Borderlands for Xbox 360

Out of all the top titles to come out in the Christmas of 2009, Borderlands caught my eye more than Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, or Dragon Age Origins because of its unique style and potential to be a very fun game. My biggest concern was by the time I picked it up in January, its popularity had waned and I might not be able to find many people to play with online. Luckily I found a few people and ended up having a very enjoyable time with it by the time I traded it for Mass Effect 2 last week.


Story

The story is pretty shallow and contrived. You land on a planet called Pandora which used to be mined for its natural resources before the Dahl Corporation pulled out. As the long winter turned into summer, many fearsome creatures took over the countryside overwhelming the colonists who settled there. In addition the workers from the Dahl Corporation were former prison workers turning the country side into a modern day Australia with prison gangs and dangerous wildlife dominating everything.

Your visit to Pandora is predicated on finding the mythic "vault", which is suspected to reside somewhere on Pandora. The vault is rumored to contain technology that might shift the balance of corporate power in the universe. Another similar vault was found by the rival Atlas Corporation and it changed their fortunes forever. You begin your journey by being contacted by an "Angel" who can only communicate with you either telepathically or through some technology. As you traverse Pandora looking for the vault, you meet a whole host of people all with their own agendas. The worst part of the story is the ending is one big buzz-kill. At the risk of spoiling it, let's just say that the ending was more disappointing than the one in Halo 2, but this story doesn't end in a cliffhanger.


Gameplay

Borderlands at its core is a First Person Shooter, however it also incorporates some role-playing elements as well as some nifty treasure finding mechanics as well. The basic goal is to shoot just about everything that moves. At your disposal is a wide array of weapons that fire all sorts of projectiles at different rates. Part of the appeal of Borderlands is that it boasts over 100,000 different guns. When you add in different types of grenade modifications, elemental artifacts, and class modifications, you get a game that's all about the loot you collect.

Beyond the first person shooter genre, there's a light role playing game behind it. At the beginning of the game you choose from one of 4 different classes all representative of different play styles. There's a soldier who specializes in using assault rifles and shotguns, a berserker who can take more damage and uses explosives more efficiency. There's a sniper class who can use handguns and sniper rifles with more proficiency, and a siren class that uses submachine guns and more tactical moves. Each enemy you take out earns you experience points. At certain milestones you level up which allows your bullets to do more damage as well as allows your character to absorb more damage as well. Starting at level 5 you can start putting points into your special ability. Depending on your class you can either deploy a shield turret, let loose a bird that attacks targets close in proximity to your character, the ability to just go nuts and attack foes with your fists, and the ability to travel to another parallel dimension in stealth which allows you to do severe damage when traveling to and from that dimension. Each level afterwards you can put points into other abilities that allow you to do some neat things like heal friends, respawn ammo, and improve your special abilities in other neat ways.

The number of enemies you encounter isn't terribly impressive. At one point it seems as if you're fighting the same set of bandits and skags forever. Eventually it opens up and you starting fighting other creatures as well as bandits riding vehicles. Still, in the end the breadth of enemies just isn't that impressive and many of them have glaring weaknesses that can be exploited.

As mentioned earlier there are a ton of items that can be obtained. There are rocket launchers, SMGs, assault rifles, repeaters, revolvers, shotguns, and sniper rifles. Each weapon is unique in the type of ammo it fires, fire rate, damage per bullet, reload time, accuracy, and magazine size. In addition to the sheer amount of guns, you can get elemental artifacts which add elemental power to your special ability. There are also class modifications which can give you even more of an edge based on a certain type of character build. For instance one character mod might give you more points in special abilities or just a raw increase in another effect like magazine size, shield recharge rate, or ammo regeneration. Finally there are also grenade mods which determine the damage and characteristics of your grenades.

There are plenty of missions in Borderlands. Most missions last no more than a half hour to 45 minutes depending on how quick your pace is. Only a handful of the overall missions are related to the main story. All the others are side missions where you recover some sort of prize or trophy or kill someone or something for another character. Missions give you money, but also experience. The money doesn't matter as much as I rarely find something in the stores worth purchasing. The experience however is often more than I'll earn while fighting enemies during the actual mission.

Borderlands was clearly designed to be player friendly. You have the ability to quickly equip weapons right on the spot as well as pick up multiple items at one time. If you feel as if your character is designed improperly, you can spend a tiny bit of money to reassign all your ability points as you see fit. This is a really nice feature which I wish was done in more games. Finally, you have the concept of the second wind. When you lose all your life you die, but not really. Instead you're on the ground fighting for your life. As your death meter winds down if you manage to kill something else you get a second wind whereby you can run and take cover. If you cannot manage to kill anything, you're not really dead, you're just restored to the last save point which are located all over the place.

The best part of Borderlands is the online component. The most common way to play Borderlands online is in co-op mode. This is where you play with up to 4 different players in a given game trying to complete missions or just go around opening chests to see if you can find valuable weapons. There is an arena mode where you can fight against your friends in a structured event, or you can face another friend in a less structured environment by dueling them. I find that the player versus player component just isn't that interesting to me and the rest of the community seems to feel the same way. Most play via the co-op method and try to farm better guns with more players in the game. The more players in the game the better the loot is, but also the harder the enemies are. Another feature that's oddly missing from the game is a trading window. The only way to trade guns is by dropping them on the ground. This is incredibly nerve-wracking if you're trading with a stranger as they can quickly pick up your gun and theirs and just leave the game. Either that or quickly pick up their gun and boot or kill the game thus losing your weapon behind. There are lots of possibilities for nastiness on this front, which is a shame.

