Borderlands uses three beloved MMORPG staples as its basis, and tests how far it can push and twist and abuse them before each staple has been all bent and twisted and looks more like a drunken paperclip. The first such staple is co-operative play with other respiring, excreting, opposable thumb equipped human beings, a must if the player hopes to interact with any living thing in Borderlands beyond riddling it with small-arms fire. Say what you will about small-arms fire, but it makes a better conversation ender than starter.
The second is an absolute, be-and-end-all emphasis on loot, creating a colour-coded Pavlovian world in which a purple rocket launcher is inherently more exciting than a blue rocket-launcher by virtue of its purpleyness and, hopefully, concomitant bigger numbereyness, with the tantalizing promise of an orange rocket launcher making that previously lustrous purple seem tawdry and sordid. The third are the quests, adhering to the "visit X, shoot Y amount of Q, collect reward Z, sell reward Z because it's got a lower accuracy stat than machine-gun W which you found in a dumpster while visiting X. Then repeat with a different X" formula which PC gamers have, until now, been selfishly hoarding. Now console gamers get a piece of that festering pie.
Only two-thirds of these staples are fun for the player, because anybody with the merest inkling of a molecule of dignity knows that their time on this earth is short going on shorter, and deserves to be better filled than with such unimaginative, nihilistic grinding as "Travel to the Lost Cave and collect fifty shock crystals, and kill anything that moves and has a tail before it eats you". The clever people who make games can do better than trawls and crawls and grinding, save for their knowing that this grinding process keeps people playing. A large bag of Doritos is culinarily unambitious, but I'll gorge my way to a stomach-ache on them without a second thought.
A tangy cheesey simile
Still, loot! Loot's super. Gradual, incremental improvements, say, a shotgun with slightly better reload speed, provide that constant sense of progression and improvement. This steady rise accompanies the player's leveling up and increasing skills. Every so often, sharp spikes in the graph of progression mark the acquirement of occasional pieces of rare loot: sudden improvements, like a cat who has just twigged how can-openers work. This rare loot might be a shotgun that shoots acid rockets and makes your enemies bleed money, or a shield which fills your soul with a sense of existential wellbeing and intangible contentment, with a 100% resistance to fire damage to boot.
It's the loot, more than the narrative or the characters, arguably more than the action of shooting and driving, which propels the player through Borderlands. Whether this is a celebration of the pure and simple pleasures of item collection, or an indictment of the game's weak story and sometimes floaty, glitchy action, is something of a "glass half full or empty" question. Regardless, there is a sense of materialism honed and whetted to a razor edge, and it's undeniably compelling. Unless you find it intolerably tedious, and think that games should find a more imaginative incentive for the player to persist than the dangling carrot of a marginally increased reload speed for their sniper rifle. You hopeless, idealistic dreamer, you.
Borderlands is a game with numbers in its blood. Shoot an enemy and blood gushes toward terra firma, but clouds of numbers float to the firmament. If the foundation of numbers and statistics upon which the whole concept of Borderlands' loot is built leaves you cold (which is understandable if you're a human being with emotions and not a copy of Microsoft Excel), Borderlands does a better job than most of hooking the player with equipment that changes visibly, and not just in a dry, statistical manner. Weapons are made up of lots of different components and effects, so you might find a scoped shotgun with a high chance of causing acid damage and a large ammo capacity. The end result is that weapons change cosmetically, beyond simple palette swaps, and with the effect they have on enemies. There are different barrel, stock and scope models for the same weapon, and even different effects for the scope views, from circular jagged red reticules to futuristic rectangular green laser sights.
Even with seventeen million ways to make up the weaponry, there isn't much in the way of innovation. Combat rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, SMGs, automatic pistols, revolvers, rare alien guns that shoot balls of lightning and grenades comprise an exhaustive list, but for a game set in the distant future, it's a conventionally contemporary selection. Bar that alien lightning gun. Modifications can be applied to grenades, to make them bounce more, teleport, or turn them into cluster bombs, but most of the seventeen million pieces of equipment are slight variations on familiar themes. If a gun with a 2.7x zoom doesn't seem drastically different to the same gun with a 2.8x zoom, you'll want to add a pinch of salt to Borderlands' statistics.
