Lawrence.com

Jeremiah's take

Borderlands is what would happen if Halo and World of Warcraft got drunk and had a baby together.

It is a wholly unique experience that combines elements of role playing games like Diablo with the controls and perspective of Halo and Call of Duty. It’s a vast game that will take you 30+ hours on a single play through either alone of with up to three other people. It's unique visual style — as well as its off kilter sense of humor — will set it apart from the majority of games this holiday gaming season. The only thing Borderlands lacks is a compelling story to go along with the mayhem.

The controls are pretty much what you would expect from a first person shooter (FPS), with different presets for you to choose from that reflect some of the most popular FPS control schemes around today. That said, they do NOT allow you to map the buttons to your own liking, which is a shame.

Movement speed and jumping ability is comparable to Halo, with the addition of a sprint button. In the heat of combat it’s nice to be able to sprint from cover to cover or up to an enemy to finish them with a melee blow to the head.

The visual side of Borderlands is as unique as it’s genre-bending gameplay. It features a hand-drawn style that might initially make you think of XIII or Wind Waker, but it packs in a lot more detail and has a much more gritty feel thanks to clever use of the Unreal engine and strong art direction (looking at the character designs I was reminded of the art of Jamie Hewitt of “Tank Girl” and Gorillaz fame).

For a change, it’s good to see an Unreal-engine powered game that doesn’t look like Gears of War. One of my favorite touches is when you fire on the enemies, numbers as well as blood (and later body parts) fly out of whatever you’re laying waste to. The numbers convey a lot of useful information as well, the bigger the number the more damage you’re doing. And as you level up throughout the game seeing enemies take ten points of damage per shot all the way up to hundreds of points of damage per hit and watching their life bar be barely affected makes for quite the feeling of progress, while keeping the game challenging.

The visuals falter a little bit on the technical end of things. When things get hectic on screen the frame rate can bog down quite a bit, sometimes down into the single digits, with a full complement of players and a bunch of enemies on screen. On the plus side the draw distance is decent and the different areas are distinct enough from one another to not lead to any confusion about where you are.

The gameplay in Borderlands is shaped by four different classes of player: Soldier (both Medic and Murderer, good for beginners), Berserker (melee focused), Siren (can slow time), and Hunter (sniper with a pet). Each class has one ability unique to them and each also has a certain weapon affinity, although proficiency can be developed with any class/weapon combo if you use it long enough.

Guns are everything in Borderlands; they kill the bad guys and creatures to keep you alive, they provide a good source of cash flow to keep you in ammo and health kits, and the constant search for rare guns that are more badass than the last will keep you coming back for more. And just like in World of Warcraft, good loot comes in different colors like purple and orange, so it’s obvious when you get a rare item in your inventory.

Borderlands really falls down, though, when it comes to storyline — it doesn’t really have one. It has exposition and a few interesting characters here and there that are well voiced and scripted, but at no point was there any real narrative reason for any of your in-game actions. The lack of story carries over into the different classes as well. Each of the four different characters will yell out random stuff as you battle giving each one a distinct personality, but since they are never given any back story, I just couldn’t connect with any of them.

As a single player experience, Borderlands is good. Add some friends and Borderlands is great. Fred's review below focuses on the multiplayer experience...

Fred's take

Borderlands describes itself as a first-person shooter mixed with RPG elements and integrating “loot drop” (which I will explain shortly).

While it does indeed have all three of those features are in the game, it’s really just a shooter that wants to be more than it is. This is not a bad thing, however, because developer Gearbox has wrapped together a solid experience that uses the right amount of temptation to keep you moving along in the game.

The concept of “loot dropping” involves specific locations of chests or treasure that will contain randomly generated items for the player to find. This means that every time you find items in the game, there’s a chance you will find a common gun that no one cares about or an extremely rare item that many players will never see in an entire play-through. The drive is to explore as many places and complete as many missions as possible in hopes that at any moment you may find that one super rare item. Games of this type are few and far between, the most popular example being the PC’s Diablo series or more recently Too Human on the 360. So, Borderlands is significant in that it is the first shooter to integrate loot elements.

Gearbox likes to claim that there are “bazillions of guns,” but in truth there are a handful of gun types and many guns will share the same name with slightly different specs. This isn’t discouraging, however, because the game operates just like a traditional shooter with specified damage amounts per hit based on the specs of the weapon. Unlike the often compared Fallout 3, there is no behind-the-scenes roll of dice to determine if you hit someone or how much damage is dealt — it’s based on your accuracy. If you get an enemy’s head in your sights and connect, you will see “critical” above the enemy with a much larger amount of damage dealt. You also gain experience points with every kill, allowing you to “level up” your character with more hit points.

Aside from the single player portion, which is charming in its own regard, the large draw to Borderlands is the opportunity to explore and hunt for loot in Pandora with up to three other friends.

Online coop play takes the concept of a loot-drop shooter and turns it into a full-on team game. Much like the firefight mode in Halo 3 ODST or the horde mode in Gears of War 2, Borderlands allows up to four people to be complete the quests and find loot together. You all evenly share experience points and money but the guns are strictly on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Occasionally multiple members of the group will stumble upon the same great weapon at the same time so Borderlands has a duel system to settle minor disputes. Much like sophisticated duels of the past, if you go up and hit your friend you will challenge them to a duel, which they accept with a return hit. Upon doing so, the game will put you into a blocked off arena and the last person standing will be declared the winner and thus rightful owner to the prize. Aside from these random moments of mutiny, the coop campaign focuses solely on teamwork — there are no purely competitive multiplayer modes in Borderlands.

Teamwork is so significant in the coop campaign that you are given plenty of options to tweak your experience. First of all, you don’t have to use the character you are playing your single campaign with; you are free to create a new one or use a generic character. The host of the game uses his or her save file as the reference to where you are in the game, so if a part is too tough for you, feel free to invite in your friend that is a few levels higher than you to come in and dominate in your world.

The same can be said if the reverse is the case; your friend who is much farther along than you can invite you in for a much more challenging but also rewarding (in terms of gold and experience) campaign where every enemy is several levels above you. The difference between a few levels in the campaign can be staggering. When I played with a friend who was only three levels higher than me, he was bored by how easy all enemies were. On the other hand, I found almost all the enemies in his campaign to be challenging. Your best solution if you don’t want either type of experience is to start a coop only character and begin with your friends from the beginning together.

If you’ve been looking for a shooter that will keep you constantly busy with quests while encouraging you to play more with the promise of rare weapons, Borderlands is the game you’ve been waiting for. For the rest of us who are looking for a solid shooter that can give us a plotline or unique feature to keep us playing, this game is a harder sell. With so many high end games releasing now and in the near future, it’s hard to justify grinding away for 30 hours on a game that offers the same thing over and over. Coop play, if you have three friends who want to join in, is the key to making the features of this game shine. Those who wanted Fallout 3 to be more of a shooter than anything else may also find this to be a decent substitute.

Fred's score:

Graphics: 8.0

Sound: 8.0

First Play: 8.0

Multiplayer: 8.5

Replay Value: 7.5

Gameplay: 8.0

Jeremiah's score:

Graphics: 8.0

Sound: 8.0

First Play: 8.5

Multiplayer: 9.0

Replay Value: 9.0

Gameplay: 8.5



Overall: 8.25