Wesley "Wex"
Critique, Review Thursday, November 26th 2009

5 Comments

With Diablo 3 looming on the horizon, I can think of a few people (myself included) who wanted — nay — needed a grind-fest to satiate their lust for phat loot. Being a Sci-Fi RPS (Role-Playing Shooter, as termed by Gearbox), the game borrows elements from the Action RPG Genre, being easily comparable to games like Diablo and Titan Quest, as well as open-world FPS’s like Farcry 2.

The narrative and setting have similar tones and themes as one of my favorite shows of all time, Firefly. The opening cinematic, which uses the song Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked, by Cage the Elephant only reinforces that with its Western/Bluegrass feel, and slightly cynical lyrics.

This makes for a great blend of a lot of my favorite genres, but does it successfully use all of the elements that make the genres that it draws upon great?

Cha-Ching

You’re not going to be getting anything mind-blowing out of Borderlands. Sure, the staggering number of guns and items available is pretty cool, but mechanics wise it’s just a very solid FPS. There are six basic weapon types (Pistol, Revolver, Assault Rifle, Combat Rifle, Sniper Rifle, and Shotgun), each of which having thousands of variations: reload speeds, clip size, elemental properties, and obviously damage.

It’s needless to say that the loot is the main focus of the game. Sure, there are other things to do, but you’re mainly trying to get the best gun to blow things away with. The main quest even tells you that you’re essentially a treasure hunter, looking for the spectacular alien technology of the Vault.

While the gameplay isn’t too deep, it is immensely satisfying. Headshots net you a critical hit, and on death they make your opponent’s head explode. The whole game really just feels like Diablo 2, with guns, and no randomly generated maps. Speaking of Diablo 2, there are several references in Borderlands to it, if you keep an eye out for them.

“This ain’t the kind of place to be a loner. You ain’t got friends to count on, you gon’ get dead.”

That’s a quote from of the NPC’s in a town about halfway through the game. He was right. Borderlands, while fun, is really monotonous, and it really breaks it up if you have someone else playing with you. You can makes jokes about each other’s shortcomings (or congratulate victories), run each other over with the cars, or duel each other if you’re tired of the lacking enemy AI.

Like any other game of this nature, if you don’t start off a game playing with someone it’s difficult to play along with them. If you host the game, and the people you’re playing with are behind you in the main story, they cannot accomplish anything for their quests. The NPC’s either don’t exist or you can’t talk to them. This is annoying, but it makes sense, as the players in the game can zone into one instanced zone at a time, all getting teleported when they go into a new zone. This might sound annoying, but if you’re all on the same part of the quest it’s immensely useful, as you might be close to the door, and everyone is dying, so you can just make a mad dash for it.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The menus feel like they were ripped straight out of the console version and pasted into the PC version. If you’re going to make menus in a PC game at least let the mouse work on all of the things you’d click on.
• While the characters are interesting and ooze style, the story that contains them all is pretty lackluster. If you’re going to put a story in the game, at least try.
• Good loot is hard to come by. “Randomly Generated” might sound like you get awesome guns all the time, but you only get lucky every so often and get “Terrible Scatterguns” most of the time.
• The vehicles control like a gimped version of the of the Halo Warthog. On a keyboard and mouse, this is infuriating.

While Borderlands is an ambitious mash-up game, and the characters are fairly interesting, it fails to deliver on a few key points. The story is forgettable and so are almost 95% of the 17 million guns that can be randomly generated.

The AI is also pretty bad, and if you don’t use the keyboard arrows in the menus you’ll likely think your mouse is broken. Poor choices and bugs aside, Borderlands is a solid experience to someone looking for a grinding-heavy action RPG with some great shooter mechanics.

You should play this game if…

…you like Diablo, FPS, getting phat loot and explosions.

Final Score

A decent Action RPG/FPS hybrid. The “consolization” of the PC version detracts from the PC experience and the weak story and sometimes bland combat hinder the game from being what it should have been.

(What does this score mean?)