Southern fried Sci Fi - A great blend of shooter, RPG and attitude!
From the opening music to art style and the game play you will find yourself quickly immersed in the not so pleasant world for Pandora (are we out of alternative names for dangerous alien planets?).
Borderlands gives you an interesting choice of character types to start your adventures and over time you can shape their skill progression to fit your gaming preferences. These skill choices along with a bewildering array of weapon choices to buy or loot keeps the feeling of character progression satisfying while still being streamlined. An inventory system that is sortable keeps everything under control and easy to manage. In fact all of the menus and map functions are very well done, simple yet packed with all the information you could need. About the only complaint would the lack of visible mini map outside of the menu screens. A direction indicator is given but it does get a bit tedious to continually pause to check the map before moving on. A minor problem but one the developers should have foreseen.
The world feels fairly open even though you are not in a sandbox game. Feels similar to how well Bioware did in Mass Effect (not ME 2 which had a much more linear and constrained feel to it). Enemies are challenging and Borderlands rewards you with more experience for killing off higher level enemies but as you progress in your levels you get much smaller experience for killing off those baddies who are lower lever then you are. The bigger the difference in level the bigger the differential in experience. It's a good touch to keep moving you through the game. And there is plenty to keep you moving along. Borderlands throws an avalanche of quests at the player and once you get into it a bit a nice fast travel system to make it easier to move around the large world that you end of visiting. Perhaps the only downside is that there are almost too many quests. Some of the quest types start to feel repetitive and some of the "fetch" quests start to get old as you get later into the game. And it occasionally feels like the main story line is no more important then all of the other tasks that you end up taking on. But overall Borderlands is a blast. Co-op play is fun and challenging, single player is good but gets a bit tired in all the side quests. NPC characters and story line have some strong points but probably not the best part of the game. Definitely more to look forward here in future Borderlands games.
Borderlands is highly recommended. It's not a perfect game, but it's unique combination of art style, game play and co-op options make it a winner. And now you can get the full game and all the DLC in the "GOTY" edition, probably at a very good price. Can't go wrong here.