Borderlands for Xbox 360

STORY

Borderlands is basically about a failed colony of space colonists who find a planet that is desolate and in ruins. Some leave, others stay. Those that stay descend into lawlessness. One day, they learn that there may be an alien “vault” on the planet that contains leftover technology or riches.  A small  mercenary force ventures off in search of it.  They do not know where they’ll find it, or whether it even exists or not, but this cardboard thin plot is the setup to get a team of heavily armed shooters into a world filled with vicious fauna that have just risen from hibernation and humanoids who are straight out of Beyond Thunderdome.



GAMEPLAY

Borderlands is a First Person Role Playing Shooter  that features just about as much Role Playing Game leveling as Fallout 3 did.

You get XP for killing every one of the multitude of enemies in the game. and as you gain XP, you are able to level up by spending points on new abilities or weapon upgrades.

The Hunter can use his "Bird of Prey" to attack enemies;  the Soldier has a huge deploying shield with an auto turret; the Siren can shift phases and move around invincible - returning only to release a huge shockwave that does major damage; and the Berserker goes into a brutal fist swinging rage like a big knuckled kid off his Adderol.
You can also upgrade the attributes of the character through three skill trees.  For example, you can either make the soldier a medic by advancing his medical skills, or you could make him a more devastating sniper by upgrading his accuracy/precision. My soldier class for example can heal friends by either shooting them, or by letting them get near my autoturret. Had I chosen different skill paths, I could have made myself an even better assault unit. You can gradually increase your skills among different weapon types (pistols, rifles, etc) the more you use that specific weapon type.   Any of the characters can advance to be powerful with a sniper rifle, but their individual skill trees will determine which attribute will be strongest when it is fully developed.   The Berserker will be strongest with explosives  while the soldier will be strongest with assault rifles and SMG's.

Weapons upgrade automatically, as I stated. The damage they cause, accuracy, precision and reload speed, etc are just a few attributes that improve as you use various guns.  And this game has A LOT of guns.   I believe there are well over 5,000,000 different model combinations (possibly over 10,000,000), but most of this is due to the fact the game's visual style allows it to support random content generation across a huge palette of colors and attachments. Sometimes you may find the exact same gun laying on the ground with the only exception being it doesn't have a scope.

Then there is "elemental" damage which varies from gun to gun. Some guns can electrify an enmeny for increased damage while others corrode them with acid or set them on fire.

Shotguns can launch exploding rounds, pistols can fire flames or acid and numerous other weapon registry codes are altered on the fly.  You'll end up finding a weapon you thought was super awesome - only to dump it for a new super awesome weapon later on and that cycle will continue on and on since the game never ceases to have a new gun to give you that's super awesome.

Your decision to keep a weapon will be based on its level and damage per hit which can easily be seen by looking at it on the ground or in your inventory.  You can drop weapons to make space in inventory, or offer guns to friends.  Some of my favorites are the sniper rifles and machine guns that set enemies on fire.   My other favorite are grenades that steal enemy health and return it to the player.

Fallout 3 was a great game, but it didn’t focus on the feel of First Person perspective shooting as much as I had hoped it would. Borderlands focuses squarely on FPS perspective  with similar gory effects as Fallout 3: heads explode, limbs fall off, blood spews, etc.  My problem however with the gameplay is that the game tends to feel overly arcadey due to the graphical style. I’d like to be able to turn off the XP popups. I’d like the enemies to look more solid and realistic.

Why is it that shooting an enemy in the head with a sniper rifle doesn't take his head off in one shot?  Just becaue they are a higher level than you are, shouldn't mean the laws of physics aren't preserved.


GRAPHICS and SOUND

Borderland's Graphics may be appreciated by many, but to me, they fail to be as impressive as those in Fallout 3 – which I believe sets the bar for a game like this.  The graphics are all colorful and seem like cell shadings. They don’t seem polygonal at all, more like you are watching an ultra gory cartoon.  This does have some benefits though. The enemies have far more animations than those in F3, and never look as blocky or as stiff as the F3 characters do. But, what attracts me so much to Fallout is the fact that when the game zooms in using V.A.T.S  targeting, watching someone get blown to bits or vaporized is far more appealing since the character models are  much darker, grittier and realistic.

The lands of Pandora are nowhere near as varied or as realistic as the Capital Wasteland of Fallout.  Many of the textures are overused and the simplicity of the nuclear bombed wasteland that has been repopulated isn’t captured here.  Once again, the graphics here allow Borderland’s objects such as safes, refridgerators, toilets, etc to be more visually interactive and more animated - but, it bothers my eyes that everything looks like waterpaint. 

This game has an “artistic” appeal but, never feels revolutionary. 
Its style is a tradeoff to realism which happens to offer more on the backend.

Sound is very good.  There are lots of ambient sounds, a kickin soundtrack, snarls, growls,  gory moans of pain and overall, it sounds just as good as Fallout 3, but, the enemies maintain a more comical edge when they get injured. This game looks and sounds a lot like “Doomsday”  with a visual theme like “A Scanner Darkly”.

The enemies are a mixed bag similar to the punks you see in post-apocalyptic films.  Some of them will simply try to shoot you, while others will light themselves on fire like Buddhist monks and will rush you.  There are lots of animal life trying to kill you and there are even well done boss battles.  Once you finish killing adversaries, they drop goodies and you can restock.  Of course, you do have inventory caps so you can’t just pick everything up, but, this is good because if you play as a team others can cash in too.  Inventory can be increased with purchased mods.


