Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

First glance at this game, you probably thought "Wow, is that a Fallout 3 clone?" Many people do, including me. A deeper look reveals that the two share many differences, however, the two are similar in their own ways.

Borderlands is an FPS game with fairly adamant RPG elements, similar to Fallout 3. Except instead customizing your armor and such, your primary focus is on your character skill tree. Speaking of which, there are 4 characters, each with their own unique action skill and diverse skill tree which ultimately changes their playstyle between the other classes, however, depending on what build you decide to take for some of these characters, you'll probably still find yourself running and gunning for the most part. The other part of borderlands that you'll be customizing is the guns. Borderlands is all about guns. Guns guns guns. You'll find a vast number of guns, easily over a hundred within your first 5-10 hours of questing on solo play. According to producers, Borderlands was released with 17,750,000 different variations of the guns. You'll find assault rifles that fire incendiary ammo, sniper rifles that can shoot acidic bullets, shotguns that fire rockets, revolvers that'll strike the enemy with lightning, or any combination of the sort. And since every gun you find has a random set of stats, you'll find thousands, supposedly millions upon millions of combinations of weapons. There are extremely rare and powerful weapons for those treasure hunter types. Grenades are treated just like guns, and are encouraged to be used just as often as well. Grenades also be customized with mods. Instead of throwing a boring frag grenade, have it explode into a shower of acidic goo, or have it float into the air, and release several other grenades, each showering the enemy with flames.

Another similar aspect between Fallout 3 and Borderlands is exploration. Borderlands is similarly a free roam game with a vast mountainous area in which you can find unimaginative amounts of loot if you put the effort into looking. Borderlands constantly rewards you with exploration. For instance, you might like to check the in-game map to find a nice route to your destination, and you might see a large area that is far off course, with absolutely no map icons. If you took the time to venture into this area, chances are, you'll find plenty of chests full of weaponry. Small piles of puke, unlocked safes, toilets, washing machines, refrigerators, cash boxes, and more, litter the planet of Pandora. In literally every hiding spot, there will be loot to be found. Never has there been such an incentive to exploring, unlike...Left 4 Dead, where you risk being attacked even harder when you stray off course, and may end up finding nothing. In Borderlands, nearly every single time, you'll find something when you explore. Unless you've beaten the game a time or two, you'll probably find useful things for the most part. Scavenging for items only gives you items at the level of monsters around the area, so don't expect to find high level uber weapons 5 minutes into the game.

Unlike fallout 3, don't expect to be finding bottle caps or bottled water anywhere. Besides quest items, you'll only be finding guns, ammunition, guns, health drops, guns, shields, guns, mods for classes/grenades, guns, money used to buy more guns, guns and a lot of guns. The form of currency in this game is the dollar, however, don't let anyone tell you wrong, it's actually guns. You can sell guns to earn money to buy bigger guns. There are small guns, big guns, medium sized guns, some as big as your torso, some as small as your hand. It's always satisfying to fight your way out of a huge band of enemies, whom all want to dine on your succulent flesh, and finish up looting the place dry, while stumbling upon a mechanical container filled with guns. You'll know when you find one of these, as the process in which it opens up to display your beautiful array of booty is orgasmic and satisfying.

The difficulty of the game is just right, though the pacing might just be a TAD too fast in the beginning. Unless you've finished the game once or twice, you'll constantly have to change your weapons as you encounter various enemies all with there own weaknesses and strengths. Obviously it's not effective to use a firey shotgun against a flaming skag. And it's not the best idea to use an anti-flesh gun against a heavily armored foe. You'll eventually be given the option of switching between 4 weapons at any given time, in solo play, you can really switch between as many as you want, as the game pauses when you want to switch your immediate loadout.

Borderlands already has 2 DLCS released, and a third speedily on its way. Each of them bring new quests/quest-types and enemies to fight. They aren't really expansions, they're just addons. As in, you buy them from the steam store, and once you launch borderlands again, it'll tell you that you've unlocked the corresponding area to travel to, and you can freely warp between those areas using those warp panels you find throughout Pandora. At least, that's how it works if you bought this on steam.


Borderlands is BEST enjoyed with a good buddy...... or two...or 3. Not only are you severely less productive, but it's also far less entertaining when you're playing it solo. Even if it's just one friend, the feeling of traveling together in a massive tank of a vehicle blasting apart everything in your way, while finding and sharing rare loot, and watching each others abilities work their magic, it's all very enchanting.




Summary of What I liked and What I didn't like.

