Borderlands for Xbox 360

When Borderlands debuted back in October of 2009, I was mildly interested. As a guy who likes first person shooters, RPGs, level grinding, and collecting "phat loot," the game seemed like it would be right up my alley. For some reason, though, I couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on a purchase. While the idea of "millions of weapons to obtain" excited my inner loot wh*re, the fact that they were all basically guns just didn't do much for me. I tend to prefer my grindy loot fest games with a more medieval setting (or even sci-fi, like Phantasy Star Online) and with a wide range of rare items to lust after. A million guns is a lot, but it's still just guns, after all.

Another reason for my hesitance to pick up Borderlands can be attributed to my personal dislike of post-apocalyptic settings. The idea of a world rising from the ashes of a destroyed civilization is one rife with potential - but game developers never realize that, content instead to give us another blasted wasteland with scraggly survivors wandering a landscape filled with varying shades of brown. This was at least part of the reason why I couldn't get into the universally revered Fallout 3 - I just found the setting uninteresting. Borderlands didn't exactly look like a Fallout 3 clone (the graphical style is different for starters), but it did remind me a lot of the ill-conceived Fallout action RPG from last gen: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. That link would prove troublesome to overcome.

I did finally get over it, though - and now that I've played Borderlands, I'm disappointed it took me so long. While the game's detractors have some valid points (which will be discussed shortly), Borderlands is still a great deal of fun for anyone who loves shooters with RPG elements.

Boasting an MMO-like structure (MMO standing for Massively Multiplayer Online - which is something akin to World of Warcraft), Borderlands allows the player to select a character from one of four classes, then plops them into a game world where they must find a mysterious "vault" that only opens once every 200 years. The overarching goal of the main quest often takes a backseat to secondary objectives provided by the local citizenry - find "X of this item" or "kill person Y." It works, for the most part - although the sheer number of secondary quests and some lackluster storytelling often make the main quest feel largely irrelevant.

Taking and completing this seemingly never-ending series of assignments makes up the entirety of Borderlands. Players take up guns and explore a blasted countryside in search of whatever someone needs or whoever someone needs killed and they kill everything that stands in their path to completing that objective. This earns players experience points for leveling up and becoming more powerful, and lots of new toys in the forms of dropped weapons.
 
The idea that Borderlands has "millions of unique weapons drops" is technically true. The catch is that most of them are just variations on a theme. You'll find many similar shotguns that are "unique" only because they have a different stat multiplier, for example. So, anyone literally expecting millions of different weapons will probably be slightly disappointed.

Weapons break down into standard types: repeater pistols, revolvers, shotguns, combat rifles, SMGs, sniper rifles, and so on. Late in the game, some alien technology turns up as well. Each of the four classes can use any weapon, but they have an affinity for two specific types. For example, I played a soldier, who specializes in combat rifles and shotguns. I didn't have any trouble using revolvers or sniper rifles, though.

Instead, choosing a class really has more to do with what you want your special attack to be. Each character type gets a special support skill that can be deployed when a gauge is filled. These skills invariably help the player get out of tight situations, and seem more geared toward online play than for players navigating the game's offline story mode. You'll use the skills in the main game, but they often felt like an afterthought to me in comparison to my trusty armaments.

Characters can be customized through the acquisition of skill points at level up. Each level increase gives the player a single point to be put into a category on a skill tree of talents. The talent trees are decent, mixing in skills useful for both solo and online play. If you pick a path you don't like, you can always respec for a small fee as well (which is great, because it allows for experimenting with various builds.)

Critics have complained that Borderlands is boring and repetitious - claims that I don't personally agree with, but I see where they're coming from. The lengthy (25 hours solo offline) title doesn't really change much from start to finish - it's all about getting a quest, traversing a bland post-apocalyptic countryside, killing things, and collecting loot. What players do at level one isn't much different than at level 50. There's a distinct lack of enemy types in the game, meaning you'll be killing stronger versions of the same raiders and spider-antlings for hours on end. There's not even much of a story to keep players moving forward - only the allure of a new awesome rare weapon or another level. Gamers who aren't into acquiring drops and grinding levels could definitely become disinterested long before the end credits roll.

Everyone else, however, is in for an entertaining experience. There are flaws - the amount of pointless traversing gets old quick, even with vehicles and a warp option later in the game, for example - but the core of Borderlands is rock solid - and that's not even getting into the whole online mode cooperative play element of the experience. Adding friends to the mix ups the fun factor significantly and brought back a lot of memories of good times I had with Phantasy Star Online.

At any rate, I'm glad I finally got to experience Borderlands. The game isn't for everyone, but those who love a good shooter with RPG elements will eat this up. Pretty graphics and solid game mechanics (plus an abundance of downloadable add-on content) make this a title I'll be returning to again and again in my quest to find ultra rare loot on the hardest difficulty settings. My only regret is that I didn't play it sooner.