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Borderlands
PC (Steam)
17 Million Useless Guns
3.5/5 stars
“Borderlands,” indeed ANY FPS, is not a game that I typically give a second glance, thanks to the fact that most of them are so similar that even their screen shots tend to blur together into a nightmare of brown and gray environments populated by huge, burly dude-men shooting each other. Having already played the non-DLC-enhanced PlayStation 3 version of the game, fellow MeltedJoystick staffer Chris assured the rest of the MeltedJoystick crew that “Borderlands” is the best FPS of the 7th Generation and that the recently-released sequel, “Borderlands 2,” would be a perfect co-op game for us to play during our weekly sessions. Between Chris and several other friends salivating over the sequel, I decided that a Steam sale during which a 4-pack of the Game of the Year Edition of the original “Borderlands” came out to $6 a piece would be the perfect opportunity for the non-FPS fans among us to dip our toes into the “Borderlands” franchise without dropping $50 for the sequel and an additional $40 for its season pass. If “Borderlands” proved itself, the sequel would be a shoe-in for later.
Presentation
Regardless of what anyone might think of the game as a whole, “Borderlands” stands out from the crowd of samey-looking FPSes under even cursory appraisal due to its unique art direction. Built on the Unreal Engine, “Borderlands” features cartoony textures and stylized polygon models with slightly thickened outlines, giving the impression of a cell-shaded game without actually being cell-shaded. The overall effect is striking and aesthetically pleasing, especially when compared to other FPSes that obsess over realism to the point of burying themselves in mud at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley. Unfortunately, all is not perfect with “Borderlands’” graphics: It seems that the game couldn’t pull far enough away from its FPS brethren to include more colors than brown and gray. The environments, characters, and enemies are all covered in delightfully cartoony… earth tones, which causes things to blend together and become difficult to see at a distance, even when looking through a high-powered scope. “Borderlands” also suffers from low quality textures, which would naturally be a limitation on consoles, yet are still present in the PC version. There are numerous instances of signs and writing on various walls throughout the game world that should be legible, especially when viewed through a sniper scope, yet upon actually doing so are revealed to be blurry, pixilated, and completely illegible. Any development team that is going to put high-powered magnifiers in their game should expect players to look at things through them and prepare the texture quality accordingly. Of course, when viewed at a normal distance, the textures in the game look great and complete the illusion of playing in a comic-book world.
And it is a HUGE comic-book world! The environments in “Borderlands” are expansive and filled with all manner of interesting nooks and crannies to explore, and are populated with large numbers of enemies, though sadly there is little diversity among enemies, outside of bandits, soldiers, and a few species of native wildlife. The polygon models are smooth, and enemies are well animated. Townsfolk, however, have terrible lip-synch for their spoken lines and frequently don’t move anything besides their heads. There are also only a handful of townsfolk models, which makes everyone look alike. Of course, it’s really disconcerting that almost everyone in the game in a man. The number of female characters in the game is miniscule, and there are almost no female enemies. I’m guessing there are no female bandits because the men either ate them or raped them to death, then ate them… but that’s beside the point. The unique characters that do exist in the game all look really interesting and have a lot of visual personality. The unfortunate thing is that several of these unique characters only appear in the DLC add-on missions, leaving the base game with a handful of unique characters to interact with along with a number of named NPCs who look exactly like every other generic townsman.
The sound in “Borderlands” is a fairly mixed bag. The soundtrack is nothing to get excited about, featuring mostly muted ambient music that bursts into a more dramatic flair when a dangerous enemy appears. The voiceacting, on the other hand, is spectacular, bringing even more personality to the unique characters in the game and bringing to life the game’s annoying mascot robot, Claptrap. The sound effects in the game could definitely benefit from better use of stereo or surround sound, and enemies need to make more noise as they move, such as growling and/or footsteps. There were numerous times that I found myself getting surprise attacked by short melee enemies that had snuck up on me completely silently, and the lack of good stereo/surround makes it difficult to tell the relative direction of enemies that do make a lot of continuous noise. Some of the weapon sound effects are unimpressive as well, such as revolvers that sound like someone slamming an aluminum storm door and submachine guns that sound like a lawnmower running over a coffee can full of bolts.
