A friend of mine told me told me via Twitter about this newfangled game called Borderlands that he’d been playing.
He described it as “exactly what I expected from a game billed as first person Diablo. Loot, quests, and co-op play.” And, having grown up with this person and knowing that we grew up with similar tastes in games, I was already sold.
Borderlands is what they now call an FPSRPG or RPS for Role-playing Shooter, it is a First Person Shooter, like Halo, but is also an expansive RPG with quests, random loot, and even color-coded items a la World of Warcraft.
Having gotten my hopes up, I decided to play it. I was not disappointed. I played it for maybe two hours, and couldn’t wait to come back to it until I really had no other choice than to go to bed (stupid day job)
Anyway, you select one of four difference classes, each of which has their own skill tree and weapon proficiencies. Very diablo-like, then they drop you into this world with some tutorial quests. It is a lot like Fallout 3, but without the whole nuclear-warzone thing and nothing VATS or turn-based to be found. This game should appeal to people who enjoyed Fallout 3 but wanted more constant action like they would find in your average shooter like Halo or Call of Duty or whatever.
The art style is glorious, it’s all cel-shaded like a comic book. It makes the environment very easy to see and navigate, which was sometimes difficult to do in more than one of the aforementioned titles.
For the record, I am playing this on the PC platform, even though it is available on the Xbox360 as well. Negatives about this game are few and easily covered. One: The key default key bindings (and mouse sensitivity) are completely asinine and anyone who has played FPS games on the PC will immediately change about half a dozen of them right away. The mouse sensitivity is WAY too high by default and had to be turned almost all the way to the left end of the slider to be comfortable. The melee attack button was in an uncomfortable spot and had to be changed, the crouch key was not Ctrl like it usually is in modern FPS games…just minor gripes.
The second issue though is a little more serious though, the A.I. in this game is about as sharp as a bowl of Jello. I’ve seen Koopa Troopas act more intelligently. I don’t consider myself the master of gaming in the least, but either I am really awesome at this game or the scripting is just terrible, because I have not once even come close to dying. I hope it improves near the end, because I am afraid I will get bored.
But beyond that, Borderlands is solid. There are something like eleventy billion guns all with random attributes and random goodies found everywhere. Headshot crits (as there should be) and some pretty good voice acting too.
This comes at a higher than usual recommendation from me. I think it is worth trying if you’re into anything I described. Go play!
