GUNS!
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Borderlands is Diablo 2 with guns. It offers a passable, but paper-thin single player mode where you run around erratically, picking up guns and powerups that offer bonuses to your non-existent teammates, chasing a plot as vague and intangible as the MacGuffin at its core, and every quest, location, fetch quest and enemy shrieks at you to stop being such a pussy and get online so you can play the game properly. It's good advice to follow, because while Borderlands alone is something of a snoozefest, four-player co-op elevates the experience to sheer, mindless carnage and fun.
Let's review: In Borderlands, you choose one of four archetypal characters (A sniper, a mage, a meat train, and a black guy) each defined by their skills and weapons of choice to go out into the rough and tumble wasteland of the planet Pandora in order to discover something called the Vault--a mysterious, mystical place that (if it exists) might contain shitloads of treasure and, more importantly, GUNS. Along the way, you find lots of guns and shoot lots of dudes over and over again.
This game masquerades as an FPS/RPG but don't be fooled. The "RPG" elements are paper thin, and there's no real "role-playing" to speak of. There are experience points and levels and you can't shoot as good at first, but Borderlands is essentially a 4-player co-op FPS, and if you go into it with this mindset, you'll be quite pleased. The main point of the game is to collect the "87 bazillion" guns that the box advertises to you, and this number is actually startlingly accurate. The item generation engine creates guns from a myriad of different combinations of different parts, and while this means the majority of guns you receive will be shit, it also means that you have a chance of picking up a shotgun that SHOOTS ROCKETS.
And that leads me to the main appeal of Borderlands. Everything about this game teeters at the edge of mediocrity. The story is non-existent, the graphics are nice and stylized, but certainly not groundbreaking, the vehicle controls are clunky and unintuitive, the physics are strangely off-kilter, and the gameplay is very, very repetitive. Yet I can wholeheartedly reccomend Borderlands for one reason only: charm.
The game is very stylized. It plays out as an almost tongue-in-cheek affront to all things considered sacred in games. Death is handwaved by a ridiculously good life insurance policy, characters spout Counter Strike-era memes after every headshot, bosses are accompanied with absurd and funny subtitles or weird visual shout outs, and just about every line of dialogue from every character is gut-bustingly funny. You have a bizarre mishmash of characters, ranging from a doctor who lost his license on account of chopping too many people up, to a saucy scientist girl who spent too many days in the desert, went insane, and started a relationship with her tape recorder.
The game is very similar to Diablo 2, and by very similar I mean "identical but with guns". But while Diablo 2 kept you playing with deeper RPG elements and a dark, gory, gothic aesthetic, Borderlands goes the total opposite route. Here is a game where you and three people will load out in two rocket-launching ATVs to blow apart hordes and hordes of blood-thirsty bug monsters just so you can get that ONE GUN that will let you go out and blow up the even BIGGER hordes of blood-thirsty bug monsters, and it does this with a tongue in its cheek and a drunken smile on its face. This game doesn't simply not take itself seriously--it exists as an affront to everything that gaming is. The graphics AREN'T mind-blowing--hell, some might just call them lazy. The story IS just an excuse to kill things, death IS just an inconvenience. Everyone you meet is so stir-crazy that they might as well believe they are video game characters, because they understand full-well that all they need to do is give you more guns and more EXP and you will solve all their problems.
I'm not a big multiplayer person, on account of never having more than one controller when I was growing up. Now that I'm older and more financially egregious, I've been indulging in the multiplayer arena, and I've got to say, I am astonished that it has taken this long for a game like Borderlands to be made. I mean, Halo capitalized the popularity of co-op gameplay years ago, but for some reason, the notion of making a co-op four person online first person hasn't even been discussed until now. I think it's a nice sign, a chance for developers to do something with shooters beyond Deathmatches and capture the flags. The fact that the game so eagerly sodomizes every gaming convention is even better. Buy this game for the sheer attitude of it all. It has that spark of wit and charm and ingenuity that it stands above the gun-metal gray worlds of Call of Duty or MAG and launches itself into the stratosphere on a rainbow chariot pulled by fire-breathing unicorns with rocket launchers for dicks that fart out nuclear bombs and it is GLORIOUS.