Technically, “Borderlands” is reasonably solid… for a PC game. However, it can be prone to randomly crashing, freezing on load screens, and networking loss… like any PC game. It also has a few special glitches all to itself, though, such as quests that refuse to complete for one player in a multi-player session, quests that complete for everyone in a multi-player session even if one person doesn’t qualify, and a problem with marking multiple quest objectives at the same time. That last one seems to be an intentional ‘feature’ rather than a bug, but it’s really annoying to only have one objective marked in a quest with multiple simultaneous objectives, especially when finding and activating the objectives out of order can cause the map markers to just give up and stop marking any objectives besides the next one in order (which may already be gone).
Story
“Borderlands” is the story of four friends (?) who travel from Earth (?) to the frontier planet, Pandora, in order to search for a legendary alien Vault supposedly filled with enough alien technology to make whomever finds it stupidly rich. These friends are Roland, an ex-soldier and token black guy, who actually is one of the most positive portrayals of a black man I’ve ever seen in a game; Mordecai, a scrawny loner in a bondage mask with a ridiculous goatee, pet bird, and a sniper rifle; Lilith, a beautiful redheaded woman with paranormal abilities and half of her body covered in tattoos; and finally Brick… a gigantic slab of walking meat that grunts.
My initial exposure to “Borderlands” was at the behest of fellow MeltedJoystick staffer Chris, who wanted help getting the co-op trophies on the PS3 version. Knowing my disdain for FPSes, he suggested I play as Brick, since he ‘gains an ability that lets him regenerate,’ while failing to point out that this ability also forces him to fight hand-to-hand (in essence, bringing a knuckle sandwich to a gunfight). This early exposure to “Borderlands” through Brick made me strongly dislike the game… as Brick is just absolutely horrible and irredeemable in every way. He’s big, he’s dumb, he says stupid things, he gets in the way, he’s a massive target, he gets stuck going through tight gaps: He is the very model of a generic FPS hero and representative of most things I hate about the genre. Of course, since the entire MeltedJoystick crew chose a different character for our online co-op playthrough, we assigned Brick to the latecomer to the first session. Out of the other characters, all of them are redeeming in some way, though I find Lilith (the character I played) and Mordecai (the character Chris played) to be superior in both personality and skillset.
Unfortunately, outside of the quips they say in battle and upon finding loot, the characters in “Borderlands” don’t have a whole lot of personality. This lack of personality is caused primarily by the fact that there are no dialog trees when talking to NPCs – the player characters just take quests as they become available and do as they’re told, no questions asked. There are plenty of supporting characters that are well developed, however, like Scooter the greasemonkey, Marcus Kincaid the fat Russian busdriver/armsdealer, and Mad Moxxi the slutty arena mistress. I found myself becoming far more attached to these NPCs during the course of the game than I ever did to the characters we were playing. While I know it’s too late for “Borderlands 2,” I would love it if “Borderlands 3” had Scooter, Marcus, Moxxi, and another NPC from the original “Borderlands” as the playable cast.
Outside of the characters, the world of “Borderlands” seems to have a lot going for it. It’s a quasi-post-apocalyptic setting on a planet where corporate raiding installed just enough infrastructure to attract settlers, before the corporate overlords pulled out and freed their forced-labor force of condemned criminals to descend upon the population of law abiding settlers. Unfortunately, the only lore to be gleaned about the game world comes from NPC audio logs. While these are interesting, and do a decent job of sharing lore that relates directly to the characters’ quest for the Vault, the amount of lore is lacking overall and leaves a whole lot of holes. This lack of lore in-game is really strange when compared to the ridiculously huge amount of lore and explanations of every facet of the game world that can be found on the “Borderlands” Wiki page. Where do the people who write those Wiki articles find their information? Is this extraneous lore locked away in the official “Borderlands” strategy guide? I would have enjoyed the game much more had I known more about how humans came to colonize space, how the massive gun corporations came to take over human government, and what kind of ecology the planet Pandora has outside of arid badlands and arid hills.
