There was so much more he could have brought up that he didn't.
I mean aside from the platform specific problems (i.e. not being able to connect to people's games due to the host not having their ports forwarded) which can't be mentioned because it is platform specific and a technical problem rather than a problem with the game.
I felt like it was a mountain of broken promises. They mentioned customizable vehicles (there is only 1 and the only thing you can customize is the choice of weapon, machine gun or turret, and the color of which there are 8 to choose from) and listed vehicular combat as one of the main features of the game. There was some talk about the stories of the four main characters, each of who is said to be looking for someone on Pandora, and I've played each of the characters through playthrough 1 at least once and I have not found any story providing any sufficient explanation as to where this went. The ending was disappointing and I actually refused to believe that that was the true ending the first time I saw it. And the 17 million different guns! It took me a while to figure it out, but it didn't take all that much to realize that each gun was made of so many parts and there were only 5 or so iterations of each part and all they did was mix and match and that worked out fine until you realized that each gun had "quality levels" that basically made it stronger all around but with a higher level requirement and that many of the more interesting guns that you see are the ones that modders make on their own.
Broken promises are my main issue with Borderlands, but there are problems inherent in the game (which of course is fair game for being attacked by critics and reviewers).
1. For a game so heavily focused on loot, it was a surprise to learn that only the first 4 lines of a weapon's bonuses were shown. With a update that was increased to 5 lines. Even then, there are weapons that have more bonuses and you would not be able to tell what they were without testing against another gun that was almost exactly the same.
2. The beserker class. He has an entire tree dedicated to "tanking". All it does is increase his ability to take damage. He has no way of forcing the enemies to attack him. Also, his skill which is supposedly makes him very strong does not build on what the game is centered on: the loot. He holsters his weapon in beserk mode, making all that searching for a gun absolutely worthless just so he can run in and punch people, which is admittedly fun but still doesn't make sense given that you spend so much time finding better guns.
3. Dueling is completely one sided. The siren has the ability to turn invisible (also invincible in this mode) and run really fast. When i dueled with my friend (a very skilled sniper) who killed me with a single shot from his new rifle, I did not need to use any skill or complex tactics at all even on a very open field. All I did was use my phasewalk and run from cover to cover while invisible and eventually i came up behind him. Similarly against a soldier's turret, the siren can easily flank it rendering it useless, and against the beserker the siren can disappear just as he activates beserker mode and closes the distance.
4. Rare loot is what you're supposed to be going after in the game, but it was made too easy as you could just restart in a particular area over and over and keep opening chests, so rarity lost its meaning pretty early.
5. You can run over almost any enemy instantly killing it regardless of level, even if it does explode your vehicle, you'll go into second wind mode upon which a teammate can revive you.
6. One type of SMG in particular sounds like a plastic toy.
I also noticed the same problems as some people and Yahtzee have already mentioned, so I won't repeat them.
That being said, I did sink 100+ hours in this game. It did what it was supposed to: appeal to the part of me that wanted to pick up a new item every 5 seconds and check whether it was better than what I already had, the part of me that I had discovered when I had first played diablo years ago. Grinding was not a problem; throughout all my playthroughs I never really had to "grind". You can just play through without doing much of the sidequests, and doing all of them whenever you can before proceeding will make it incredibly easy, but I'm not sure if doing sidequests counts as grinding. Comparing items was a problem only after I discovered that there were bonuses on the weapons that I could not view. The system by which the weapons are created and named give a good amount of information on how "good" the weapon is. Being able to see the gun's "item card" without having to bring up some other kind of interface was a very good idea. One member of my team took a while to figure out the system, but when he did comparing weapons became easy enough that it would take a quick 2 second glance at the card before picking it up or not. The only time I ever had to "pour hundreds of rounds" into a monster before it would die was when I was badly underleveled or poorly equipped. In fact most of the enemies in the game follow patterns that can be easily countered given minimal thought. Reddles mentioned the characters shouting out the same phrases over and over again; there is an option to turn "player callouts" off. The problem with the car getting stuck can be fixed by meleeing it; and the 3 round burst rifle borrowed from Halo isn't as much of an obvious borrowing as the shields are.
All in all, it deserved the criticism it got but perhaps there wasn't enough. It did well in providing me with a new toy to play with every few minutes, and that's all I wanted it for.
I feel a little disappointed that Yahtzee didn't rip into this one harder. In this review he came across as being a little too lenient; he didn't really want/care to review this game and it shows.
