Borderlands

By: Patrick Lighthall

Tuesday January 19, 2010

Borderlands throws gamers into the hectic and beautiful world of Pandora.  Choosing one of the four unique mercenaries, you step off the bus and embark on a break-neck journey through Pandora to uncover scientific secrecy and war-torn legend.  The beautiful (although, admittedly, often tan or beige) world of Pandora uncovers a fresh and wild ride that is worth playing over and over again.

Starting your quest as a mercenary with a unique set of skills, you slowly upgrade weapons and abilities as you uncover the world of Pandora and the fun characters inhabiting it.  Borderlands provides a wonderfully unique gaming experience with unique friends, enemies, and weapons.  Small spunky robots will guide you to different missions, “doctors” will help you find the right shields and health, and colorful characters around the Pandora world will offer guidance and missions to complete.

There is an astonishing amount of depth in Borderlands.  From the thousands of guns, shields, weapons, upgrades, and modification choices, gamers will be able to play Borderlands several times through with a completely new experience.  The most exciting part of Borderlands is that the game play is so addicting you’ll want to play through again and again with all the different mercenaries and unlocking all the elements provided.  The soldier will throw his specialized turret into the firefight, while the hunter will combine his sniper skills and burning hawk to take down enemies.  Each character brings their own flare, firepower, and twist on a beautifully destructive world.

Borderlands creates an environment completely unique.  You will scour for loot in the harsh barren lands of Rust Commons and the rebuilt New Haven.  You will encounter enemies with upgraded armor and serious firepower, or shoot at various flying and crawling insects creeping across the world.  Each new location in Pandora gives you another unique challenge at using your mercenary’s skills to take down whatever heads your way.

The game play of Borderlands is overall refreshing and rewarding.  Shotguns will crack with delicious ferocity, and sniper bullets will slide from your rifle with amazing accuracy and precision.  You will often feel rewarded after taking down a particularly troublesome enemy.

This isn’t to say, however, that Borderlands is perfect.  Some of the missions are repetitive and ask you to accomplish a new version of the exact same thing.  Other times, finding the last missing piece of the item you need for a mission will be extremely difficult.  The waypoint system only shows the item’s general area, and you have no reason to believe that it’s sitting on top of the tall roof or buried in the burning tire one hundred feet away.  Also, you will have to pick up loot all the time.  You will spend just as much time sifting through gobs of loot as you do actually taking down the enemies.  The final setback is the average ending, which answers little (if any) questions, and leaves much of the game open-ended with little satisfaction.

These setbacks put a damper on what is otherwise a fun and rewarding gaming experience.  You will want to revisit your character after the game has ended and get into your second “playthrough” for even better loot and bigger enemies.  Borderlands is definitely worth the purchase, and hopefully they will come out with another installment that can give avid players more answers and even more fun game play.