The main narrative for “Borderlands” is, itself, not particularly interesting, though at times reveals glimpses of a rather dark sense of humor. The story involves the four Vault Hunters taking a bus from somewhere (perhaps the landing pad for the transport spaceship?) to a run-down rural town called Fyrestone where bandits and dog-like wildlife called skags have killed most of the residents. The Vault Hunters are guided in their quest by a mysterious blue woman who appears to them in visions by hacking their embedded computers (like Google Glass, except sub-dermal). Starting with some do-gooding, the Vault Hunters soon find themselves hot on the trail of a Vault Key that will conveniently open the Vault they seek once every 200 years… and they just so happen to be on Pandora at exactly the right time. After ingratiating themselves with the Pandoran colonists, killing huge swaths of Pandoran bandits, and running afoul of the Crimson Lance, a private army of space marine wannabes controlled by one of the world-dominating weapon manufacturers, the Vault Hunters assemble the key and find their just reward. There is very little of excitement or interest that happens through the course of this base story, and the entire thing can be completed in a few hours… minus all the side quests, of course. In order to stretch its length and possibly slip in a tiny bit of extra lore that doesn’t really help detail the game world, “Borderlands” has dozens of side quests that pop-up in each major area of the game world. Unfortunately, these quests don’t all pop-up at the same time, which merely results in the Vault Hunters having to trudge across a huge area looking for something, only to report back and receive another quest to trudge across the same area looking for something ELSE that was there the entire time, but not flagged for character interaction until a subsequent quest has been accepted. This quest structure leads to a lot of replaying through the same areas… and is a crystal clear example of a little problem in game design called ‘padding.’
However, all is not lost in the realm of narrative in “Borderlands,” as there are four DLC packs available for the game. While “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot” is just a glorified battle arena and item storage bank with no story whatsoever, the other three DLCs feature much better writing, more developed NPCs, more interesting side quests (as well as a few really terrible ‘collect x items’ side quests), and a full embrace of the dark sense of humor that occasionally peaked through the gaps in the base game. “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” is a horror spoof in which the employees of the Jakob’s Corporation’s gun factory on Pandora become infected with a zombie plague that turns 97% of the population undead. It’s up to the Vault Hunters to help the bumbling Dr. Ned (who is definitely not Dr. Zed from the main story with a fake mustache taped to his air filter mask) deal with the plague he unleashed through a vaccination program gone awry. “The Secret Armory of General Knoxx” is perhaps the largest DLC expansion and involves a rogue Crimson Lance agent seeking the help of the Vault Hunters to chase the main force of Crimson Lance mercenaries lead by the depressed, overworked, underpaid General Knoxx (whose audio logs ended up being my absolute favorite parts of the entire game) off of Pandora. “Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution” is the story of a Ninja Assassin Claptrap dispatched to Pandora by one of the corporations to kill the Vault Hunters, only to go rogue upon seeing the poor treatment of the ubiquitous Claptrap robots all over the planet. With the tables turned, the corporation that once tried to use the Ninja Assassin Claptrap to kill the Vault Hunters must now hire the Vault Hunters to kill the Ninja Assassin Claptrap. All of these DLC scenarios, outside of “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot,” are far more interesting, entertaining, and flat-out hilarious than the straight-forward treasure hunt in the base game’s story. The DLC also serves to expand the length of the game by a huge amount… unfortunately a lot of the extra length provided in the DLCs is due to the fact that there are no fast travel destinations in the DLC areas, forcing the Vault Hunters to walk or drive everywhere.
