and easily get hung up on the environment.
Role playing fans may find Borderlands lacking in depth and options. However, shooter fans will find a pleasurable introduction to many tenants of role-playing games. Either way this hybrid game should generate enough good ideas to benefit both genres in the long run.