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Borderlands is Diablo 2 with guns. It offers a passable, but paper-thin single player mode where you run around erratically, picking up guns and powerups that offer bonuses to your non-existent teammates, chasing a plot as vague and intangible as the MacGuffin at its core, and every quest, location, fetch quest and enemy shrieks at you to stop being such a pussy and get online so you can play the game properly. It's good advice to follow, because while Borderlands alone is something of a snoozefest, four-player co-op elevates the experience to sheer, mindless carnage and fun.
Let's review: In Borderlands, you choose one of four archetypal characters (A sniper, a mage, a meat train, and a black guy) each defined by their skills and weapons of choice to go out into the rough and tumble wasteland of the planet Pandora in order to discover something called the Vault--a mysterious, mystical place that (if it exists) might contain shitloads of treasure and, more importantly, GUNS. Along the way, you find lots of guns and shoot lots of dudes over and over again.
This game masquerades as an FPS/RPG but don't be fooled. The "RPG" elements are paper thin, and there's no real "role-playing" to speak of. There are experience points and levels and you can't shoot as good at first, but Borderlands is essentially a 4-player co-op FPS, and if you go into it with this mindset, you'll be quite pleased. The main point of the game is to collect the "87 bazillion" guns that the box advertises to you, and this number is actually startlingly accurate. The item generation engine creates guns from a myriad of different combinations of different parts, and while this means the majority of guns you receive will be shit, it also means that you have a chance of picking up a shotgun that SHOOTS ROCKETS.
And that leads me to the main appeal of Borderlands. Everything about this game teeters at the edge of mediocrity. The story is non-existent, the graphics are nice and stylized, but certainly not groundbreaking, the vehicle controls are clunky and unintuitive, the physics are strangely off-kilter, and the gameplay is very, very repetitive. Yet I can wholeheartedly reccomend Borderlands for one reason only: charm.
The game is very stylized. It plays out as an almost tongue-in-cheek affront to all things considered sacred in games. Death is handwaved by a ridiculously good life insurance policy, characters spout Counter Strike-era memes after every headshot, bosses are accompanied with absurd and funny subtitles or weird visual shout outs, and just about every line of dialogue from every character is gut-bustingly funny. You have a bizarre mishmash of characters, ranging from a doctor who lost his license on account of chopping too many people up, to a saucy scientist girl who spent too many days in the desert, went insane, and started a relationship with her tape recorder.
The game is very similar to Diablo 2, and by very similar I mean "identical but with guns". But while Diablo 2 kept you playing with deeper RPG elements and a dark, gory, gothic aesthetic, Borderlands goes the total opposite route. Here is a game where you and three people will load out in two rocket-launching ATVs to blow apart hordes and hordes of blood-thirsty bug monsters just so you can get that ONE GUN that will let you go out and blow up the even BIGGER hordes of blood-thirsty bug monsters, and it does this with a tongue in its cheek and a drunken smile on its face. This game doesn't simply not take itself seriously--it exists as an affront to everything that gaming is. The graphics AREN'T mind-blowing--hell, some might just call them lazy. The story IS just an excuse to kill things, death IS just an inconvenience. Everyone you meet is so stir-crazy that they might as well believe they are video game characters, because they understand full-well that all they need to do is give you more guns and more EXP and you will solve all their problems.
I'm not a big multiplayer person, on account of never having more than one controller when I was growing up. Now that I'm older and more financially egregious, I've been indulging in the multiplayer arena, and I've got to say, I am astonished that it has taken this long for a game like Borderlands to be made. I mean, Halo capitalized the popularity of co-op gameplay years ago, but for some reason, the notion of making a co-op four person online first person hasn't even been discussed until now. I think it's a nice sign, a chance for developers to do something with shooters beyond Deathmatches and capture the flags. The fact that the game so eagerly sodomizes every gaming convention is even better. Buy this game for the sheer attitude of it all. It has that spark of wit and charm and ingenuity that it stands above the gun-metal gray worlds of Call of Duty or MAG and launches itself into the stratosphere on a rainbow chariot pulled by fire-breathing unicorns with rocket launchers for dicks that fart out nuclear bombs and it is GLORIOUS.
good review