The nebulous sense of economy in Borderlands makes it difficult to say where this discarded arsenal came from. The most obvious bounty is thousands of dollars left in bins, toilets, unlocked safes, lunch-boxes, piles of garbage... all the places scavengers fighting for every dollar don't leave their hard-earned/stolen money lying unattended. The game's back-story describes the planet as largely abandoned by its colonists when they found nothing of worth, leaving only labourers and criminals behind, and in that context all the abandoned guns and money sort of make sense. Perhaps money isn't really worth anything on a lawless planet, and it seems unlikely that they need to scrimp for pennies when they can find a perfectly good assault rifle in that mysterious storage chest on top of their roof. But it's odd that the animals and bandits who survived this long in the desert did so by acting like suicidal morons. Even enemies twenty levels lower than you will enthusiastically attack you, clambering over the bodies of their slain comrades to be ripped to shreds by one bullet from your Gold Electroplated Pistol of the Apocalypse.
It's a common enough conceit to have these items lying all over the place, even in animals' guts- the game even attempts to explain the goody bag of items which flows from the corpses of slain monsters by claiming that the foraging nature of Pandora's wildlife, which has only just emerged from hibernation, makes them very unfussy eaters, and thus prone to vomiting up a shotgun when slain. But it's not just the proliferation of weaponry and money that puzzles. The enemies, who we know have a very scant regard for their own lives, and in spite of being primarily male and living in very harsh conditions, do an admirable job of repopulating the area every time the player casually slaughters them. We'll put it down to mitosis for now because... you know, the sand gets everywhere in those environments.
Idionsyncrasies are fine, provided they're a known quantity. It might not be ideal to work in a confined space with a paranoid schizophrenic who enters into a violent rage whenever somebody uses the word "anadiplosis", but at least it gives you a framework to work within. Sure, it limits what you can talk about once rhetorical techniques are off the menu, but there's always... football and... Merlot. Borderlands combat lends itself to unexpected, unpredictable idiosyncrasies, which force the player to control the combat by exploiting the shortcomings in the A.I. Critical hits are assigned to headshots (or whatever the target species' equivalent of a head is), which might suit Counter Strike fans fine, were it not for the way in which a perfectly aligned sniper rifle shot can still miss, not because ballistics are fully modeled with wind or bullet arcs, but because it feels like somewhere along the line you rolled a one and the bullet flew off to bother a rock formation instead.
As a result, you may come to prefer rapid-firing weaponry over effete sniper rifles. In this case, combat is often neatly resolved by choosing a gun with the largest magazine size, sprinting up to an enemy, and shooting them fifty times in the face before they can formulate a riposte. Particularly against the larger humanoid enemies, you're almost guaranteed a majority of critical hits, and the point-blank barrage either stuns the enemy, or forces them to try and melee you away. As in most shooters, the first quantifiable sign of any ill health as a result of being shot is when the enemy falls over or when their torso is blown into fragments and their head explodes. Many enemies are flustered by having the player run around them in circles at point blank range and shoot them with a machine gun, which doesn't feel tactical, and certainly doesn't feel like a wise move in a desperate survival situation, right up until it works.
The A.I. is largely stupid, stumped by such iceberg-like obstacles as a small rock or the perennial puzzle of a chain link fence. You can often think a firefight finished, but still hear somebody firing... firing, as it turns out, into a piece of masonry occupying the space between you and them. And this is where the player spots an opportunity it is difficult to ignore. Like Resident Evil 5, otherwise difficult odds can be easily managed and controlled by the player exploiting flaws: trapping your opponent behind a fence and shooting their feet might not feel heroic, but you'll be the last man standing.
Especially if you've shot the other chap's feet off.
Connection with characters is minimal: most interaction is handled by expository text and repetitive sound bites, with NPCs acting largely as bulletin boards for new quests. The story is a very thin one, with the player as a mercenary who has come to the planet of Pandora to search for "The Vault", a semi-mythical depository of alien technology and money and.... oh, you know it's not going to contain that. The vault is a box on the planet Pandora. When that door opens, it will not be sunshine and kittens streaming forth.
Not having a story is fine if your focus is action, but the story is nearly always linked to a sense of place and a sense of purpose. An absence of emotional investiture just leaves the player travelling from area to area, killing cronies and monsters and working their way up to a lead bandit, searching for new gear. If that sounds good, this game will be for you. Class specific abilities, such as a mighty eagle and deployable gun-turret to send against your foes, help establish a basic sense of function and perspective, and certainly make multiplayer a more diverse affair. But to others it will feel aimless, with the ending making it seem there never was much of an aim, beyond the aim needed to shoot a midget with a pistol at fifty yards, which does at least require a very steady hand.
