Games in Review #5 – Borderlands

Welcome back to Games in Review! Today I’ll be reviewing RPG-Shooter, Borderlands for the Xbox 360.

Story

The story of Borderlands is blessedly simple: You’re a Treasure Hunter on the planet Pandora looking for a legendary find called The Vault. Nobody has ever been able to find The Vault, so of course no one can tell you what is inside, but many have speculated that The Vault contains spectacular riches, far-advanced technology, or anything else they’ve ever desired.

As a note, I was hoping for a secret harem. I was kind of right, but not in a good way.

Gameplay

When you begin the game, you take on one of 4 characters to control, each with his or her own unique skill set, proficiencies, and ability tree. Your choices are Hunter (for sniping and revolvers), Soldier (assault rifles and shotguns), Siren (SMGs), and Berserker (Fists and Rockets). You can obviously attempt to customize your characters, and it is often useful to steer away from the predetermined career paths in order to use some more effective weapons or round out your party if you are playing with friends. Your view is from first person, and you can level up your character in the menus to learn new abilities, gain stat boosts and critical hits, and otherwise customize your ass-kicking machine.

The game consists of many small quests of the usual variety: kill this, steal that, find these pieces of a new weapon, etc. Quests are activated either at designated terminals around the world or by talking to the often surly locals. You can simply push your way through the story, but it is extremely worthwhile to play as many of the optional side quests as you can for big payoffs of the experience, gold, and weaponry kinds.

You can play with a party of up to four friends, and the game will balance the difficulty based on the number of players involved. Luckily, the designers realized the tendencies of the internet and the bane of the infamous Leaver to online gamers. The game will automatically scale down the difficulty if a player leaves.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward, but it’s not a simple blast-through-everything type of game. There are many different armor types, weapon strengths and weaknesses, enemy strategies, and customizable abilities to be considered to even have a chance at success.

Combat is usually quite sudden and frantic, barely offering time to whisper “oh, shit”, making it extremely important to be as prepared as possible. If you or an ally is downed, that person can be revived by either getting in the killshot on an enemy for a self-revive (called a second wind), or be picked up by another player. If the timer expires, the character respawns at the last spawn point, usually leaving the team at a significant disadvantage, so know when to get the hell out of Dodge.

Graphics

All in all, pretty good. Environments are well rendered and engaging, and it really adds to the game’s Western-Comic Booky feeling. Not really much to complain about, but not groundbreaking either. Really cool stylized textures though. Nice to see something different.

Sound

Gotta give this one some good marks for sound. Between using pretty decent weapon and attack effects, effective ‘in danger’ combat music, and including Cage the Elephant’s ‘Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked’ as their overall theme song, Borderlands gains some points for me in the sound category. Even the voice acting was more than tolerable.

Overall

This game is worth the play. Other than a couple of annoying missions that my completionist compatriots and I embarked upon and a startlingly easy final boss, Borderlands delivered everything that was promised. Think Halo crossed with Diablo. Sounds pretty good, right? It is.

Gameplay:
Graphics:
Sound:
Overall:

Check out Shufflingdead’s video review of Borderlands.