Borderlands

Borderlands ^{(Xbox 360)}

Genre: First-Person Action Publisher: 2K Games Developer: Gearbox Software Players: 1-4

By Keith B (5th Nov 2009)

Slick visuals and an addictive scavenging approach doesn't save Borderlands from eventually slipping into the realm of almost-great.

Those of us who review games for a living tend to fall into the same predictable cycle – you play games a lot, most of which you’re glad to leave behind for the next big thing, but occasionally one comes along that keeps you up late at night and occupies your mind more than others. This becomes a slight problem when you’re trying to find hours in the day to play something you want to as opposed to something you need to. Borderlands was, initially, one such game.

Borderlands relies on players wanting to open every crate and every box they come across to look for loot, trading weapons wholesale to swell your bank balance, and embarking on blazing battles across a variety of zones using a massive array of ordinance. While similarities to Diablo are currently the flavour du jour, the game contains little or no real RPG elements – discussions with the locals are one directional, often with you receiving a mission and talking to nobody else (other than when required to further your mission progress) until you return for your reward upon completion. In between these scant moments of conversation Borderlands slips neatly into the FPS mould. When you strip the layers away it emerges as quite a shallow experience, but those layers are respectable in their own right.

As it turns out, scavenging across a wasteland and obliterating a range of enemies becomes a terribly addictive experience, because there are just so many different things you can use to blow stuff up.

The game begins with a bus rolling into the Borderlands, and here the player chooses between one of four character classes to play, each with its own preference for weapons and a unique skill. Aside from picking a name and the colours your character is adorned in, there is nothing else to be specific about, no character creation as such. This isn’t a bad thing, because there is no need for a dynamic set of skills and experiences required for, essentially, a dedicated first person shooter. The bus journey is also where the player is introduced to the mysterious lady that appears through a snowy picture at the top of the screen, a guiding hand to help keep the player on the right track throughout the warren of missions they aim to complete.

She informs you of a mysterious location called The Vault, the thing most scavengers in the Borderlands are hunting for but often considered myth. As campaign missions are played through, more back story becomes available and the existence of The Vault becomes more likely, while the enemies faced get tougher and new locations are uncovered.

That’s not to say that levelling up doesn’t provide benefits, because each level allows the player to boost a couple of things, namely the special skill and some general areas like attack and defence. Building through the skill tree is interesting and certainly changes the way the continual combat is approached, but it’s never set in stone. One visit to a machine and, for a fee, players can reassign all their points, allowing players the chance to experience all the skill sets in the one playthrough.

The art style is wonderful, a blend of cell-style animation but with a level of fluidity and interaction not seen in other games that have used this styling, namely Afro Samurai but also titles like XIII. Where those games had impressive locales and enemies, the locations were fairly static. Gearbox have a random loot and weapon generator which means that every time a character enters an area, all the loot items are again randomly populated with amounts of cash, new weapons and shields. This amounts to a non-stop mechanic of rummaging around anywhere where a little green light can be seen poking out of the rubble, which becomes increasingly important as bigger and better weapons become available in the shops – with price tags to match.

Inventory management is pretty simplified, with players only really needing to worry about which four weapons they have equipped, in addition to a shield, class mod and grenade pack. Everything else is collected for trade, done through any number of vending machines that litter the landscape. Each machine also sells one special item, which rotates every 20 minutes, meaning that even when you’ve nothing to sell, checking the machines can often be a worthwhile endeavour.

The usual problem with having a game so reliant on combat is that there isn’t enough interesting things to shoot at, but thankfully Borderlands avoids that pitfall by having a solid range of foes. In the beginning you’ll be shooting a variety of Skags, like wild dogs that come in many flavours – acid spitting, charging ones, and strange ones with massive tongues. By the later stages there will be massive boss battles, weird off-world creatures, vehicular combat, and a whole cast of human soldiers in a variety of battle kits.

The cast of enemies, while impressive enough, inevitably becomes somewhat predictable, and this is where the co-op play comes in. With a wonderful drop-in drop-out system your friends can hop into your game and help you complete missions, even if they’ve already completed them in their single player campaign. The toughness of the opposition increases every time a player joins, and drops when a player leaves, meaning that a consistent difficulty curve is maintained, while at the same time adding new dynamics to combat as a variety of player controlled classes enter the firefight.

As good as it all sounds, the option of replaying through the campaign multiple times is something which may not turn out to be implemented as frequently as Gearbox had hoped. The ending sequences are ultimately a letdown, leaving players scratching heads as the game wraps up and leaves the character in the semi-empty landscape to look for random encounters to try and garner a few more levels. The variety in the four classes may be interesting but it certainly didn’t compel me to start again to play through the 100 or so missions to use another special skill. Even the co-op, while certainly fun indeed, loses something when there’s nothing to pursue. The vehicular combat could have been developed, but as it stands it feels like an afterthought, with the Warthog-like buggies only customisable insofar as you can choose one of two weapons, and the actual combat made irrelevant by the auto lock on feature.

Apparently, this is the first in a new string of games to come from Gearbox, and if an approach was taken similar to Rockstar's episodic content, we would certainly get stuck in, and we look forward to seeing what happens.

Borderlands does so many things right, but ultimately fails in providing one of the key things it promised – replayabilty. It’s an entirely competent shooter with a looting subtheme, and it’s a great experience for a few days, but with the hectic run into Xmas there will be other games that will make demands of your pocket, and will probably provide a longer term gaming solution.

8.2

DOWNLOAD LINKS:

http://www.hellbored.com/games/review/11175#STS=g2o6b020.1sht

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