Overall the gameplay is really solid and definitely proves its worth in the game. There are several nasty glitches and oversights here and there which can really affect Borderlands enjoyment, but they mostly amount to keeping the game in the realm of "very good" instead of being an all-time great. For instance when playing with random players online, there are several hacked weapons some of which can be automatically transferred to your inventory without your permission. But in the end I was happy I played Borderlands because of its strong gameplay not in spite of its problems.


Controls

The controls are pretty solid. Borderlands is a standard dual stick first person shooter with the standard control layout. The left analog stick controls lateral plane movement while the right stick controls the look direction in a 360 degree sphere. The right trigger fires your weapon while the left trigger allows you to aim much like the Call of Duty games. The right bumper throws a grenade and the left bumper activates your special ability. The A button jumps, the Y button switches weapons (along with the dpad) the B button allows you to crouch, while the X button allows you to manually reload or pick up items off the ground. Clicking the left analog stick allows you to run while clicking the right stick allows you to melee attack. The vehicle controls are your standard vehicle controls for first person shooters like Halo and other games like that.

I don't have any major complaints about the controls. I'm not particularly fond of the vehicle controls as they seem way too loose, but you adapt to them pretty easily by the time they matter much. Also having the X button mapped to two actions can result in reloads when you want to pick something up. Holding down the X button allows you to equip items right away instead of putting items directly into your inventory. It also allows you to pick up multiple items and cash in the vicinity. This can also result in mis-equipping certain items when you mean to just pick up everything local.


Graphics

The graphics follow a cell-shaded style that really works well in Borderlands. The theme is of a game that doesn't always take itself seriously, yet not nearly as whimsical as No More Heroes. Borderlands knows it isn't the big boy on the block and the graphics help to convey that. The cell shaded graphics mean you do not have a lot of detail commonly found in first person shooters, but there's a lot of detail for other games with cell-shaded graphics. The graphical scheme also allows for a pretty decent frame rate because you don't have to worry much about textures and you can play games with the lighting. In Borderlands day turns to night after a while and while it's never too dark that you can still see without an artificial light source, it can be tough to see at times.

The name of the game here is glitches and the graphics are no less glitchy. Clipping errors can be found all over the place in the graphics. I frequently see skags and other creatures just disappear into walls never knowing if they'll return again. This can be annoying in some respects because you might need to kill them to complete an objective, or a saving grace if you need time to recharge your shields and/or life bar. So overall the graphics are good for a first person shooter, but they clearly need lack a lot of polish.


Sound

The audio in Borderlands is very average. The music is pretty good in that it sets a modern southwestern theme. Pandora is a place very reminiscent of the desert southwest and aurally it's played up very much that way in Borderlands. The music changes tone based on the situation. That is, it changes depending on whether you’re in the middle of the wasteland to being in a cave to visiting a fortified base. In this respect it transitions very well. Also the music changes pace and mood depending on whether there are enemies in the vicinity actively seeking you too. This is a good tip off for whether you should be expecting to get attacked.

The sound effects do not do as good of a job. The gunfire tends to sound rather similar and the explosions sound rather canned as well. There's no silencer attachment so the element of stealth never really factors into the game which also takes away from the aural elements of the game too.

By far the worst aspect of the sound in Borderlands is the voice acting. I just didn't care for the effort put into the voice acting. Most of the characters are just uninspired, follow cliche scripts, or simply overact. One of the best comic relief characters, the claptrap, is simply a set of voice clips merged together sloppily. Overall the voice acting seemed to cohabitate with the story rather well in that they both simply didn't have much substance behind them to make it meaningful.


Replay Value

With all the loot involved with Borderlands, you'd think that the replay value would be through the roof. Sadly, there isn't really that much to do after you've beaten the game a couple times. There are 2 (and a half) playthroughs in Borderlands. Once you beat the game the first time, you play through with all your weapons from the first playthrough only the enemies are much tougher. After you beat the game the second time all enemies are maxed out in terms of level and so is the loot. You can also go back at any time and complete any side missions you miss. If you happen to finish all the side missions in both playthroughs, most enemies and even bosses will respawn if you wish to take them on over and over. Sadly this gets boring and while there are a ton of different weapons, unless you purchase a download pack, you cannot store your weapons in a chest or bank. Overall, I spent probably 30-40 hours playing through everything in Borderlands, not including DLC. There are a couple downloadable add-ons which add quite a bit to the game as well as a third on its way. Sadly, the game is much more finite than a Diablo. The reason why weapon farming just doesn't catch on is because there are so many hacked weapons such that it easily loses its luster once you go online. The biggest reason to play this game for many hours is if you have a bunch of friends that just like playing co-op and blasting people and critters.

Borderlands is a game that isn't what it appears to be. There's a decent and sufficiently deep game in there; it's just that it fizzles out once you really begin to dig in deep. Thus if you're expecting an experience similar to Grand Theft Auto IV, Halo 3, or even Modern Warfare, then you'll walk away disappointed. Notice I never compared it to Fallout 3 and that's because they are very different that it's like comparing apples to oranges. Borderlands is a neat game, however I don't think it'll have much of a shelf life beyond this spring or summer. Grab it while you can and find some buddies to play online with it, and then sell it. I wouldn't spend more than $40 for it. If you can spend $30 or even $20, consider it a good purchase.