Aaron Klein: The more I heard about Borderlands the more I got excited to check the game out. The tone of the press had been mostly doubtful, touching on how Gearbox was almost desperately racing to distinguish itself from a saturated release season populated with established gaming titans like Rock Band, Halo, Uncharted, Mario, Call of Duty and other anticipated new intellectual properties like Dragon Age: Origins and Brutal Legend.

A relatively late switch of gears in artistic direction to use hand-drawn textures, a controversial portrayal of a stylized suicide as cover art and the inclusion of a catchy, popular tune from Cage the Elephant in advertising trailers combine to illustrate just how badly 2K Games and Gearbox want you to pick up Borderlands.

Arthur Kotsopoulos: Funny you should say that because before they changed the art style and serious tone of the game I also wasn’t interested. Sure, there were hundreds of thousands of variations in weaponry, but other than that the game offered nothing to really make me want to buy it

It wasn’t until they changed the graphical art style and started to post up viral videos with that comedic touch to them. From this point on I got interested in the game from reading previews, viewing screen shots to watching video walk through of game play, It was a marketing strategy that worked for me.

Aaron Klein: And none of this is bad. I agree the roll out has been a masterpiece of marketing and has been as successful as possible at carving out a niche for Borderlands to have success. The big question is whether or not the actual gameplay can capitalize off this attention.

Arthur Kotsopoulos: I wasn’t expecting much from this game other than it being unique. Having had time to dig into it, I have to say I am loving it! The chance that any weapon I find could be my new favorite weapon is great. You will never find the exact same weapon twice.

Sure the game starts off slow, but this just gets you comfortable with the basics to get you ready for the long journey ahead in the barren wasteland of Pandora in search of the Vault.

How are you in all finding the integration of game play, travel and missions within Pandora?

Aaron Klein: The weapons are awesome, and that is a great observation. Your character is never totally optimized. There is always a better weapon out there somewhere. That keeps it interesting for the exact reason you stated: The next weapon you find on your ground could end up being your favorite.

I get a little OCD about the weapons, though. When new guns are so plentiful I tend to spend a lot of time tweaking my arms and making tiny decisions between the rifle with more power but less accuracy and the one with an increased firing rate but low power.

This is both good and bad. A couple of times I wanted to set the controller down just because this micromanagement was overly taxing. But then I realized, “hey, you don’t have to do this. Just run out there and shoot.”

Arthur Kotsopoulos: Exactly. It’s has enough RPG elements to keep you swapping out the weapons in your backpack as you level up. Yet at the same time not overly taxing to the point where you have to organize which weapons have this scope, barrel, handle and ammo capacity.

It’s an FPS that’s challenging, yet easily accessible. Borderlands blends the genres in a way I haven’t seen done so well since Bioshock. You have an open, sandbox world, a light RPG skill tree for each of the four character classes and hundreds of thousands of weapons with various stats and augments such as fire, electricity, poison and so forth.

My main gripe with this is the driving. It follows the Halo-esque driving controls except it doesn’t do Halo justice. If you clip a tire on the road or small rock the car just lifts in the air funny like it weighs barely anything. I tried to avoid the driving as much as possible because even when you do master it, it still becomes annoying.

Aaron Klein: I was worried about the driving heading into this game, and my worries were warranted. The driving is not very intuitive. Having the car go in whatever direction the camera is pointing means you can’t look off to your peripheral without driving off the road. Plus the vehicle gets hung up really easily on the environment. And when it gets stuck, it’s stuck. There’s no rocking it out.

Driving just tends to be a pain. Gearbox was already trying to do so much with the role-playing shooter dynamic. The vehicle was the darkest cloud over this game.

The map itself is laid out with different “levels” connected by a common area. It’s open, sure, but it’s also constraining because the map is mostly the land between canyon walls and not a wide open plain, like Fallout 3. I say this type of map is not conducive to the driving.

Arthur Kotsopoulos: Sure the map isn’t open like Fallout 3, but it is still massive. I’m currently only on my first play through, taking my time, and I have still to enter a few sections of the game. At the moment I’m in awe at how many areas there are and exactly how big each of them is.

Aaron Klein: But you need to have some way to get around the world. And driving, as bad as it is, is still better than walking. And it is more interesting when you team up in co-op mode to have someone in the gunner’s nest.

Arthur Kotsopoulos: Yeah in co-op, especially four-player co-op, the game really shines. The game becomes much more fun. You receive better loot and acquire more experience points as enemies become harder.

