Thread: Raid Review: Borderlands

Still less annoying that street racers

Borderlands

After the slow moving pace of Demon's Souls I felt I needed a change of pace, and with Gearbox's "Borderlands" suddenly springing up into the public eye over the past few months I felt that maybe I could enjoy a soulless, visceral shooter to quell the smoking portions of my cortex that were being overworked. The slogan for this game, "FPS and RPG had a baby", seems strangely fitting when you factor in the inbred redneck world that you find yourself thrust into. The prospect of a game mixing two genres that tend to avoid each other like a neo-conservative to common sense seemed intriguing. Gearbox, I accept your challenge.

Everything starts off with the four main characters being driven to Fyrestone by Roman, who is now finished with pissing off his cousin Niko and has decided to focus on you. Once the bus stops you get to choose between the four characters and set out on your quest for phat lewts. Not even before you can take five steps away from that annoying Yugoslavian, Cortana decides to spring into your skull and get a piece of that frustration action. Yes it appears that every teeth gnashing fifth wheel has decided to jump into your game at the very first opportunity. Five minutes into the game and I wouldn't have been phased if I saw Navi trying to get my attention.

Oh...wait...

Scooter has a little sumthin-sumthin for ya!

Story wise the game pretty much unravels at the beginning and there isn't any attempt to flesh out any of the characters as unique save for their special abilities and personal skill trees.

For the most part the game plays out like any other FPS. You run around pointing your boomstick at things you want dead and continuously shoot until they turn into a red mist. Each creature has a critical weakness which, while the game suggests you analyze and experiment with it to find out, is almost always revealed in one of the tips you see during a loading screen. You recieve quests from various NPC's and bounty boards to earn experience, money, and items. Most of the time the quests involve going somewhere and fighting off a horde of enemies in order to retrieve some item that wasn't really worth the time or effort needed to obtain, but I suppose that is part of Borderlands charm. On more than one instance I found myself retrieving some "precious item" that turned out to be the equivalent of sending a friend across state lines to fill up a can of gasoline and when you have just destroyed an entire bandit colony just to recover a "liberally used" pornographic magazine for a pervert that is all to eager to shake your hand you cant really help but giggle a little inside.

Borderlands claims to have 87 bazillion guns. Ignoring the obvious hyperbole, Borderlands uses an item generating system similar to Diablo's, where an item is dropped and a set number of prefixes and suffixes create different stats for the weapon. There are numerous different skins and color palettes as well, however while it is very possible to obtain two guns that are cosmetically identical, the odds of encountering two functionally identical firearms is pretty astronomical. Loot becomes a serious part of gameplay and increased loot value in multiplayer promotes grouping online. Of course the lack of any real loot distribution system means its first come first serve, and given the quality curve for the quality of people online means that some whiny bitch will be on your ear in a multiplayer game more often than not. This is more a problem with people in general and less a problem with Borderlands specifically, but some way to ensure fairness in item collection would have been nice.

The RPG and FPS elements seem to conflict at times which can become somewhat annoying, and I would say that this is my second biggest peeve with the game. At times I will have my cross hairs set dead center on the skull of a midget who is idly picking his nose only to fire off a shot that seems to evaporate into thin air. Seeing as how I have been playing as the condom hat wearing hunter that specializes in sniper rifles, and how I have been generously investing points into his sniper tree, this seems somewhat fucked. At times I would encounter strings of "ghost bullets" that would consume an entire magazine. Let me clarify, its not that I didn't have a direct line of sight or that my shots were missing, if this was the case I would see my bullet strike something, no...my bullets were fucking GONE! When your bullets seem to mysteriously vanish as if they were being consumed by a barrel dwelling gremlin in an FPS game the shit has hit the fan. I can only assume that this is a bug because it doesn't seem to effect the enemies in the game, in fact the enemies in this game have the standard bullshit telescopic cybervision that allows them to hit you from across a mile stretch of land with a motherfucking shotgun.

