Format: Xbox 360, Windows PC.
Rating: BBFC, 18 / ESRB, M
Borderlands is a hybrid first person shooter and role-playing game, dubbed the first ever ‘Role Playing Shooter’ by developer Gearbox. Set in a futuristic environment on a desolate planet known as Pandora, the game focuses on the quest to uncover a mythical vault somewhere on the planet’s surface, which involves traversing the large, sectioned game world and fighting swarms of unpleasant beasts and bugbears along the way.
On first impression, the cel-shaded graphics and sprawling landscapes are certainly impressive, and the character design and voice acting are solid. When you first begin, you create a fresh character from one of the four basic types (gun specialist, stealthy sniper, psychic assassin or hard-hitting juggernaut), give him or her a name, and select your clothing’s colour scheme. You soon pick up your first gun and get into a firefight with some hostile bandits. Your guide, a graceless yet disarming robot called a “Claptrap” shows you where to find your first quest, and away you go.
Very quickly, the game shows where it got much of its inspiration. The questing and reward system is anything but proprietary, but goes a little further in borrowing elements familiar to those who play MMOs such as World of Warcraft. Similarly, the player won’t make it far from the first town before they realise that rushing through the main quests is impossible without a bit of ‘level grinding’, or fighting groups of monsters over and over again until you get strong enough to continue. The Borderlands world can feel a little empty at first, but this is something the story attempts to explain, and soon changes when the player progresses in the game.
These niggles aside, the game gradually opens up into a thing of considerable scope, and as the player levels up they gain access to new and better skills, weapons and abilities, not to mention the ability to travel around the desert landscape in a turbo-charged assault vehicle. The dialogue, main characters and even enemies have been crafted with a good deal of humour, and the game proudly wears its influences on its sleeve. Homages abound to classic action films, and the whole affair is drenched in western-meets-post-apocalyptic style.
The combat is violent and fast-paced, allowing you to equip several weapons of differing function, ranging from sniper rifles to six-shooter revolvers, to missile launchers and pump-action shotguns. Each weapon you find will have randomised stats such as firing rate, damage and elemental damage types (e.g. fire, acid), a feature which Gearbox promises will mean no two games are ever alike. You can trade these weapons in when you’re done with them, accruing money to spend on medikits, shields and those pesky respawn charges when you die.
One of the real selling points of the game, according to its developer, is that it allows a player to invite others to join in at any point during their adventure. This means you can have someone who has already done much of the main questline to come and help you, should you get stuck on a particularly tricky mission. It also means that you can start a new game alongside a friend, and do the whole thing together. While this freedom to play in your own style and at your own pace is great in theory, in practice it is anything but straightforward (at least on the PC version).
Unfortunately, Borderlands for PC, a game which can be purchased through Valve‘s Steam content delivery system, does not feature multiplayer that runs through Steam, but through the god-awful Gamespy network. As if this weren’t bad enough, any attempt to connect to a friend’s game will result in failure unless you manually reconfigure your network router. As of yet, I haven’t done this myself, since I’m waiting for the game developers to fix their mistake. For now I’ll stick to the single player experience which, as already mentioned, is more than worth the price of admission.