Borderlands

Borderlands is a game created by Gearbox Software and was released by 2K Games. Gearbox Software is known for games such as Half-Life, Halo and Brothers in Arms. So it's clear that Gearbox is one of the bigger development studios out there and that it has quite a legacy to it when it comes to games, however I personally think Borderlands could've been way better. Borderlands is a shooter/RPG game.

The storyline of Borderlands is the following, you start out on Pandora, which is a planet known for having treasure in a vault under the ground, the Vault opens every 200 years. On the planet Pandora there are few settlements because the environment is very hostile and most treasurers don't choose the good path but rather turn into bandits. You're send as a mercenary to open the vault and see what it contains, whilst remaining on the good side of the law, because the information you get from the settlers is very important in order to accomplish your goal.

The storyline is pretty cliché and you'll probably won't even bother to read any side information or listen to the woman that pops up in your upper-left screen every once in a while. My major problem with this game is that it tries to be two things at one and does a poor job at both of them, whilst they could've really made them work. I'll start with the gameplay, since that will make things a lot clearer. Borderlands is a shooter in that your weapons are guns and is an RPG in that you accumulate experience and your hits are displayed in numbers, along with an inventory system and quests. So where's the problem you might ask, well throughout the game you'll have to grind through tons and tons of enemies in order to complete quests or get level up. There's little variety in quests, there are only 3 types of quests, search-and-destroy, retrieving certain items and certain objectives. For the most part you're killing thousands upon thousands of enemies in order to level up, and I'm not even kidding here, I had to kill about 20,000 enemies in order to get to level 50. So it's pretty redundant to say that the gameplay gets stale rather quick.

The game doesn't really work like a regular shooter in which it just takes a few bullets in order to kill a certain enemy. In Borderlands you do a certain damage depending on a few factors such as your character's level and your gun experience level for that type of gun. So it's not really special that you sometimes have to shoot more than three cartridges in order to kill a normal enemy, if they happen to be a few levels higher than you. Not even mentioning the bossbattles, which will often lead you to deplete your ammunition for every gun type that you have. I find the inventory system to be an annoyance as well, because when you're completing quests in a rapid pace(it saves time to just accept every quest there is and do multiple quests in one area) you'll often lose track of your inventory since all these quests award you with equipment that you don't really need and when you find a gun or something else that you want to pick up, you're required to clean up your inventory first, by throwing out the stuff you just got from the quests.

It's also a shame that the creators of this game changed the graphics during the development of this game, at first they went for a Fallout 3 style look but later changed it to a cartoonesque style, similar to Prince of Persia. That's what also made it hard to be sucked into the game, the game had a cold, bland, empty feeling to it. Another thing that bothered me is that they re-use enemies a lot, I think there are only 6-7 different enemies in this game and they keep reappearing with different names, pallet-swaps and of course with better stats.

Soundwise there isn't anything that's the noteworthy neither on the bad or good side. The only thing that I thought could've been better is the background music, or the lack of there being background music. The only music that's in the game is the title music and combat music, whenever you get attacked you hear a song, but besides that there's no music at all, which doesn't really help with the fact that the game has a cold, bland, empty feeling to it.

My overall conclusion of this game is that it really let me down, I had been tracking this game for quite a while and I was disappointed when I got it. The repetitive grinding gameplay and the cold, bland, empty feeling to it, make that this game becomes boring pretty fast. If you were looking to buy this game I'd suggest trying your luck somewhere else, since this game isn't noteworthy on both the Shooter-side and the RPG-side. But the truth be told it isn't that bad, everything works like it's supposed to work, but the overall mediocrity makes the game a let-down, especially when you consider the fact that there was such a hype around this game. Oh yeah, about the millions of guns, that's a lie. Surely there are guns with different stats, but they all look pretty much the same, except for a few special ones but for the most part it's just the same gun with a different skin, different stats and a different name. They use the diablo-method of just randomizing the stats. So when you're considering to buy this game, I'd suggest trying your luck somewhere else.