What I liked

-The game is about guns. A lot of guns
-Every gun feels unique to handle
-Supposedly there are over 17,750,000 variations in weaponry, and many more to come in the third up coming DLC. You'll rarely find someone using the same gun as you
-Great uses in mood. It can be extremely comical and sarcastic, or pretty damn spooky.
-A.I. is near perfect
-A lot of depth in the skill tree and class mod system.
-The gameplay is just plain fun. No questions asked. Combat is very satisfying. Guns feel great to shoot, killing enemies is satisfying, being able to access huge arsenals of guns, action skill elements, and grenade mod combinations is amazing. Although there aren't that many enemy types, it doesn't get old killing them. Doesn't require too much strategy or thinking, great if you're tired, don't want to think, and just want to go all out guns blazing for an hour or two.
-Plot and Setting are by far some of the most interesting I have ever seen.
-Voice acting is pretty good
-Large world to explore and loot


What I didn't like


-An absence of a loot sharing and weapon trading system also stops this from being a perfect 10.
-Players that duplicate or use modded weapons can make this game absolutely terrible. I cannot stress this enough. Don't duplicate or mod your guns. It completely destroys the point of the game, which is to FIND rare and powerful weapons. Not make a completely overkill weapon with a third party program, kill everything you see in one body shot, and then get bored of the game in 40 minutes due to how easy it is because you're using a rocket launcher that shoots 900 shock rockets per second. You 13 year old kids out there on Xbox, begging to give someone 2000 Microsoft points just to give you modded weapons are pathetic.
-Match making is pretty bad. The way it works makes it so someone HAS to host, which prevents the use of dedicated servers, you also can't see the ping of the servers, most of the servers are laggy, some hosts often DC.
-The 3 dislikes above have absolutely destroyed the online portion of the game. In fact, I refuse to give this game a perfect 10 until the online mode is fixed up.
-Such a shame that the ending was no where near as good as it should have been. The plot was so interesting, it didn't deserve such a crappy, rushed, and unsatisfying ending. As small of a thing this may be, I feel it almost completely ruined the game. And I HONESTLY want to know, who wrote the ending? I'm not asking a rhetorical question. Did ANY of the producers even BOTHER looking at the ending. It's absolutely shocking and awful. Words can truly simply not express the disappointment displayed by the ending. More shocking then my 21 clip x4 Shock Vicious Orion Sniper rifle with a 2.4 fire rate. Truly unbelievable. I simply REFUSE to believe the ending was made by the same person who wrote the plot and all the comical portions of it.
-Physics are awful. Nothing in the environment is movable. Melee attacking vehicles sends them flying, which although can prevent your car from being stuck, it just feels funny.
-Very little character customization. The only thing you can change is the color of your outfit, it's barely noticeable, characters are all gender/clothing/hair/face locked, and there is nothing to change your appearance at all. Can be very irritating to some, would have been a nice addition to the game.
-A bit more game content and stuff to do besides find guns and shoot them would have been nice. I could imagine rewarding mini-game type activities to be enjoyable. Although the game tries to avoid repetition and staleness, after a certain point, you'll stop looting as much since you'll eventually have a giant arsenal of epic weapons that you'll be hard pressed to find better versions of. All you can do is loot and shoot. It's fun for a while, and even though it's still just looting guns, shooting them, and repeating that process, it's still enjoyable. Even though almost every player acknowledges that Borderlands is the same thing over and over, they still enjoy it. However, these feelings can only last so long. Still praying for activities to do in the future. The upcoming third DLC seems very promising, but it's likely to be the same thing as before, just on a higher level scale with a few additions.
-What could have made the game a bit more interesting is if each character got one or two more action skills which also expanded into separate skill trees. This would allow players to all be unique to a further extent, even if two people are using the character. It would also make the skill tree system far more interesting, as you would have additional trees to build upon. Example: Not only would hunter have bloodwing and its skill tree, he would also have another skill, maybe the ability to equip and fire a battle-bow for a certain duration, and he would also get an equally sized skill tree to customize for that ability as well. This would be a nice addition, and add further depth into the skill tree system, but it's not stopping the game from being a perfect 10.