Technically, the game is far from a rock-solid production, at least on the 360. The graphics, which moved some time ago toward cel-shading, presumably to complement the game's general pretensions to an anarchic attitude, feature textures which take upwards of ten seconds to pop-in, meaning the first gameplay many players will experience is a view of a brown smudge with a large grey smudge road, with higher resolution textures popping in embarrassingly late. A noticeable delay in textures is a real immersion breaker, particularly since textures aren't all that detailed; enemies, especially, look very rough up close. The vehicles handle clumsily, bouncing around the landscape like toy cars, and combat with other vehicles is much better resolved by standing on top of a rock and shooting vehicles as they go past. Frame rates can drop during firefights, and speech during the rare cutscenes can correlate very poorly with lip movement. Explosions clip very clumsily with scenery, and even the muzzle flares can be jarringly low resolution. And, dammit, muzzle flares are important!
It's difficult to say with certainty when Borderlands is being allusive, referential or outright derivative. The obvious aesthetic comparison is with Fallout 3 (although Borderlands is more "alien" than "post-apocalyptic", it feels a tad pedantic to insist upon different categories of wasteland). The mechanics of Fallout 3, combat tinged with statistics ("combastics!") are similar to those of Borderlands. The object of Borderlands story is a search for "The Vault", where Fallout 3's begins. The opening scene features a Fallout 3 style bobblehead on the dashboard of a bus, a reference to Fallout 3's first trailer.
Fond memories
Other inspirations come from Firefly, with the fusion of derelict, rusty technology and Old West setting. The atavistic, crazed bandits take a page from Whedon's Reavers. The loneliness of the experience is reminiscent of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as is the weak story driven by a MacGuffin magical room which is said to contain all the finder's dreams, but which will almost certainly screw you over in some way and turn out to be a life-threatening disappointment. The bus driver/merchant in Borderlands bears an uncanny likeness to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s merchant Sidorovich, in looks, comedy accent and shadiness.
The player is spurred on by advice from a flickering hallucination of a woman's face, all echoey voice and vague allusions to the future, about having "chosen the right one for this task", all but identical to the visions of Cortana from Halo 3.
Borderland's flickering blue woman also turns out to be an Artifical Intelligence, which will not surprise System Shock 2 players, or Halo 3 players. Or people with even a vaguely suspicious mind.
And none of these things make Borderlands a bad game, just a game which is acutely aware of what has come before it. Take away the MMORPG concepts, though; slice away the elements extracted from other trendsetting media; reduce on a rolling boil, and you start to ponder what Borderlands has brought to this dish. You're left with guns and spreadsheets about guns. The game's irreverent sense of humour is best evinced by the screens which introduce boss enemies...
But the humour is eclipsed by the amount of crushing boredom the player faces in walking around a town activating generators, or dispassionately shooting giant ant-beasts as they pour out of a hole in a wall on some great organic production line. If they really wanted to capture the energy depicted in the box-art, well-handled voice acting could've helped, but Borderlands is much less of a rebel than it wants to be.
The flashes of humour make me wish there was some way to interact with the world beyond shooting things. That's the world of Pandora, obviously: it's not a place in which problems are resolved through harsh language or diplomacy skills. The business end of a gun is the ultimate authority, and the primary driving force is to find a shinier gun with a more authoritative business end. Borderlands needs to be played with other people, or it's an achingly lonely experience. Not the moody, haunting loneliness of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but a soul destroying loneliness bordering on boredom, that makes you not want to take on another quest because it'll mean retreading the same ground, shooting the same enemies, all for another sodding gun.
The fan reaction to criticisms of Borderlands plot is to say that the game is a team driven, multiplayer oriented game, in which working with other people, and creating a good build and layout for your character takes precedence over plot. It's a game, not a novel. Which is good, because I sometimes mix up books with DVD jewel cases, so clarificatory remarks like that are useful. Borderlands' priorities are shooting, finding better things to shoot with, finding bigger and more lucrative things to shoot, and hopefully having friends aid you in the shooting. Whether you will like this game hinges on whether said priorities strike you as an efficient use of refined mechanics, or as a hollow over-extension of stale and unoriginal concepts. You find loot to level up, to use better loot, to level up more...how far such tautology carries you is the clincher.
Still, midget shotgunners falling over on their arse every time they fire at you. You'd need to be a very glass-half-empty type of person to not find that funny.
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On a personal note, having put aside this game reviewing thing a bit recently to focus on this getting a degree doodah, and having finished the degree thingummy and suddenly finding myself a card-carrying accidental member of some sort of Lost Generation of unemployed graduates doohickey, I thought it might be nice to return here and share some of my thoughts. Hopefully that'll mean fortnightly reviews, from new and older games, and getting back into the forum business because...well, because these forums are good, and computer game reviews scrawled on toilet walls don't work very well.
Obviously this is a longer review than is ideal, but it's been a while since I've been excited enough about a game to want to write about it. So, bear with me while I get back to some sort of groove!
And hello!
Blows mine out of the water, haha. Well worded, pictures used in all the right places, and most importantly an enjoyable read 
