Borderlands Review - Xbox Gaming in South Africa

Welcome to the planet of Pandora. It might not look like much with its never ending sand plains, armies of carnivorous creatures and roving bands of bandits, but it's going to be your home for the next fifty hours or so. Somewhere along the line you just know that somebody at Gearbox must have taken a look at Bethesda's Fallout 3 and thought to themselves that making the shooting bits more fun and downplaying the dialogue and story bits of a straight laced RPG might just work, and wouldn't you believe it, it does!

Borderlands starts off with you as one of four treasure seekers arriving on Pandora to try and discover a fabled treasure trove of alien weaponry and wealth that's rumoured to be somewhere on the planet. Other than that, there's almost nothing else to the story for the remainder of the game and none of the character interaction that you might expect from an RPG. Here your gun does the talking and negotiating. Luckily for you it seems that almost every single gun ever imagined by anyone on this world has been brought to life in Borderlands. Every gun you come across on Pandora will have different stats for rate of fire, amount of damage, range, as well as possible elemental damage through incendiary, explosive or corrosive properties. Indeed, most of your game time will be spent deciding which of your guns to keep and which to sell.

As this is a roleplaying shooter you'll also be levelling up your character with each kill and mission you complete, and with each level you gain you get the chance to increase your character's stats with a selection of skills which are dependent on the class of your character. There's the soldier who specialises in general combat and healing, with the ability to deploy an automatic turret; there's the siren who can phasewalk (a fancy way of saying she goes into a stealth mode); there's the hunter who specialises in sniping and has a trained bird that can attack enemies; and finally there's the berserker who can go into a rage mode where he becomes invulnerable to damage and beats his foes to a pulp with his bare fists. While the roleplaying elements are fairly basic, they still allow you a degree of freedom in shaping your character to suit your particular style of play, and should you decide later you want to change everything, you can reconfigure your character's skills for a slight fee.

In each area of Borderlands you'll have a range of missions to complete, and while none of them are particularly exciting, when you hop into a co-op game with friends, they become downright fantastic. The game allows your friends to drop in and out of your game seamlessly and will scale the enemies and difficulty to match the number of players and their levels ensuring that games are never too easy or difficult, as long as you and your friends are more or less the same level. In a co-op game the difference between the various character classes becomes evident with the berserker excelling as a front line tank and the sniper dealing damage from afar. The teamwork and constant chatter with your teammates means that you'll lose all track of time while playing and that's a sign of a well made game. The fun of a co-op game does highlight the limits of the single player game though, with no story or real character interaction to speak of, and I found myself somewhat bored traversing Pandora by myself.

What some of you might not be aware of is that Borderlands originally had a more realistic art style, and it was only late in development that it was decided that Borderlands should rather change to a more illustrative art style, similar to that of cel-shading. It was a real savvy decision as Borderlands' art style is unique and slightly reminiscent of Crackdown which manages to steer it away from looking as desolate as the Capital Wastelands from Fallout 3. The characters and environments all look great, with many of the enemies you encounter looking suitably insane or evil, with the shotgun toting midgets looking especially hilarious as they topple over from the recoil of their own shotgun. The designers have also done a good job of staving off boredom by changing up the environments to break up the tedium of Pandora's prominent sand plains. The soundtrack is the perfect companion to your travels and strikes an interesting Western vibe to match the wild west feel of Pandora. Other than that, the only other sounds you hear will be your weapons and the cries of your enemies, all of which sound the part.

Shooting your way through thousands upon thousands of creatures, people and miscellaneous objects never gets tiring, and with the addition of a well thought out co-op system, there are tens, if not hundreds of hours awaiting you on the planet of Pandora. This is one game I can recommend to both shooter and RPG fans, and it's definitely one of the most entertaining and well made games to come out in 2009.

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