Battlemouth

For those living under a rock, Borderlands is the latest action/adventure, first person shooter, RPG from those swell fella’s over at 2K Games. Creators of, most notably, Bioshock…and soon Bioshock 2.

Here is the official description…

Borderlands is an original First Person Role Playing Shooter that combines the intuitive reward systems of action role playing games and the frantic-paced shooting combat of first person shooters. The game features a groundbreaking content generation system allowing for a near-endless variety in weapons and item drops. Borderlands allows for 4 players to share the same game experience simultaneously online in co-op gameplay. Players can freely join or leave each other’s games at anytime, or choose to play in the full single-player mode. These features, along with a rich and deep fiction that touches upon the mysteries buried beneath the surface of a danger-filled planer, combine to form a breakthrough experience that challenges the conventions of modern shooters.

Welcome to Pandora, planet of wastelands and junk…and an alien vault? Thats right all children brought up on this planet are told of a missing alien vault containing some sort of powerful (or at least expensive) mythic artifact(s)…unfortunately no one is really sure that it actually exists. Naturally as children grow up with these fairy tales some end up wanting to take up the torch and become a treasure hunter in search of the illusive vault. Enter your character. Before you can go venturing through the dangerous and mysterious parts of Pandora’s wastelands and towns you must first pick a character!
Four fairly standard character types are presented to you to choose from:

Lilith “The Siren”
Weapons of Choice: Incendiary, Shock, and Corrosive guns (we’ll talk about those in a minute)

Mordecai “The Hunter” (My pick!)
Weapons of Choice: Sniper Rifles and Revolvers

Roland “The Soldier”
Weapons of Choice: Combat Rifles and Shotguns

Brick as Himself
Weapons of Choice: Explosive weapons and his fists….

I think its important to note that character choice is not necessarily THAT important. During game play you pick up so many different types of weapons that you may find you don’t use your originally preferred weapon. This is not a big deal as you actually level each weapon individually…which is brilliant. The most important factor to take into consideration when picking your character is their “action move”.

Each character has their own unique “action move” (or special move). Lilith for example does this bit of fazing/glow-in-the-dark non-sense, while Brick has berserker mode allowing him to punch things really hard (?), and Mordecai has a sweet ass attack raven…ya I know, attack ravens FTW. Later in the game you can even pick up elemental add-ons for your attack raven, or fists, or whatever you choose, to increase their effectiveness!

So now that you have your character picked out its time to get off the bus and go check out the sweet little town of Fyrestone. You are guided around by a small, mildly comical robot (PS: ALWAYS SAVE THE CLAPBOTS) as the game walks you through the controls and basic menu functionality. Your fist several missions will take you out of Fyrestone into the wild where you will meet many new friends and be pestered constantly by those damn skags! Pick up missions from characters you meet or there is always the Job Board in most major towns. As you complete missions you are awarded cash, new more powerful guns, elemental upgrades, and of course XP. Upon gaining a level you are given a point to put into your skill tree. Much like “spec-ing” in World of Warcraft, the skill tree allows you to fine tune your character towards whichever area you would like. Brick for example, can be spec-ed as a Brawler, Tank, or Blaster…(pretty self explanatory what each category is for in this instance). Of course you can mix and match, but keeping all your points in one category means obtaining the top skill for that category that much faster. Also just like in WOW you may at any time re-spec your character, which comes in handy for trying out new skill sets! Anyone who has played WOW knows the value of good skill tree organization, it can be the difference between life and death.

Speaking of death, one of the greatest things in Borderlands is the return of the “second wind”. Lets say your badass shield that you just bought runs out, a Midget Psycho is beating you to death, and suddenly you drop….never fear it isn’t over yet! Drop that creepy little bastard with whatever weapons you have loaded and you get a second wind, giving you enough health to jump up and run for you life! Trust me…you will grow to love the second wind. Of course if you just can’t kill that baddy kicking your ass, it’s not over, your DNA has been saved at the computer station…you know the one that also happens to allow you to change the color of your dud’s as well as your name…if you think Mordecai is a lame name that is.

Now to explain my post title.
Here is the deal, the game is incredibly fun, huge maps, an insane amount of guns and upgrade combos, even the story line is fun! The art is brilliant, you feel like you are playing a comic book…which of course gave me a bit of a nerd-gasm. “So whats the deal Aaron?”
The game is so fun that it forces everyone to overlook some very basic video game flaws. These flaws are not game-breaking, they are not unfair, or glitches…they are clearly put there intentionally. While some of them make a little more sense than others, as a whole there really is a lot of silly-ness going on in Borderlands.

My first complaint-
“The Compass of Always Correct Direction-ness”
There is an almost overwhelming amount of missions in Borderlands. This is cool because obviously it is going to progress the story and your characters level in a timely fashion…However, there is not one mission that you encounter that cannot easily be solved by following the diamond floating on the compass at the bottom of your screen. This results in what I like to call “Never Ending Gameing Syndrome”- in which you completely zone out and just follow the compass never looking up to really see whats going on around you or what items there may or may not be floating about or the expression of sincerity that is on your wife’s face as she screams that she is going to kill your dog if you don’t get off the fucking Xbox. Like I said, it’s a minor deal but at the same time really is a little lame.

Next Complaint-
“The Three Douche Bag Bandits that are ALWAYS right outside Fyrestone waiting on me!”
The overall point of this complaint, is that everything in Borderlands re-spawns…I understand that once you get to the later maps you do a fair amount of traveling back to places you have already been and thus there needs to be something new to fight. However when each area at some point presents you with a “Kill this boss to rid the land of bandits” mission…and you kill him…and the bandits don’t leave….? I just found it questionable. In addition to bad guys re-spawning, the loot does as well! Which, you could exploit if you really wanted to but I imagine it would be rather boring to wait around. Just remember if you need cash, you can always go back and loot your favorite loot spot! Re-spawned boss guys even drop their unique weapons again!

Next Complaint-
“Repetitive, Repetition, Repetitious, Repetitively, Repeat”
Anytime you have a game that is the size of Borderlands and is based around questing you are going to run in to repeat quests. I do not excuse this, as an aspiring writer I challenge Peter Molyneux to a Quest Off…guaranteed I can write enough quests for a game, AND I will do it for only 500,000$….so….ya.

That’s not to say that each location does not also contain a healthy amount of NON-repetitive quests that are incredibly fun and difficult.

So you see, those are some fairly substantial flaws! So what is it that makes this game so much fun? I just can not get enough of Borderlands, The multi-player is incredible, the art is incredible, the amount of guns and upgrades are mind shattering…Borderlands is simply a fun game! Despite it’s flaws, I would name this as my next “Game to Buy” this year. For it’s looks, it’s diversity, it’s playability, and it’s ingenuity.