Gaming and Geekery

Borderlands.  Easily one of the more highly praised new(ish) releases.  It offers a little bit of everything:  a unique art style, big guns, vehicle combat, a splash of humor, first-person shooting and roleplaying game elements.  Oh, and psycho midgets.

At first I was skeptical of the game, having heard very little about it.  I also tend not to rely on previews written by people who are paid to play videogames, the same way as I don't read reviews written by people who are paid to watch movies.  So I went in blind.

From the beginning, you get a very quick introduction into what kind of game this is going to be.  Through that introduction movie and the sequence that follows (neither of which you can skip), you are welcomed to a world that is very much in the a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max, dystopian state.  You are offered a selection of one of four characters and off you go into a brief tutorial.

Combat is interesting.  There's a bit of a learning curve involved if you are not familiar with FPS mechanics.  There is no option for target locking seen in some other FPS/RPG hybrids, so you are on your own with the aiming.  There is, however, a aim assist feature which I found got in my way more than it helped.  There's plenty of bullets and grenades and blood to cater to the most gun-happy player, and the way a critical hit (head shot) makes the head leave the body is absurdly amusing.

The RPG elements are at the core of the gameplay.  It follows the standard formula:  Get a quest, complete the quest, turn in the quest, get your reward, get a new quest, rinse and repeat.  All of the weapons, grenades and shields have stats and "enchantments" as all RPG items should, and they drop out of enemies like candy from a papier-mâché donkey.

The story is, as most others have said, lacking.  If you play RPGs for the compelling story and the character development, look elsewhere.  However, it does free you from having to sit through hours of voiceovers or reading lines and lines of text.  With this, it allows the player to get more action and less waiting.

The game world is broken up into zones/regions, which extends the loading time a bit but otherwise means you'll be moving from place to place less often.  The "dungeons" or "lairs" within are also quite large and oftentimes elaborate, almost always leading up to a fight with a big boss at the end (depending on the quest and/or your reason for being there).

My biggest gripe is the way the quest system is handled in multi-player.  Everyone must be on the same active quest as the host of the game, so there is very little in the way of independence.  It does force everyone to work together (which is kind of the point in a co-op game), but it makes it complicated for people who don't have characters of the same level and/or on the same quest line.

Ultimately, the game is very fun.  It stirred up some nostalgia for the Diablo games, as it feels a lot like them...  except in first-person, with mutants instead of demons, guns instead of blades, and vehicles with rocket launchers.