Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

Borderlands is a uniquely rendered game that places the player in a world where bandits, monsters, and guns rule an empty desert landscape in the vein of Fall Out 3, with a few interesting and addicting twists.

What immediately strikes the eye is the special art style of Borderlands: something akin to Good and Evil's childish level design, with a little grit, humor and noise similar to MadWorld(Wii), only less so.

With that in mind, some eccentric characters are expected: a trailer dude, a scary doctor, insane armed bandits--midgets, giants, and everything in between.

At the beginning of the journey, the player is asked to select from a group of stock characters. They look like mock-ups from a drawing board where Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress were used as inspiration.

During and after missions, the main driving element is cash. This can be used to purchase new weapons and get upgrades for grenades and sniper rifles, as an example. Skill points are used to level up attributes of the character.

The missions themselves are nothing more than running back and forth to gather an item, talk to another crazy stock character, shoot through dozens of bandits--enter a new section of the desert landscape-- and repeat.

What Borderlands does well is keep a player occupied with leveling up: fighting slightly more difficult enemies and learning to use cover. I was especially impressed when what was supposed to be 20 minutes of gaming turned into an hour and a half. And I would have gone for more.

The sound and gameplay elements are complete: Riveting gunfire, powerful grenades and loud explosions. This is what kept me going. But the missions in of themselves are very boring and do not inspire the player to continue for more than an hour at a time -- since the end of every new mission requires the player to return sometimes half way across a map-- just to get cash.

Borderlands offers something new to the 2009 generation of first person shooters: skill levels and another take on the animated-render style. One can't help but compare Team Fortress 2 to Borderlands....

Borderlands may have a story ( a bare one at that) , but it could do equally well without it. As a FPS multiplayer experience--with the option to play solo-- it succeeds in addicting the player one level up at a time.