As far as guns go, there is no shortage of options. You’ve got pistols, combat rifles, submachine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, revolvers–if it shoots bullets, they included it. There are also a near endless supply of these guns as well, as the game randomly generates weapons, occasionally with elemental properties. Do you know how awesome it is to have a sniper rifle with a large magazine that shoots three times as fast as a regular sniper rifle, and also sets its targets on fire? You will, once you find one lying around. Besides incendiary damage, you’ve got shock, cold, and my personal favorite, caustic damage. The only thing cooler than setting enemies on fire from a distance is melting their faces.
Besides guns, you will also find lots of shields; the basic ones just absorb damage (and slowly recharge) while the very best prevent certain kinds of elemental damage, regenerate health and recharge fast. Grenades can also be modded, so that they bounce, explode on contact, cause elemental damage, and various other things you will delight in discovering.
You can also earn artifacts that change your skill’s powers. To once again go back to the Hunter, you can cause your war hawk (called a Bloodwing) to do elemental damage by equipping certain artifacts. You can also equip class-specific artifacts that improve your special skill, or just augment your class: you’ll find some that do random things like improve accuracy, reduce reload time or recoil, and regenerate health (or maybe even team health!). Loads and loads of customization, and you will find yourself making decisions about what to keep and what to sell often. The game’s inventory also turns over often, and though you can oftentimes find better guns and shields in the wild, options never hurt anyone.
That said, Borderlands still has its mess of problems, many of which keep it from being a game of the year contender. Some are small, but some are pretty significant. On the annoying side, there are loads of invisible walls scattered throughout the game. When you’re supposed to be able to explore everything, but the game halts you constantly as you try to enter an area–sometimes even an area that is explorable–then it’s failing a bit on that job.
Driving is tough to control, as you use the left analog stick to go forward or backward, but use the right analog stick to control the direction you head in. The right stick is very sensitive in this, so if you need to do anything that involves any difficulty–say, shoot enemy vehicles before you blow up–you may as well just stop driving and run to the gunner’s seat.
The story is basically a throwaway one–it starts to get a bit interesting late in the game, as everything starts to come together, but the end of the game does its best to take all of that apart and make it very generic once again. This was probably the most disappointing end–in terms of both the boss fight and the conclusion itself–that I experienced in a great game all year.
There is splitscreen multiplayer, and there is online multiplayer, but there is no splitscreen + online multiplayer, in the vein of Left 4 Dead. This is a huge oversight; you’ve got two people in a single house that want to play, but they can only play with each other and never experience 3-4 player modes because of it. If there’s a Borderlands sequel, that should be up near the top of things that need to be fixed. When you do play in splitscreen, the menus are also poorly designed. The menu is the same size, but in half the screen, meaning you need to navigate the menu on your screen constantly to read it. That’s a problem if you’re trying to do something quick before you get shot in the head.
In the same vein, I wish you could save your characters to your gamertag/PSN ID like you can in Castle Crashers, rather than just your hard drive. I don’t mind starting a new character to play online with a friend if they aren’t in the same area as me, but it would be nice to have the option–I’m not going to always want to use a different character.
Blast Factor: Despite its failings, Borderlands is addicting and worth every minute you will spend in it. I just think that, with a few tweaks and adjustments in a sequel, Gearbox could create a serious Game of the Year caliber contender with their next outing. Even before that though, there’s no reason to skip out on Borderland–it controls well (on foot anyways), it looks good, and the lure of more loot has me itching to go back and play even as I sum the game up.
Borderlands is available on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC, and retails for $59.99. A copy of this game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes.
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