Game review: Borderlands

Yea i know, it's been out for a while now. Initially i had trouble to decide which game to play first, Borderlands or Dragon Age. Anyway i beat Borderlands 3 days ago and i got a few thoughts on it.



Plot

On the Australian like planet of Pandora, there is a legend of a Vault which supposedly hold tons of alien tech, thus exist vault hunters who seek it out. You play the role of one of these vault hunter as you arrive on Pandora.

Simple plot, You don't have to save rescue anyone or anything like that, it's pretty much a treasure hunt. And you know what, i like that because greed is such an easily understood motivation. "Save the world" plots that start out as such always seem lacking, flawed, unrealistic or just cliche.

Gameplay

Well it's a shooter, but almost all guns are randomly generated on the go. but I'm getting ahead of myself here...

When u start, you have to pick one of 4 characters, I've tried out all classes but used a Berserker to beat the game, The only real difference between classes is their special skills and stat bonuses.

There isn't anything bad about the basic character movement, in fact, I quite enjoyed the jumping physics. very high and slow jumps, which were quite fun to use and the game does have a bit of platforming, you're also given an amazing ability: fucking running! doesn't sound like a big deal, but god damn I'm sick of slowly strolling in all these FPS games.

There's also vehicle action in the game, and although the control of it feels weird to anyone who played half life 2, once u get used to the vehicle controls they're actually pretty darn good. It's the half life 2 ones that don't make fucking sense and ruin u for life.

Characters

As characters, they're pretty much blank slates i guess, not really developed whatsoever, they act more like classes. As i mentioned i tried out 2 characters, although one was brief. So i'll just babble on about the Berserker.

The Berserker, called by default Brick, has the ability to punch stuff. It sounds lame, but i think that he might actually be over-fucking-powered. To use his fists, he goes into a rage where his life regens at an incredibly high rate, his punching dmg is ridiculously high, even for just jabs (he can perform slower but more damaging uppercuts), the rate he jabs is really fast and honestly he makes ALL fights a joke, rarely enemies will survive 4 secs of punching, over 50% die in 2 hits and 20% die in 1 hit (assuming u used the uppercut).

Mordecai the hunter - Lilith the siren - Brick the berserker - Roland the soldier

Now granted each character has 3 skill-trees and he may pick skills from each or focus on one, i went with brawler which enables him to go berserk often, for longer, to regen on kills during berserk, etc. punching the shit out of stuff was really the quickest and easiest way to deal with anything. even used it to just heal myself.

I encountered far more difficulty when i played with the hunter seeing as he had little health and just pretty much relied on sniping shit before it got to him. seeing as even sniper weaps don't have perfect accuracy, it was troublesome.

I've tried the Siren and Soldier yesterday, and i gotta say, like the Hunter, the Siren's special ability is kinda worthless and if you use her you're just making the game harder on yourself. I'm currently playing through with the soldier, and although I'm having more trouble with him early on than with the Siren, i cna see how he could become really really useful. I'm at the point where i'm deceasing the cooldown for him special skill (making a turret which auto aims and shoots stuff provided it's in front of it), when maxed that skill will have 100% cooldown decreased (which i believe means no cooldown). that could b a great help.

Weapons

The game generates weapons with all sorts of stats, elemental dmg, and sometimes weird gimmicks, you will come across tons of weird weapons in this.

I did encounter a few notable weapons in the game:

• A rare hydra shotgun, which had a weird 5-way shot. Best i could describe it would be like that multiple shot in Contra games, it was like having 5 different shotguns shooting in 5 preset different directions.
• A shotgun that shoots an inaccurate rocket. Turns shotgun ammo into a rocket, I can't imagine how that works, but it's a nice budget rocket launcher.
• A"Boom stick", a very high power shotgun that shots a single bullet with 0.0 accuracy, that's right none. has 6 bullet per clip and when u fire it will autoshoot til the clip is empty. incredibly deadly at close range, useless otherwise.
• A rocket launcher that shoots 3 rockets at once, which spiral around themselves.
• A SMG that shoots 4 bullets simultaneously each time, but low ass accuracy. think of it as a low budget shotty that does lil dmg but is really fast.
  

From my play through, shotguns tend to be the most interesting.

Besides all the regular types of weapons, you sometimes find alien-tech stuff that is just goofy.

Also, the game has 4 kinds of elemental dmg: explosive, corrosive, fire and shock. Elemental weapons have a chance to deal said elemental effect.

• corrosive is my fav by far, deals damage over time and drains armor and flesh. It's a must on late game levels when u start encountering soldiers from the crimson lance.
• explosive is self explanatory, it creates an explosion, as far as i can tell, some creatures are weaker to it and some are almost immune. generically though, seems to add a lot of dmg to attacks.
• fire sets people on fire to deal dmg overtime, works especially well on flesh, if the enemy still has his armor on it's a lil less effective.
• shock is great to drain shields, you probably should have a revolver with it around just to one shot enemy's armors, and then switch to something else, cause it's not that great on flesh. I find that a lot of stuff takes less dmg from it.

Conclusion

This game is pretty awesome, all RPGs should b like this because it's not that boring to play through and I've actually been replaying it this with other classes and using different strategies. It's mostly optional if u wanna pay attention to the story or not.

I want to try this on multiplayer, but i don't know if i can. I heard u get really nice loots when u do so though. The thing about each class is that you either embrace the character's special ability, or you seem to b fucked. You are allowed to respec your skills for a large sum of money though so your character is never ruined.

I do know that i really enjoyed this game as it is even if it was just single player, always getting new guns, shields, grenade and class mods, trying out lots of really weird and different gear, so many missions and it didn't always feel like a fetch quest, which even when they did, didn't feel all that bad. Boss fights were cool too, not that hard, but memorable for the most part.

I fucking recommend this, totally "Do want!"