Borderlands

System: PC
Release Date: 2009
Published By: 2K Games
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

When you first start Borderlands, it treats you to a music video. This is a horrible device that bad people use because they don't understand that, unlike movies, people play video games. Fortunately, this time around, the music video is fairly short, and the song isn't unstoppably awful. I mean, it's not exactly good, but it's not the song from Kingdom Hearts either. I'll take it. Before too long, the music video gets cut off and some creepy chick starts talking at you in your head about finding the Vault and how it's your destiny, and I keep waiting for the part where she tells you to go destroy the Hoover Dam.

The Vault, you see, is a mythical place left behind by the Eridians, who used to be aliens and now apparently are dead. Nobody knows if the Vault is real -- except the player, of course, who knows perfectly well that the game wouldn't be making such a big deal of it if it didn't exist. The player probably also knows exactly what's in the Vault. I won't spoil it here, but, seriously, have you played a video game before? Then you know exactly what's in the damn Vault.

That's pretty much the story. Find the Vault. It's about as much story as the game needs, though; it's nice of Gearbox not to overdo the talky-man bits in a game that, fundamentally, is about shooting the hell out of people and getting phat lewtz. Borderlands plays like a cross between an arcade-style FPS -- not something highly tactical like Half-Life or survival-horror-y like Bioshock, but something like Serious Sam where there are just tons of mobs attacking you all the time and you spray ammo everywhere -- and a dungeon crawling loot piñata like Diablo. You head out into the wastes and shoot a lot of dudes, and then they leave behind all manner of guns and things for you to collect.

The guns themselves are highly varied, and are definitely the game's greatest strength; there are several different base types and a rarity scale you're perfectly familiar with if you've played World of Warcraft (or, really, any other game since World of Warcraft). There are lots of different potential modifications on the guns, and so chances are you'll find a gun that suits you without too much trouble. Each of the four classes specialises in certain types of gun, but there's nothing restricting you from using a different type -- some of your talents may not apply to the new gun is all.

The talents are fairly interesting. Starting at level 5, you get a point each level, and spend it in one of three trees. Just like in World of Warcraft, you need five points spent in any given rank before you can take any talents in that tree's next rank. Interestingly, almost all talents in Borderlands are passive; every character's first talent (at level 5) is that class' active ability, and everything else is a passive modifier. This eliminates a potential source of clutter, since the number of buttons you need to use stays very small, but the amount of potential variation in effect stays high. The downside is that, given the differences in player talent selection skill and the high variation in potential gear quality, the game becomes exceedingly difficult to balance; Gearbox has gone the "soft" route and balanced the game around a relatively low level of character development, which is probably preferable to, say, Diablo 2's expectation of extreme min-maxing.

Gearbox clearly has no confidence in the game's funny dialogue, which is okay with me, since this funny dialogue is not deserving of confidence. The level of quality of these jokes is about on par with routines you worked out with your friends when you were fifteen (just me? I can live with that), and the direction is ham-fisted and focuses on calling attention to the punchlines at any cost. I can picture the director saying to the voice actors "bigger! More emphatic! Make that joke obvious!" The end result, of course, is jokes that are almost painfully unfunny, and just sort of make you a little bit embarassed for everybody involved. There are a few genuinely funny moments -- most of which are provided by Marcus, the arms dealer -- but, for the most part, the dialogue falls completely flat.

The game has a highly unusual visual style, with thick outlines around pretty much everything, that makes it look almost like a comic book, or perhaps almost like it's half cel-shaded. The down side is that, while the outlines themselves are striking, the game is overpoweringly brown. Exceedingly brown. Here, off the top of my head, is the list of locations you'll travel through in Borderlands: desert, desert, desert canyon, cave in the desert, fort in the desert, desert canyon, junkyard, rust heap, junkyard, junkyard, rusty beach with brown water, desert, salt flats, fortress, snowfield, snowy cave, snowfield. The change to snowfield at the end of the game is hilariously abrupt -- apparently, on Pandora, the desert and the tundra just straight-up abut one another -- and the all-white levels will really seem like a breath of fresh air after all that brown.

Overall, Borderlands is a pretty straightforward game. If the idea of shooting a lot of bullets and getting phat epix appeals to you, well, you'll probably like it. If not, you probably won't. I think it's pretty excellent, myself, even if it does have that one horrible goddamn vehicle boss that is absolutely no fun at all.

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