Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K Games
Rrp: £9.99 (£19.99 for the Game of the Year edition)
Released: 26th October 2009
Available on Steam and Amazon
Played using: Mouse & Keyboard
So, you want to be a Vault Hunter, eh? Finding the Vault is a big dream my friend and many have come before you in search of it, but I’m sure that YOU’LL be the one to find it. I’ve a good feeling about you, now… Get off my bus.
How was my Marcus impression? Yeah, I know a bit off with the accent. I’ll nail it next time.
Anyway, welcome to the planet Pandora! Home of the legendary vault and more enemies than you can shake several sticks at. Borderlands is a FPS with some RPG elements that has a heavy emphasis on the collection of loot, almost every enemy drops some kind of loot, be it ammo, equipment or money.
At the start of the game you’ll be given the choice of four characters, each of these is a class and have their own strengths, and unique skill trees.
Each class comes with its own unique action skill that can change the players style of play, for example one character releases a turret that will mow down enemies while another releases a bird that will distract and attack them.
On the main HUD there are two bars you should be aware of that represent your shields and your health. The shield bar is blue and will only appear once you actually have a shield equipped (I think that I fairly obvious). The health bar is the red one below it, when that is depleted your dead… Well not quite but I’ll get to that.
Any damage you sustain will be absorbed by the shield and it will begin to regenerate back to full after a short period so long as you aren’t continuing to sustain damage.
Earlier I mentioned about losing your health doesn’t quite mean death, and that’s true. If you lose your health you have a chance to gain a ‘second wind’ all you need to do it’s kill something, once you do that you’ll be given a small amount of health back. Or, if your playing with a friend they will hopefully come and revive you before time runs out. Should you actually die though you’ll be resurrected at the closest new-u station with everything you had when you died… Minus a fee. These new you stations are scattered all over Pandora and active automatically when you pass them.
So you’ve gotten into a gun fight, you won but your health is close to being depleted, what can you do? Well you could try and fight off your opponents until you level up, that’ll put you right back to full health and shields. You could also look for some health vials the enemies sometimes drop, or even find them stashed in some nook or cranny, maybe you have a shield on that will slowly regenerate your health when it’s at full. There is one more option, you could find one of Dr Zed’s vending machines and buy some health. You do have to be careful though, just because your at a vending machine doesn’t mean you won’t get attacked.
Borderlands uses a similar system to MMO’s when it comes to its loot, common items are white, uncommon are green, rare are blue, very rare is purple, legendary are orange and finally is the extremely rare pearlescent.
Along with this some items will have a element attached to them, so a shotgun with a fire element included would cause fire damage as well as the base damage it already causes. This can be especially useful as each elemental type works more effectively against certain enemies.
What’s interesting is that the weapons are procedurally generated and apparently the game can create up to 3.5 million unique combinations.
A great thing about the items in Borderlands is the fact that the manufacturer of the item actually has a impact on the properties of it. Each brand has its own quirks and some will suit some players and not others. I for one, prefer sniper rifles made by Jakobs because they tend to have greater damage and stopping power, although they tend to be slower to reload and have decreased rate of fire compared to the others.
If, while wandering the vast areas of Pandora, you happen to find a item or weapon that you would prefer to equip upon yourself you can just hold down [E] and the game will have it automatically swapped with the item you currently have. That means you don’t have to go faffing around with the inventory system every time you wish to swap out an item. Annoyingly this same system, or anything like it, doesn’t exist when buying equipment.
You gain XP from completing missions, exploring and killing enemies. Eventually all that XP will level you up increasing your health and (once you’ve surpassed level five) grant a ability point to spend on your character skill tree.
The skill three is separated into three parts, each class has a different name for the various sections but they generally fall into three categories;
– Gun buffs, such as damage and ammo capacity.
– Special ability bonus, increased damaged or duration.
– Stat increase.
Along with your skills screen you also have inventory, mission log, map and character screens. Each of these can be accessed through their own keyboard hotkey or by using the mouse to select the icon at the top of the screen.
The inventory allows you to swap out equipped weapons and items with those that are stashed in your backpack. You can also view and compare the items by highlighting the item in question and pressing [E], the will make the backpack menu on the left filter out all items that are not that type. For example highlighting and comparing a grenade mod will filter out everything except grenade mods.
Your mission log screen shows what quests you have accepted and in what areas they effect. Each mission will have a level and difficulty rating shown at the bottom as well as the reward for its completion. This screen also shows you your current amount of experience, although you can view that on the character screen. You am also see previously completed missions and, interestingly, a challenge log. The challenge log is a list of optional tasks that you can complete for experience, some of which you will likely achieve simply by playing the game.
I think the map screen is pretty self explanatory, it even comes with a legend for ease of use.
Lastly is the character screen, it’s on this screen you can see you level, hit points, shield points, experience, ammo count for all ammo, your look, the cash you carry and weapon proficiency.