Loot must be shared accordingly though, as any player can take any loot. That can make for frustrating times if you found an awesome weapon and someone nabs it from under your nose.

It is also very hard when you are levels apart from your co-op partners. The game can become quite brutal and unforgiving.

Aaron Klein: I agree, the game is pretty solid as a single player title. But it absolutely shines in the co-op. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why exactly that is… and I think it works so well because the challenge and number of enemies ramp up to coincide with the number of players and their levels. The fight for loot afterwards also contributes to the fun, as it gives everybody something to talk about. “Check out this sweet sniper rifle, does the Hunter want it?”

Plus sharing XP and gold means players level up at relatively the same level.

A testament to the different ways to play the game: while you planned and shared the loot, when playing split screen with a friend we were having fun rushing to beat each other to the glowing gun on the ground, and even waiting to revive each other until the other had picked the battlefield clean of ammo & mods.

But I can see how that could be annoying when playing with strangers.

Arthur Kotsopoulos: Whilst it does feature a form of dueling in co-op with fellow teammates it’s a shame the game doesn’t feature online multiplayer.

I supposed it wouldn’t work seeing as not 1 gun is ever the same so having the ability to take in your weapons from single player to multiplayer would be greatly unfair.

Aaron Klein: I have a co-op cautionary tale to share, too: Make sure any characters your friends build on your system are associated with a gamertag. My buddy was playing without signing in to one, and when we tried to continue the next day his level 11 Hunter was gone.

Luckily I had a level 20 Soldier, and we were able to power level his new character up pretty quickly, but not before he got tired of the game because he felt so underpowered against the enemies we were up against in the current missions.

Arthur Kotsopoulos: Still, I believe co-op is where Borderlands truly excels. Whilst other reviewers think it doesn’t work as well as It should, I believe it works flawlessly as the enemies become more tough and much better loot is dropped.

It’s a battle of who can find the better loot, that battle is always fun, time and time again. What’s even better is the fact you can duel each other at any time by a simple melee attack to see who is the better of the Vault hunters.

It’s great fun to have your team mate bragging about an awesome weapon he just found only to have dueled you then defeated by your awesome level 30 combat rifle with corrosive damage.

It’s satisfying and enjoyable all in the one package and I feel Borderlands is probably one of the most fun and unique games to have been released in the past year.

Aaron Klein: I agree. It captured the “one more level” draw of RPGs and has earned itself a place in my disc drive for quite a while.

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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.

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“We start a revolution!”

Perhaps no greater tribute has ever been offered at the temple of an entire genre of music than Brütal Legend. This game idolizes the power and energy of heavy metal, creating an entire world with metal as its central mythology. The world of Brütal Legend is steeped heavy metal symbolism; with every scenic vista looking like it belongs on an album cover.

Brütal Legend is a game with a lot of star power. First, it bears the name of one of the most critically acclaimed video game developers: Tim Schafer. Schafer spent more than a decade at Lucas Arts working on games like Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango before founding his own studio, Double Fine Entertainment, and creating games like Psychonauts. He has earned the reputation as being one of the funniest writers in the industry.

The game’s second big name is Jack Black, who voices Riggs, and whose enthusiasm for rock music evident in movies like School of Rock and Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny made him a perfect advocate. In addition, heavy metal icons like Ozzy Osborne, Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead and Judas Priest’s Rob Halford lend their voices to some of the game’s main characters. In another stroke of genius, Schafer secured the diabolical voice of Tim Curry as the game’s main villain.

Brütal Legend is a third-person, open-world action game where you play as Roadie Eddie Riggs. Riggs laments what passes for music nowadays, asking a fellow roadie, “Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong time, like you should have been born in a time when the music was better?”

Soon enough he finds himself magically transported via his cursed belt buckle to a land of Nordic fantasy where demons have enslaved humanity. Only the power of metal–and Eddie’s superior organizational roadie skills—can save them.

In this world, Eddie can melt his enemies’ faces with a scorching guitar riff and allies can be healed with the soothing vibrations of a bass note from a steel string made from a giant spider. Eddie’s guitar launches special attacks, and behaves in a way similar to Link’s ocarina in the Zelda franchise.

The story lampoons various aspects of music culture. Eddie’s first roadblock, General Lionwhyte gets around by using his massive hair to fly, and represents the glitz and glam of corporatized hair metal in the 1980s. Other enemies clearly mock the emo culture, as they don black clothing and mascara while saying things like, “you don’t understand my suffering.” These guys get their power by drinking from the “Sea of Black Tears.”

