Borderlands Hands-On Impressions
We finally get our hands on Borderlands and spend our time punching midgets in the face, searching for hidden treasure, and tracking down a man missing a toe.
Gearbox Software is calling Borderlands the product of a marriage between two of the video games industry's mainstay genres: the role-playing game and the first-person shooter. Dubbed the "role-playing shooter," the game cherry picks the best gameplay aspects of both categories with the goal of creating fun, twitch first-person action with skill trees, tiered abilities, and the lust for filthy lucre.
To do this, the team at Gearbox has taken features normally found in dungeon crawlers and massively multiplayer online games--notably the scale of the world and the desire to clamber for loot--and thrown them into the mix with tried-and-true shooter mechanics. Though the game's stylized visuals will certainly catch your eye, digging a little deeper reveals multiple character classes, carefully tweaked skill trees, and guns. Lots of guns. We recently had the chance to take the game for a spin and get hands-on with a work-in-progress build of the single-player and multiplayer modes on the Xbox 360 and found that this is no ordinary run-and-gun game.
Borderlands puts you in the role of one of four vault hunters searching for elusive alien technology found on the planet Pandora. We don't blame you if your mind begins conjuring up images of a few games that have gone before--including a certain Bethesda game released last year. The team at Gearbox is open about having drawn inspiration from many of the seminal games within the two genres and takes pride in including elements from them during the shaping of the project.
The beginning is always the most logical place to start, and though our build had been stripped of the game's opening cinematics--which we were told will reveal detailed background information about exactly what's going on--once loaded, we found ourselves alone and thrust into a dusty, barren world. It was apparent from the outset that this dustbowl--replete with salvaged shanty towns--was a tad on the unsavoury side, and as tumbleweed rolled past, the muted colour palette of browns, reds, and grays only further amplified the sense of isolation and desperation needed to survive in this postapocalyptic world. This year's E3 saw the announcement that the game would move away from its realistic graphics for something the team is calling "concept art" visuals. The style is striking and gives characters and environmental objects thick black borders but stops short of a cartoon look.
As we scanned the sandy horizon, we began to hear a high-pitched mechanical voice beckoning us. It was then that we realised despite its forsaken facade, Borderlands isn't nearly as lonely as we thought. A short jog toward the makeshift community introduced us to Claptrap, a seemingly good-natured robotic character with more than a few passing similarities to WALL-E and Jhonen Vasquez's GIR character from the short-lived Nickelodeon animated series, Invader Zim. Claptrap gave us the guided tour of the area, and as we ducked and weaved our way through narrow corridors of cliff-face and hopped over corrugated steel barricades, we were given glimpses of some of the other residents of Borderlands, including leather and armoured bandits driving souped-up Max Max-esque vehicles. Claptrap's role is as much comedic relief as guide, and when he's shot during an ambush while attempting to open a gate for us, he mourns his leaking fluids.
Here in the town, we were introduced to the game's shooting and navigation mechanics. Anyone who has played a shooter in the past few years will instantly be at home with the left-trigger controls used for weapon iron sights (or scopes if available) and the right-trigger controls used to fire. Weapon damage straddles the line between FPSs and RPGs because the game will call on two specific factors to determine your hits and misses. The first is your weapon accuracy skill, which can be upgraded via your skill tree and raises as you level your character. The second is your proficiency with particular weapon types; like weapon skill points in RPGs, these increase with continued use of an item. Gearbox reps on hand pointed out that while each weapon subclass has its own proficiency metering system (pistols, rifles, shotguns, and the like), hits and misses are not determined by a "dice roll" system.
Procedural weapon creation in Borderlands has long been a talking point for the game. Rather than creating a set of standard weapons--such as a single pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, or alien technology weapon--and taking a page out of the Diablo and World of Warcraft books, weapons are dynamically generated as you play. For this to work, each weapon type has been fed a set of variables that are randomly combined to create an object, and while they may appear physically similar given their finite number of materials and finishes, it's unlikely you'll come across two of the same item with identical stats. During our play, we saw weapons that appeared similar but had vastly different properties, such as a run-of-the-mill sniper rifle and one that fired incendiary rounds.
Ammunition in the single-player portion of the game seemed reasonably plentiful, and while picking up bullets from dead bodies should give you enough to keep moving, you'll be encouraged to scavenge to find extra booty throughout the environment. Quest items, ammo, and cash glow to indicate their presence in the world, and short vertical pillars of light help you quickly locate objects dropped by fallen enemies. When you get close enough to an object, all you do is hit the X button to pick it up, and you can also hold the X button to sweep across groups of items to grab the lot. Though easy to spot, we had a little trouble picking up objects because we found we needed to be standing right on top of them and looking directly at them to register.
325 Comments
Borderlands Quick Links
Summary | Reviews | News | Previews & Features | Images | Videos | Downloads | Answers | Hints & Cheats | Forum | Check Prices
- GameSpot Score8.5great
Check Prices: $39.99 – 49.99
Content you might like…
-
Borderlands Updated Hands-On - Exclusive Look at Shooting, Gaining Levels, and Exploring the Wasteland
We finally got our hands on this desert wasteland-based role-playing/shooter hybrid. After blasting some bandits, gaining some levels, and picking up a whole bunch of ammo, we have much to report.
- Sep 14, 2009
Users who looked at this article also looked at these content items.
Related Content
-
Dark Void Mixed Combat I Movie
Check out some of the different combat styles in Dark Void!
- Nov 30, 2009
Matches based on text similarity.
Images
Related Unions
- 2K Games
- Gearbox Software
- Sci-Fi First-Person...
- Release: Oct 26, 2009 »
- ESRB: Mature
Games you may like…
-
Torchlight
(PC) -
Left 4 Dead 2
(PC) -
Machinarium
(PC) -
METRO 2033
(PC) -
Left 4 Dead
(PC)
Users who looked at content for this game also looked at these games.
See More Similar Games
peterfaj posted Aug 22, 2009 1:43 pm PT (does not meet display criteria. sign in to show)