Just as with the real world, Borderlands recognises that the more you use soemthing the better you get at it. Since you’ll be using the weapons a lot this is represented by your weapon proficiency level (found on the character screen). You gain levels by killing enemies with that particular weapon, each level will give a minor increase a statistic such as +6% reload speed.
As is expected the controls for Borderlands are pretty much the same as they are for every other FPS. There are some minor differences such as the unique action skill [F] but otherwise if you’ve played a FPS since Quake you’ll probably know he controls.
After a mandatory quest early in the game you get to access vehicles which you can give a paint job to, sadly you only get ten colours to choose from. There are two types of vehicle, one that fires rocket from its turret or one that has a a more powerful machine gun as its turret weapon [right mouse button], they both have a basic machine gun that fires directly in front as well [left mouse button]. They also sport a booster allowing you to go much faster for short time, once depleted these boosters will refill but it takes about a minute. Driving is actually a simple task, as holding the [W] button moves forward and [S] is reverse, left and right are both done through moving the mouse.
At the bottom of the HUD is a compass, this compass will show you the locations of enemies near to you, the general direction of your current objective and also indicate a vending unit, if one is near.
There are also New-U stations allow you which reallocate your previously spent skill points (for a fee) and are also fast travel locations (once you’ve complete a quest for fast travel to be available), meaning you don’t need to trudge back and forth across entire areas just to get to a single location once you’ve visited it. It’s from here that you’ll also find you can access any DLC’s you have bought, all of which will be reviewed separately.
I’ve heard people compare Borderlands to Fallout 3 and claim it to be a ‘pretender to the throne’ or that it’s inferior in some way. I can understand this argument, both are set in a wasteland of one sort or another, both are FPS/RPG’s, they both have levelling systems that involve perks, and both have a similar looking and acting compasses on the main HUD. When looking at it that way Borderlands is definitely the inferior of the two to me, but it’s important to note that beyond those similarities they are both quite different games. If I want a story intensive game with a much heavier emphasis on the RPG side then Fallout 3 (or New Vegas) would be my primary choice. BUT if you want a game that’s stupid, funny, gun happy and has very little story (which I’ll be honest is pretty terrible) then Borderlands is the way I’d go, also unlike Fallout 3, Borderlands allows up to four player co-op.
Even though I am generally not someone who ‘does’ multiplayer, this game (actually this series) is one of the few in which I have chosen to partake in it. I think it’s mainly because, at the time of writing, I had a friend staying over who also had the game on his laptop so we would play together and give each other abuse (and help… Sometimes). Borderlands’s multiplayer is quite different to most other games in that its co-operative, of course in order to balance out the increase in players the levels of the creatures you fight increases too. This is something of a good and bad thing, it’s bad because obviously that means the enemies are harder to kill but it’s good because a tougher enemy means better loot.
I had to change the field of view because what it’s set to as a default was making me feel sick. Unfortunately there isn’t a way to change that in the options menu, which meant I had to manually edit the config file.
One of the many foibles of the game is that you can enter areas for missions that will occur later, this can be a bit confusing for the player to find character that you can interact with and whose mouths move but nothing else happens. Sadly this is just something the game does, some things have to be done in a prescribed order. You can’t talk to the character T.K Baha before completing a certain quest, for example.
I’m also not a fan of the ‘mission to get a mission’ thing the game seem to like to do, as vague as it sounds it feels like a cheap way to pad out the game.
Another annoyance is the act of selling or buying items and ammo, you have to sell each individual item separately! This wouldn’t be so bad but it works the same for purchasing meaning that you have to repeat the same action over and over if you want to get to maximum.
I don’t give any game a free pass on having invisible walls and this is no different, there are quite a few around and some are in the strangest places, making it so I can only climb so high up a rock face. If you don’t want me to climb higher just make it taller than my jump can manage, don’t put a invisible wall there.
Finally there’s Claptrap, or rather the Claptraps… I’m going to echo something that was said to me a long time ago by a friend “Creating a character that’s supposed to be annoying is not an excuse for them to BE annoying.” I have to say I wholeheartedly agree, in the sequel Claptrap’s (as there is only one in that game) annoyingness is toned down. In some cases you actually feel sorry for him, in this game though… I just wanted to destroy him, and yet I couldn’t.
Artistically Gearbox went for a stylised cel shaded look, I think this was a great move as it means that the game stands up against the ravages of time. That being said it as clearly aged especially when compared to the series later instalments.
There are several things that have not aged well though, such as the UI design. It feels a clunky and not all that intuitive, thankfully this is improved upon in later games.
Overall I’d say that getting Borderlands is a worthwhile purchase, especially the Game of the Year edition that comes with all the DLC’s (each of which will be receiving a review of its own). There is decent amount of replay value as each of the characters you can choose requires different play styles, and if you have friends that play you can have a really good time.
If this interests you then perhaps try;
Rage
Bulletstorm
Dead Island