Eddie’s roadie skills particularly help in the massive “stage battles,” which are duplicated in multiplayer mode. Stage battles are a mix of third person action and real time strategy. Here Eddie sprouts wings and soars over the battlefield, setting rally points and commanding his troops. Two opposing stages vie over fan geysers, which supply resources needed to build more and more powerful troops to take out your opponent’s stage.

Some RPG elements are evident in that Eddie earns flame tributes by pleasing the gods, which he can give to the Guardian of Metal (Ozzy) in exchange for upgrades to his vehicle and weapons. Side quests are good ways to earn extra flame tributes. There are around a half dozen varieties, including ambush attacks, races, hunting wildlife and searching for collectibles.

If anything bad can be said about it is that it is too short. However, it could have just seemed that way because it was so much fun.

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Alex Mercer is Prototype’s protagonist. In the beginning of the game, he awakens in a morgue, about to undergo an autopsy. He flees, only to be riddled with bullets and escape again by jumping 20 feet over a fence. Mercer must discover why he has these newfound abilities by piecing together his forgotten past.

He discovers his city falling apart. A mysterious plague has infected the populace, turning citizens into zombiesque monsters connected to a hive mind. Bioresearch firm GENTEK is somehow involved, and a covert biowarfare military unit called Blackwatch is determined to stop the diseases’ spread even if it means killing everyone in Manhattan.

The story unfolds through cinematic cut scenes and a puzzle of memories called the Web of Intrigue. Much of the story is narrated by Mercer to a mysterious third party on the 18^th day of the infection, with the player taking control of the past.

Amnesiatic protagonists are cliché in the gaming world, but Mercer’s method of remembering his past forgives this sin. The way Mercer unlocks memories is grotesque. He literally extends his tentacles into an individual, rips them apart and consumes them to display a short cut scene. There are 131 people walking around the game world with a piece of the conspiracy in their that can help unlock the story’s mysteries.

Consuming a pedestrian or enemy is also how Mercer replenishes health, learns some skills and assumes their form. Mercer is a shape shifter, which adds a stealth element to this action-heavy title. He can blend into the crowd to lose enemies, or disguise himself as a soldier to gain access to a military base.

The stealth mechanic requires a major suspension of belief, but a necessary one to maintain the fast-paced action. For example, the military know they are looking for a shape-shifting superhuman, yet if they see you disguised as a random pedestrian or fellow soldier jump 30 feet in the air, glide and then run up the side of a skyscraper they don’t bat an eye.

Getting around the city is delightfully liberating. Mercer has super speed, can run up the side of buildings, jump three stories and glide on the air. This is particularly helpful when being pursued by angry Marines in helicopters, making it effortless to travel the New York rooftops.

Prototype is a brutal game, and Mercer is no hero. He does not care how many civilians are killed on his path to vengeance. In fact, the game rewards players for killing in the form of evolution points. This creates a disconnect between the Mercer you want to root for in the cut scenes, and the homicidal maniac you play in the game. This detachment is even more pronounced than in other games with this problem, such as Grand Theft Auto.

Evolution points are spent to upgrade Mercer’s abilities, and are earned liberally. Improvements include new attacks, new ways to view the world, new ways to get around and protective powers like armor. Although Mercer can pick up and use enemy weapons, his shape-shifting abilities provide a much more interesting method of dispatching foes. He can grow Wolverine-style claws from his hands, turn his fists into giant hammers or morph his entire arm into a blade or into whip like tendrils. His attacks are devastating, often hewing an opponent in two. That this is not a game for children doesn’t even need to be said at this point.

Melee battles are messy and chaotic. It is a good thing Mercer can take a lot of damage, because Prototype throws waves of enemies at you. The camera can sometimes be an additional foe, providing horrible views particularly when you fight too close to a wall.

If Mercer didn’t have enough ways to create havoc, he can also commandeer enemy tanks and helicopters. Jumping on the back of a helicopter, making your way to the door and consuming the pilot is one of the most rewarding experiences in the game.

The main story has more than 30 missions, and with tons of side missions this game could keep you occupied for a couple dozen hours, longer yet if you attempt to find all the hidden content and memories. The story missions have a great balance, straddling that fine line between challenging and frustrating. The side missions are mostly the standard combat and time trial fare, but a lack of innovation here does not impede their enjoyment.

What the graphics lack in detail they make up for in scale. Dozens of vehicles and seemingly hundreds of people can be on the screen at a time. Vehicles realistically swerve, skid and crash when approaching street battles. Citizens hysterically run away from you and the infected monsters. The combined effect presents a city gripped in fear at the violence playing out on its streets.

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