Gameplay
“Borderlands” is a pretty cut-and-dry FPS. In the PC version, the character can be controlled with either a mouse and keyboard or with any compatible console controller, though players using the controller don’t actually get button prompt labeled with their controller’s buttons, but instead simply get the same generic labels as keyboard and mouse players (which can lead to a LOT of initial confusion about how to control the game). In my case, I used a custom Razer Hydra control profile, and it worked gloriously. As a cut-and-dry FPS, “Borderlands” allows characters to carry equip a small number of weapons into a ‘load-out’, and switch quickly between them. Characters (and, helpfully, enemies) have a health meter and a shield meter, and the screen flashes red on any side from which a character receives damage. The shield meter refills after a short delay after avoiding damage, while health doesn’t regenerate unless a character gains that ability through one of their skills or by equipping a health-regenerating shield. There are many types of guns available, with each type drawing its own type of bullets from a series of separate ammo stores. When not walking around shooting enemies, the characters can frequently hop into a dune-buggy-like vehicle and drive, either to a quest destination or straight into combat.
Where “Borderlands” differs from other FPSes is in the attempt by Gearbox to hybridize the game with its polar opposite genre, the RPG. Unfortunately, Gearbox didn’t add very many elements from real RPGs, but instead appropriated a lot of mechanics from that redheaded bastard stepchild of RPG subgenres, the loot-driven Hack ‘n Slash. As such, each character in “Borderlands” has a single ‘action skill’ that serves as an analog for the cooldown-based special abilities common to all “Diablo” clones. Roland summons a Crimson Lance turret that shoots independently and can regenerate the health and ammo of nearby allies. Mordecai summons his pet bird, Bloodwing, to swoop into enemies and rake them with its talons. Lilith phaseshifts, becoming invisible and invincible to enemies for a brief time while gaining the ability to run really fast, regenerate health, and cause small amounts of damage. Then there’s poor Brick who runs around screaming, punching things, and regenerating (but also regenerating less than the damage he takes running up and swinging at bandits with guns). The interesting thing is that ALL of the characters’ action skills have some form of health regeneration attached, which seems to indicate that they are meant as a way to pull a character’s fat out of the fire.
As characters kill enemies, they gain experience, both for their overall character level and for their individual weapon type proficiencies. Levels in “Borderlands” wouldn’t really matter very much if it wasn’t for the fact that a difference of 5 levels (I think… it might be 10) between a character and an enemy is all it takes for a fight to be a cake walk or impossible. At that 5-level breaking point, lower level characters/enemies deal negligible damage while higher level characters/enemies deal overwhelming damage. Thus it’s possible for a level 20 character to mow down dozens of level 15 bandits without any difficulty, while a level 15 character will have to unload large amounts of ammo into a level 20 enemy to kill it. This weird mechanic can be seen incredibly early in the game by visiting “The Secret Armory of General Knoxx” DLC and opening a refrigerator in a hidden room that always contains a level 61 midget. Up until about level 55, characters can lure this midget onto a catwalk and snipe at him from safety (since he’s a melee midget)… but the characters will NEVER kill him because he can somehow endure having hundreds of sniper shells embedded directly into his brain without even losing a fragment of his health meter. In essence, the leveling system in “Borderlands” doesn’t really serve a purpose outside of allowing characters to equip higher level equipment (which, naturally, has better stats), providing them with a small health bump at each level, and providing them with a skill point at each level after level 5 to dump into a small variety of passive abilities that improve their action skill or provide some other minor boost. Personally, I would have much preferred the game to just stick with static character stats and offer skill points upon completing segments of the game or quests, action/adventure style.
