Article: Thoughts on Borderlands

I set off to EB Games after work last night to pick up a copy of Borderlands. A curious game I had been hearing about more and more over the last few days as its release date crept closer.

As luck would have it, EB Games had sold all of them, except the PS3 version. Bummer.

And then what happened?

I decided to stop by Wal-Mart as it was on the way home. Not only did they have it in stock, they had it at 40.00$ rather than the retailed 70.00$. Obviously an error as the SKU registered as a generic product, unless they were running some kind of promotion I was unaware of. Anyway, with an extra 30$ in my pocket, I was happily on my way home.

What is Borderlands?

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the commercials, ads and other promos on Borderlands, let me explain the concept. Borderlands is a first person shooter with RPG and scavenging elements. Think Fallout 3 with fluid, robust shooter elements. In the game are thousands of weapons, each with their own stats and special features ranging from reload time to damage rates, reload times, damage modifiers up to incendiary, acidic or electrical rounds. You scavenge the landscape for ammo and items which can be sold to vendors for extra cash, although there are no “trash” items like in Fallout 3.

When you start the game, you choose your character class from a selection of four. When simplified, these are the soldier, sniper, tank and magic user. Each character has it’s own traits and special abilities. As you level up you can spend points on various skills in your skill tree, much like World of Wacraft’s system, in order to boost certain traits. For example, the Soldier can spawn a turret gun. Through the skill tree, he can choose to make his turret last longer or hit harder depending on the player’s fighting style.

As you gain levels, you also gain more health, hit harder and overall just become much more dangerous to the bad guys that await you on every turn. Leveling can occur naturally through enemy-grinding or by doing quests. You’ll also be rewarded small doses of experience for completing in-game challenges like setting 25 enemies on fire, free-falling, crushing enemies with your car and many more.

At the time of writing, I’ve only managed to squeeze in a few hours and reaching level 20 and about to jump into the second boss fight, so keep in mind that some of my rants may auto-correct themselves as I play on.

You get thousands of weapons and set on hundreds of quests that span from the classic “kill 10 of these things” to fetching, to running things over with your car, and you get paid for it and the whole thing is done extremely stylishly.

Stylish? You’re damn right it is.

Speaking of style, the graphics in Borderlands are amazing. Highly stylized, it has that “Crackdown” feel to it. It’s half shaded and heavily outlined. The textures are crisp and the ambiance completely engrossing. I found the stock music level much too high, overpowering voice speech but a quick trip to through the menu allowed me to change that. While the day and night cycles are always greatly appreciated and immersive, they seem to go by much too quickly.

How’s the gameplay? Smooth, for the most part. Character movement is very fluid and once you get used to the aiming system, you’ll truly enjoy the satisfying feeling of combat in this game. A headshot scores you a critical hit which may take down your opponent in a single hit if your weapon is strong enough. Unfortunately, there are framerate issues. Notably when something explodes close to you.

Other gripes

There are a couple more issues that annoy me. First off are the repetitive character models; I understand that you’re trying to cut back on resources, but please include some form of diversity. Fighting knife-wielding midgets was fun at the starting area, but after 19 more levels, it’s starting to get annoying even though they’re now at my level range.

When I’m done clearing a village, don’t just randomly make six more enemies magically appear out of thin air around me. At least have some context for it. I’ve seen them coming out of houses, but wouldn’t they have come out earlier during the intense fire fight rather than now when it’s quiet? And why can’t I go into those houses and explore? A locked door is fine, but I should be able to walk through a hung piece of cloth that’s used as a makeshift door. C’mon. Fallout did it, why can’t you?

The game lacks a banking system. You’ll soon find yourself hording dozens of weapons that you either swap between or are keeping for later leaving little space in your inventory for your medkits and loot. The only way around this is to start a co-op game and make a secondary character pick up your spare gear (muleing).

Other than that, my only gripe is about vehicles. The controls are way loose and my car tends to get stuck everywhere. If you hit anything mildly high, you’ll either flip it over or clip half-way through it and get stuck. Once your car is stuck, no amount of grenades are going to move it although it can be easily flipped if it topples over. Update: turns out you can smack cars with melee attacks.

In closing

It’s not all bad, though. The game is riveting, extremely addicting and it’s just plain fun while offering a challenge. So far, I have to admit I’m completely hooked and looking forward to playing a couple of co-op games with friends on a drunken Friday night.

I’ve yet to find a proper multiplayer game. Every time I’ve tried, I fell on a group of level 1 players or people who are dozens of levels above me. There does not seem to be a proper matchmaking system in place at this time but I’m excited to complete a couple of quests with a few other players.

As always, feel free to drop me a line on XBOX Live if you’re looking to join me in my adventures! My XBOX Live id is: Steelfrogg