PLAYING THE GAME

Don’t even think of buying this game if you don’t also have XBOX LIVE.  The single player campaign is in no way as well planned or well designed as Fallout 3’s which in comparison was an excellent and revolutionary single player experience.  The enemy attacks can get ultra boring and ultra repetitive and similar to Fallout 3, the game can be beaten fairly quickly (within 12 hours) if you choose to simply play through it. 

Enemy healthbars are padded to artificialy make battles longer and more difficult. You need combined firepower from the team, or, a rocketlauncher on the vehicles to quickly take down enemies with high Levels. 

Similar to Fallout 3 (i know you are tired of me saying that) you must get "quests" to complete in order to advance through the game. You can work on any quest you like, but, you need to select it in order to get its waypoints. The game basically devolves into waypoint finding as you make your way from level to level. Definitely not fun without friends.

The point of this game is not to simply beat the game. The point of this game is to have fun playing it and to do so with other people.
Borderlands supports up to 4 players who can drop in or quit as they feel like it.  Once you are playing with 3 others, the game feels  much more fun (similar to Left 4 Dead or Gears of War)  since now you’ll have to actually work with other people to move through the game and battle the ridiculous numbers of enemies.  

If you join in with a player who is far ahead in the "story mode", your gained experience  and completed missions will still be applied to your own game. This is good because you gain loads of XP from fighting the more advanced enemies to be found later in the game. The reverse is also true...if you want to help a newbie player, you can join with them and use your well developed character to help them defeat a tough boss - and they can then pickup XP or any rare weapon the boss dropped.  I had a guy join who had enough money to purchase powerful guns and just give them to me and the other teamates.   This game design ensures plenty of replay value since even people who beat the game can still come back to help others.

If a low level joins a very high level, the low level can gain massive money and XP quickly. Of course, the low level won't be able to damage enemies easily or withstand enemy attacks.

ENEMY AI is decent despite the aformentioned  padding of enemy healthbars. The human enemies will attack and take cover in an alternating fashion. Some will rush while others will lay down covering/sniper fire. animal life always charges you and they can seem downright stupid sometimes. So long as there are no animals in the mix, battles feels pretty fluid and the game seems intelligent. 
Enemy AI can be annoyingly intelligent in fact. I thought I'd be able to snipe a boss character from behind a cabinet and he was able to understand me trying to cheat him - ran around the cabinet and killed me.  Nice one.

Why is it that if you shoot a man or an animal with a weapon that causes critical injury, they continue to attack?  Is there no fight or flight mechanism in their minds?

Of course, you still end up mowing them all down and they never manage to push you to the edge of death regularly. But, if they do, you can be healed in a manner similar to Gears of War. Add the decent AI to battles that gradually increase in violence and enemy count and many missions really make the game shine.

Team killing has also been addressed here. If someone attacks you, you can attack them back which challenges them to a “fight to the death”. This is important because in the game, you must compete with other players for ammo.  The game doesn’t have a clear cut trade system between players like Fallout 3 and the only way to give an item to a friend is to toss it. This can lead to ammunition shortages if everyone wants to use the same weapon which will necessitate you fighting them for resources.   

Ammo, guns healthpacks or mods may be purchased from vending machines scattered throughout pandora. You can sell guns to clear out inventory space, and even buy them back later.

Similar to Halo3, you can also grab vehicles and “team drive and shoot” across Pandora’s backslopes. Unfortunately, like every other game of this type, there are annoying situations where the physics engine causes a vehicle to flip – or, even worse, lag, causes a driver to lose control.   I’ve got Fios and a perfect connection… others  may not.   Vehicles are spawned at spawnpoints and the driver controls a uni-directional machine gun while the passenger mans a multi-directional rocket launcher or machine gun turret.

Fortunately, you can even play with a 2nd player in split screen mode, but, to get the most out of this, you need a 50 inch (or better)  LCD television.


OVERALL

Borderlands is worth buying but, the game can wear thin on people who prefer the style of Fallout 3. The game really feels like that game with the added benefit of a focus on teamplay, FPS killing and loot collection.  Its actually potentially addictive and can be fun in hourly doses.

My biggest problem with the game, as I've said is that battles degenerate into waypoint finding rather than exploration off the beaten path, and some enemies aren't very exciting to kill despite the gore.  Beating enemies in this game can become as mundane as it is in hack&slash RPG's.  

There are also a handful of user-unfriendly features that are annoying as hell.
#1 you must remember to select your character every single game or else you'll start as a Level1 with no stats.
#2  The maps don't tell you where teleporters are.
#3 The maps don't tell you exactly where to go to end a quest quickly.
#4  People who join in a game can change your map even if you didn't want them too.
#5 There is no way to swap weapons between your own classes which means that in order to move an awesome gun from one class to your other, you must trust someone to hold it for you and then invite them to your next game.  I got a cool blaster stolen from me earlier today :-(
#6 Again, you can only drop items to exchange them - this entails someome could steal it from you or you're intended reciever.

Also, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare 2 is right around the corner and we are in a recession. If you can buy both, buy both, but I think COD is going to suck most players towards it like a black hole meaning less people online to play with. In the mean time,  Borderlands is a decent diversion but it is already failing to fully captivate me or give me something to look forward to beyond reaching a higher level.