Of course, the biggest Hack ‘n Slash RPG addition to “Borderlands” is the random loot. I have never been attracted to random loot games, and upon recently completing “Torchlight 2” with the MeltedJoystick crew, can officially declare that I really don’t like the luck-based aspects of that sub-genre. “Borderlands” is just as loot-driven as any Hack ‘n Slash (though the random number generator is significantly more generous than any of the games I’ve played in that sub-genre). Each character can equip up to four weapons, a shield, a grenade mod (which causes the character’s grenades to have different effects), and a class mod (which acts like a generic ‘magic item’ and gives the character percentage-based boosts to up to two wildly variable gameplay statistics and skill point boosts up to +4 to up to 3 different passive skills. The Gearbox developers seem to revel in the fact that “Borderlands” has over 17 million available guns (not all are guns, however)… what they fail to tell their customers is that nearly all 17 million of those guns are worthless. Since characters level-up, every item in the game can come at any given level. Finding a great weapon (following the standard Hack ‘n Slash and MMO color scheme of white, green, blue, purple, orange) at an early level only leads to frustration as that weapon loses effectiveness against higher level enemies, but an equivalent with the same non-damage stats is nowhere to be found. The way the random weapon generation system in “Borderlands” works is by randomly picking weapon parts from a small pool for each type of weapon manufactured by each corporation. Thus there are very definitely weapons that can be called ‘the best’ of each type, and finding one, only to have it outleveled and having to replace it with a crappy substitute of a higher level, is no fun. The fact that loot levels only affect damage for weapons and capacity for shields means that a player needs to rely on the game’s random number generator to essentially make lightning strike twice to get a great weapon again at a higher level. And the non-damage stats that lead to wanting to hold onto a weapon forever aren’t meaningless: “Borderlands” uses an accuracy mechanic that determines the size of the player’s target reticule based on the accuracy of their weapon’s accuracy stat. I hate inaccurate guns, so I always want to hold onto my super accurate, high-powered scope-bearing guns forever, especially when they have legendary (orange) parts that give them unique properties and generally high-quality parts that minimize penalties.
If “Borderlands” were a better game with tighter weapon design, 90% of the weapon parts wouldn’t exist because they just flat-out suck, giving penalties to damage, massive amounts of recoil, horrendous accuracy, or abysmally long reload times. The good parts offer bonuses that seem even bigger when taking into consideration that the bonus is not only a bonus but a lack of a penalty. In such a hypothetical version of the game, weapons would level with their owners or perhaps could be leveled-up by paying money at one of the game’s ubiquitous weapon vending machines. In a perfect world, I would have liked to see “Borderlands” incorporate a complete weapon breakdown and customization system that might allow a player who randomly finds a weapon with a legendary (orange) part to keep that part forever and attach it to a new weapon of the same type instead of just selling the whole weapon and replacing it with a different randomly-assembled piece of junk. How awesome would it be to collect a hoard of different legendary sniper rifles only to combine all of their legendary parts into one high-level death-from-afar-dealing machine?! It would be the equivalent of “Armored Core’s” mecha customization, only for small arms. Considering how the weapons in “Borderlands” are assembled by the random number generator, the underpinnings for such a customization system already exist… yet instead of taking this route, Gearbox opted to tickle the addiction centers of loot whores who will click through the same Hack ‘n Slash and MMO dungeons over and over in the vain hope of finding something better than what they already have.
And it’s not like it’s possible to just completely ignore the random loot system and use whatever junk guns one might come across. The difference between a ‘good’ purple or orange gun and a ‘craptastic’ white or green gun is the difference between headshots killing an appropriate-leveled enemy with one bullet rather than two or three. The difference between a ‘good’ purple shield and a ‘worthless’ white shield is a significant number of hits from appropriate-leveled enemies. I’m not even sure why Gearbox bothered to put any shields in the game besides the three kinds that regenerate health (with only the Panacea Shields being truly useful), as every other kind of shield is a complete waste of a loot drop.
Overall
“Borderlands” is a distinctive looking FPS with a unique setting that actually has something of a story to drive the action and intriguing, though well-hidden, lore. Between the solid shooting, shield, and skill mechanics and the DLC stories that continually get better, the Game of the Year Edition of this game provides a lot of entertainment value, either alone or online with a group of friends. The RPG mechanics, however, are poorly chosen and sorely out of place in a game that would have benefitted from more weapon customization and less reliance on levels and random drops. While the game still has plenty of flaws, it also does enough right that it’s fun to play – though the ability to play the PC version with a Razer Hydra automatically makes me hate any FPS about 60% less. Gearbox’s new IP is a solid effort that needs a bit more polish and a bit less hybridization… but I’ll definitely come back for the sequel… once the Game of the Year Edition is $10, that is!
Presentation: 4/5
Story:
Base Game: 2/5
Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot: 0.5/5
The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned: 3.5/5
The Secret Armory of General Knoxx: 5/5
Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution: 4.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5 (extra 0.5 bonus for PC version due to Razer Hydra compatibility)
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
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