There are reasons why the FPS and the RPG are on the far opposite ends of the video game spectrum, its like sitting a jock in on a session of D&D and expecting him to contribute. Like two turds being flushed, shit just doesn't mix. Another perfect example of the genres opposing each other is elemental damage, which on paper was likely a great concept. There are four types of elemental damage; Fire, Corrosive, Shock, and Explosive (this is an element?). Each one of these is effective against a different type of enemy. Fire damage, in addition to dealing the initial projectile damage, also deals damage over time, however it is very ineffective against shielded opponents. Shock on the other hand is the polar opposite of fire and it is effective against shields but is piss poor against flesh, and this is part one of the elemental goat fuck. Any enemy who has a shield also has a life bar that shock is ineffective against, thus making shock weapons almost completely worthless. I wont really go into explosive damage because that's all it really does...it explodes. Now corrosive damage is effective against armored opponents, and this is the second half of the elemental goat fuck, its just as effective a DoT as fire damage. So this begs the question, "Why bother with fire damage?". Just grab a weapon with corrosive damage and you are set elemental wise.

Another area where the two genres collide is in the level system. I can understand the idea of reining in the players by adjusting the levels of the enemies to the suggested strength of the character in accordance to specific areas, its a pretty common concept in RPG's, but instead of scaling the enemies life pool and equipment the game opts for damage scaling with levels. This creates a strange scenario where a rifle that just sawed a skag in half with a single shot will bounce off the eyeball of a bandit leaving nothing more than an irritating itch and a bad disposition towards those who aren't afraid of using soap. This of course renders the concept of a "low level challenge" all but impossible and really steps on the concept of realism. Far be it from me to claim that I need everything in my video games to operate in the realm of actual reality but if a baby shot you in the face with a pistol I doubt you are going to walk away because he hasn't unlocked his skill tree yet.

The controls are adequate in the respect that they serve their purpose. When you are running about on foot and engaging in firefights the controls are about as tight as you could ask for in regards to an FPS on a console. The one area that they fail is in the vehicles. I am sure someone will comment on my criticizing of games using overly complex controls and scream "HYPOCRITE!", but I am fully aware that some level of complexity is a good thing. Vehicles are boiled down to the bare bones in regards to their controls. The left stick functions as accelerate and reverse and the right stick operates the turret, this creates the problem where aiming doubles as turning and while its a little tighter than Prototypes horrendous vehicle controls it still sucks harder than Birdo working the street corner. Who the fuck came up with this retard control scheme where the turret affects the control of the chassis!? The driving and firing controls should be independent of each other! What, are there not enough buttons!? Do I need to mod a fucking Jaguar controller to work for the 360 to drive a tank now? There is no fucking excuse for this shit and the sooner game developers pry their faces from the crotches of transvestite hookers the sooner we can scrap this piss poor concept of a control scheme and focus on making vehicle sections fun again!

I need to be honest though, for the most part I have been nitpicking at the problems in Borderlands and if I am working this hard to find something wrong with the game then that alone should clue you in on my overall opinion. Borderlands has its faults, but the one place it excels at is its atmosphere. This is something that most games seem to have ditched in favor of shitty vehicles. Borderlands has this charming redneck version of a MadMax movie setting that just makes it so enjoyable to play. At any given moment you may find yourself running over giant maggots on the Ludicrous Speedway or fishing with a satchel of hand grenades. Everytime an NPC decides to open their noise hole and say something the dialogue is always pure comedy gold. This is the same world that compels rednecks to strap a 4.5x scope onto a double barreled shotgun or make a sub machine gun that fires TWO bullets at once. Borderlands has a sense of humor about itself, the kind of humor that would get you called in for a sit down with your boss.



More balls than Lance Armstrong

Despite the problems and gripes I had with Borderlands it was still an overall enjoyable experience, but the bizarre niche it falls into would favor a rental first to decide whether or not you personally would enjoy it. I will say that it exceeded my expectations, and not the expectation that it was utter shit but the one that was hopeful it was at least a good game, and Borderlands is a great game. My final gripe with it though is that it feels unfinished, Gearbox has already stated they are developing downloadable content for the game however I feel that a lot of things that might be included in it should have been bundled with the shelf product to begin with.

Good review.

i loved this game it has a nice difficulty...even though many games that try rpg/shooter fail..i enjoy them...even shitty ones XD, this game doesnt fail though