Borderlands quick review (and Borderlands 2 speculation)

Borderlands is a first person shooter that is heavily inspired by the game Diablo by Blizzard. That makes Borderlands a dungeon crawler, with guns… lots of guns. The game allows you to pick from four different classes. The soldier, the hunter, the siren, and the brick. Each of the classes has their own unique skill trees which change up how you go about playing the game. While each of the different classes can use every kind of gun available, the classes have their own specializations. The soldier can focus more on assault rifles, and the hunter focuses more on sniper rifles. The gameplay of borderlands is all about exploration and completing fetch quests, the kind of missions where you are sent out to pick a small trinket in a highly dangerous area. But, this is the way of the wastes. The game takes place on the planet Pandora, no not the one from Avatar. The planet is rumored to have an impressive treasure, that could make anyone who finds it rich beyond their wildest dreams. Many have tried, and failed to locate the so called treasure, and have been driven insane by the constant hunt for it. Thus making mostly everyone you come across on this desolate planet a tad on the irritable side. There are some folk who are friendly enough to see reason over gunplay, but they’re all quest givers. The environment of Pandora is a bleak, desolate wasteland, with no distinguishable qualities from one area to the next. It’s not a pleasant place, and it really isn’t supposed to be one. However, this makes the whole experience of Borderlands a bland trudge through a boring brown dust pit with nothing really interesting to offer. The main draw of Borderlands is its host of guns. There is a ridiculous amount of unique guns, all with their own look, style, stats, and abilities. There are shotguns that spit acid, or submachine guns that cause the enemy to ignite in flames, or a sniper rifle that shoots explosive rounds that blow the enemies to bits. It’s all about the guns. And that is it for Borderlands. Guns, guns, and more guns. Complete a quest, get paid, get more guns. Borderlands. The game does offer online and two player split screen co-op, which would make the game more entertaining, provided you could find a friend that has the game and a character that is about the same level as you are. I’ve tried starting up a game of Borderlands several times with my brother, and we both quickly lost interest. It was the boring and drab environments and the excessively slow start to the game that just could not hold our attention. As the game progresses, there are some interesting moments, but they are few and far in between the tedium of the rest of the game. I would say that playing through again with a different character class, or trying to focus on one of the other skill tress of the class that you played before would change things up enough to warrant another play through, but it just isn’t. Maybe it’s just because I played through the entire game solo, and wasn’t entirely motivated by the story, or characters, or gameplay. Oddly enough, I am looking forward to the sequel, imaginatively called Borderlands 2. Having done a little bit of research here and there on the upcoming game, I’m rather excited for the game. What 2 does different from 1, as far as I can tell, is make the game have more character. The side characters have more personality and are more involved with their own stories and quests that they hand out to the player. Rather than just getting the flash of a boss with some witty punch line about the character, there seems to be more motivation for the player to destroy him rather than just being told to do so. Also, Pandora now has some foliage to liven up the place. Screenshots of the new and improved Pandora have really caught my eye. The environments are lush and colorful, and are places that I want to visit and explore. Also, the guns have gotten an injection of character as well. In the original Borderlands, there where the different gun manufacturers, but in all honesty, one could not distinguish. It was all about the stats and abilities. I just remember having my blue sniper rifle that had a revolver cylinder for a magazine that was super powerful and could one shot almost anything. There were a few unique guns that were rather special, but all of them came from boss fights, and were pretty much useless outside of said boss fights. Borderlands 2 claims that the player will be able to tell the difference between a gun made by this manufacturer rather than a gun from that gun manufacturer. And while the characters that players can take control of don’t seem to be quite as colorful as the last ones, at least there is more customization to them. All in all, Borderlands is not great. It does something different with the whole dungeon crawler formula, but at the end of the day, you’re still just clicking over and over on an enemy until it dies. While Borderlands 2 will undoubtedly have the same format, at least it’s looking like I’ll have some sort of motivation for doing so. D