Final statement: Really, the problems with online mode, with people duplicating rare weapons, and making there own overkill weapons using third party programs, absolutely destroy the game, and staunch its success. I hope they fix this one way or another. Multiplayer mode is only fully enjoyable with a group of friends, so you can prevent some random level 50 joining into your game and killing everything with a sniper rifle that has a clip of 70 and a firerate of 50, who then proceeds to drop 8 copies of that weapon in front of everyone, and then leaves the server. Really. Messed. Up. Other then that and a few other minor issues, Borderlands is very enjoyable. I didn't intend to make this a comparison between borderlands and Fallout 3. I just wished to clear up misconceptions about the game. Although they share similarites, Borderlands is its own unique experience from Fallout 3, and it is worthy of the attention of anyone who has ever enjoyed shooting a gun, be it in real life or in a video game, because really, borderlands is all about finding the biggest and baddest guns out there, and using them to your pleasing. Borderlands on its own isn't the most stunning game, in fact, some would call it boring, monotonous, and nothing like how it should be played, but if you play it as its meant to be played, as in with friends and doing the many side quests instead of just jolting to the finish line by yourself only to be disappointed by the abysmally anti-climatic ending, then it's a very magical experience that is probably best suited for casual gamers, however hardcore gamers could learn to appreciate it as well. This game shows so much potential, and I know people say that for every game, but I feel Borderlands is one of the most disappointing losses to the gaming industry because its potential was not acted upon. The ending simply felt like a rush job, and I feel it was sort of a business scam since 3 months after release, they already have almost 3 fairly sized DLC's out, 10 dollars each. I honestly feel like they started making these before the release date, instead of working on a certain severely disappointing ending. Worst of all, people are pirating this game left and right, which makes me regret paying 70 dollars for all of this. This game doesn't even require a CD key to go online. Please, for the love of high quality gourmet cheeseburgers, FIX THIS GAME GEARBOX.


edit: Multi player hosting has been fixed, the number of players on the online lobby has now doubled, you no longer need to forward your ports to host or play. :)
edit: Patch 1.30 has fixed NUMEROUS bugs and balanced the game a bit more. Most importantly, it has prevented users from using modded weaponry. DLC3 has been an excellent addition to the game and it shows how great the developers are at learning from their mistakes. The story telling in this DLC has improved SIGNIFICANTLY from the main game. Things are looking sharp. Rating increased from 8.0 to 8.5.

Additional information/comments:

The developers are actually doing EXTREMELY well. Within just 3-4 months of released, they've already released 3 pretty fairly sized DLCS, 10 dollars each. They're all fairly enjoyable (except Mad Moxxi's underdome, only buy that if you're desperate for an ingame bank or if you want to play in a survival-mode like arena where you'll fight some REALLY tough battles. You don't get any exp for it, though you do get 1 Skill point per playthrough. It's made for those who want to actually kill things). The latest DLC, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, has proved to be the most expansive and greatest. In it, they've DRASTICALLY improved upon many of the previous flaws of the game. It continues the story from where it left off in the main game, and acts almost like a mini sequel. Right off the bat, you'll notice that they've improved story telling mechanics. If you're going to get any of the DLCS, get The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. It includes new weapons, vehicles, enemies, areas higher level caps and quests. It's simply jaw-dropping to know that Gearbox actually put in the effort to improve upon the game. Within a very short time span, Gearbox has patched up the buggy and broken game, and improved upon every aspect of it. Best of all, they were on time for all their releases, the first two DLCs came out within one month of each other, and just one month after the game was released. The third took a bit longer at two months, but it's understandable considering it was such a large one. Better yet, there is almost no other company that works on this astonishing pace of averaging 1 $10.00 USD DLC a month. 5/5 stars/2 Thumbs up to Gearbox, simply incredible work.

Borderlands is a bit difficult to run on older computers.

I currently use:

AMD anthlon 5200+ 2.71 GHz Dual Core
2 GB DDR2 RAM
HIS HD Radeon 4670 1GB GDDR3 128-bit IceQ

I can run the game on 1680 x 1050 with maxed ingame quality settings, but I get a few fps drops on some maps. The hardest map to run is probably that one giant highway map on DLC3. The performance on that map is pretty much bipolar. Standing in one spot and looking in one direction, my game will be PERFECTLY smooth, making a 180 degree turn causes my FPS to drop to unplayable rates. Any $600+ USD high performance computer should be able to run borderlands very playably. Depending on the price you spend, you might not be able to max it out and play perfectly smoothly, but you'll definitely be able to play it at a decent resolution with very smooth frame rate. Older computers will definitely struggle. Before I got my 4670 graphics card, I was using an Integrated HD Radeon 3300. With that card, I could play games like CSS, L4D, and TF2 with fair settings and pretty good frames for the most part. I couldn't max any games out, but I could play them on fair settings. But I could barely play the game on the VERY lowest settings. That should give you a fair idea of what you're getting your computer into. Although it claims to have mediocre system requirements, It's not very optimized. You'll want to squeeze as much FPS out of it as you can.