Borderlands ReviewWritten By Roy
One genre ‘mix up’ I firmly believe can work really well together is that of FPS and RPG – the immediacy of FPS content takes away much of the grind and boredom associated with RPG content, while RPG style levelling and story can make an FPS feel a lot more structured.
It’s weird than that despite the huge success of games like Deus Ex, there have been relatively few FPS games that have moved into RPG territory – even Bioshock, one of the best shooters of this generation only lightly scratched the surface.
Borderlands though is a game that jumps right in to the deep end, with full levelling, weapon upgrades, and an entire RPG format backed up by classic FPS shooting action.
The games story isn’t as strong as you’d expect from an FPS with RPG mechanics. You’re looking for a vault full of treasure, and there’s a voice in your head guiding you around to it. Meanwhile you spend a whole lot of time at various quest hubs and the story is delivered through the various in game characters. Almost all of these are fairly boring attempts at humour that doesn’t fall flat on its face but does cheapen the experience somewhat.
The game is basically a series of quests – although almost all of them are about collecting a certain amount of an object, killing a certain amount of enemies, moving something from point A to point B or killing a boss. If you’re familiar with how Diablo worked, or you’ve ever played Warcraft, you should be able to figure out how the stories and quests in Borderlands progress.
The four classes of the game basically put you in the role of a soldier, sniper, magic user and tank, and they’re all different enough to be worthwhile. I played the entire game through as the soldier and found it great fun, while a friend was playing as the ‘magic’ class. The classes complemented each other brilliantly, and the combat just seemed to work. The gameplay isn’t ultra realistic and if you’re playing on the PC you’ll have a dead zone on the mouse to deal with, but overall shooting – the activity you’ll spend the vast part of borderlands taking part in – works very well.
The big problem with Borderlands is that it’s aimed at a single player audience but with multiplayer design. The weak story and fairly repetitive quests don’t serve well for a single gamer looking for an immersive FPS, but they do work brilliantly when playing online. Play Borderlands as it’s truly meant to be played – with other people – and it’s a great game. Play it alone and you’ll still find yourself glued to the screen for a good few hours, but there’s every chance you’ll get bored long before the ending.
Graphically the game adopts a distinct cell shaded look which while a little lazy and sure to turn off people look for hyper realistic graphics at least makes the game look a bit different. You spend the vast majority of the game in a wasteland that all looks very familiar, so having a bit of a change to the overall visual style has helped the game out somewhat.
In summary, if you want a co-op FPS game and a brilliant alternative to something like Left 4 Dead with a lengthy – if weak – story and decent gunplay, check out Borderlands. If you’ve got no intention of ever taking the game online you’d be far better of renting it and seeing if the grind bores you before investing in a full purchase.
The News Release was written by: Roy who produces professional