REVIEWED – Borderlands

Title:  Borderlands
Platform:  Xbox 360
Developer:  Gearbox Software
Publisher:  2K Games
Reviewed By:  zerothma
SCORE:  B-

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Borderlands is a game developed by Gearbox Software. It has a hard time fitting into a single genre, but focuses on multiplayer, both offline and online.

Storyline
The story is nothing really special. Nor does it fail. It takes on sort of a treasure hunt aspect, as the main point is to find the ultimate hidden treasure aptly named, “The Vault.” It sort of reminds me of One Piece, in that everybody “sets sail” for the ultimate hidden treasure. Though, in Borderlands, everybody gets out on foot (and eventually vehicle) and runs n’ guns their way to the treasure. So, that’s the sort of general premise as to why everyone is killing each other. Strangely enough, nobody actually seems to know what is actually in The Vault. You (as the main character) receive some sort of divine guidance from a seemingly disembodied talking head that appears to probably only you. Aside from that, The Vault can only be opened once every 200 years, and that time just happens to be very near. So you go from place to place trying to find and unlock The Vault. I always figured you’d find the people from Fallout in The Vault, but I won’t ruin the surprise for you.

Overall, the storyline seems pretty standard, nothing too out of the ordinary. You can clearly tell that they put effort into it. Though, I can imagine that much of the effort is overlooked. For instance, who really reads the text before and after you finish a quest? The game is probably much more in depth than even I realize, but map markers seem to do much of the quest work for me, so I (and probably many other people) just overlook most of the quest related text. It’s a shame really. The effort is evident, but probably overlooked.

Gameplay
Gameplay is the most important part of almost every game, so I had to take a long hard look at it. I found that much of the gameplay is glitchy, which is to be expected of massive and lengthy games. But quite honestly, I’ve found about half as many glitches in this game as I have in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. That is to say, this game has a ton of glitches. Luckily for the people playing this game, most of these glitches don’t really harm the overall gameplay. Glitches are just a sea of annoyance in this otherwise great game.

So first, allow me to talk about the good. This game combines popular themes from the extremely over-manufactured genre, commonly referred to as FPS (meaning First Person Shooter), with that of the also heavily over-done standard RPG (meaning Role Playing Game). In other words, if you combine say, Diablo with Fallout, mix it up a bit, add some individuality, and give it a different graphic style, you’d come out with something similar to this game.

Gameplay, in general, is you going around and completing quests. You get experience, level up, and get to spend points on your skill tree. These are all derived from standard RPGs. But while doing those things, you will be finding massive amounts of loot in the form of guns. This game is centered around using guns to take down enemies in typical FPS format. You get most of the aspects of RPG’s implemented on the guns as well. For example, you get status effects, firing rate upgrades, etc. that are already on your gun when you find it.

Things get even more fun (usually) when you play splitscreen. This game actually allows you to play the main story with another player offline. The second player doesn’t get royally shafted like in Fable 2, which is something to get excited about. Though, I do still find two player to be just a bit underdeveloped. Despite that, offline splitscreen of this caliber is rarely found in games these days, and that fact alone is what got me to buy this game. So you can imagine my disappointment that you cannot go online with two profiles at the same time. So if you and your brother both want to play online with your friend and his girlfriend, you are going to need 4 Xbox 360’s, 4 Borderlands, 4 Xbox Live etc. This is a major downfall for a game that so heavily relies on multiplayer aspects.

Finally on to the glitches. There are a ton of glitches, like I previously stated. Most of them seem like easy fixes and no-brainers. Hopefully downloadable content or updates will take care of much of this. Some of the most frequent and annoying glitches I’ve encountered have to do with reloading. Using one of the four provided character classes, I chose one that has an ability to increase the clip size in his own guns. However, every time I exit a vehicle, I have to reload my gun so that it holds full ammo, as if my clip size decreases while riding in the vehicle. More than that, I have sort of an aura that also increases not only my own clip size, but my partners as well. Unfortunately for them, they have to reload every single time they switch weapons in order to get the full clips worth.

You might think I’m being nit-picky. Well, I’ve walked through terrain, fallen out of the game map, gone inside enemy spawns because they forgot to put invisible barriers up, walked into invisible walls that clearly shouldn’t be there, been stuck running really fast, seen floating items, seen floating dead (and stiff) bodies, quest that won’t let you complete them (forcing me to restart the game to finish them, and so much more. And don’t even get me started on the frame rate. This game is can be laggy in offline splitscreen. And it can mess with your controls.

Music/Sound FX
This music in the game seems appropriate enough, but really, not memorable at all. Usually when I think of a game I can recall at least one tune. After not having played the game for less than a day, I’m racking my brain, but absolutely cannot think of a single tune. The music is just not memorable. However, the voice acting is. This is a bad thing. I can easily recall quotes from the voice acting because the non-player characters love to repeat the exact same phrases over and over again. “This is where cars live! Get you one!” Throughout the entire game, every weapon , ammo, and healing shop use the same phrases. I know it’s supposed to be quirky and catchy, but it’s really just annoyance. It’s one of the times in video games where I prefer silence over the dialogue. And that’s just it, the voice actors are doing a fine job. But they have crap to work with, so it ruins their good job. Also the grunts and groans of a jumping/landing character is unrealistic and sound extremely inappropriate (just close your eyes and jump a couple times, you’ll see what I mean) and that particular sound effect happens all the time. Aside from that, the sound effects are just fine and are mostly appropriate, which is good.

Controls
There is not much to say here. The control scheme follows that of Call of Duty. The controls work, and they work well. You can change the look inversion and sensitivity as you see fit. Standard stuff, but good stuff. The only bad controls are those of the vehicle. The vehicle takes some getting used to. Speed coupled with bad controls make driving tough. But if Earth Defense Force 2017 has taught me anything, it’s that vehicles with bad controls can be tamed. The vehicle seems way too responsive, like the Warthog from Halo on speed (terrible pun intended). It also has a tendency to get stuck in the most inopportune places for seemingly no reason, forcing you to walk. It also likes to hit invisible jutting barriers, forcing your speed down to an automatic stand-still, like Need for Speed: Underground. Also, the button you hit to boost (left bumper) really feels like it should be left trigger, instead of the useless horn honk. Outside the vehicle, the controls work seemingly perfectly.

Graphics
I know people will have a huge gripe with the score in this section. Too bad. Honestly, the game has those weird cell shaded graphics sort of like in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I don’t find graphics like that to be “artsy” I find them to be ugly. The landscape itself looks pretty good for the most part. The character models (that you will be staring at for the whole game) look terrible. At one point in the game, there’s a guy who only opens a small slot on his front door, so you only see his face. His face never moves and looks like a badly made mask. What a poor excuse for a character. Also, some of the humanoid enemies look pretty bad too. But to be fair, some of the armored enemies do look pretty cool. A huge complaint of mine is that you don’t get to customize your character’s costume aside from changing the colors.

Summary
This game certainly has a lot of flaws. But it got the most important things right. Those things are gameplay and good controls to accommodate the gameplay. It’s not like you can’t put on different music or something, though it may interfere with the frame rate even more, but I digress. If you like Diablo, you might like this game. If you like first person shooters, like Call of Duty or Halo, then you might like this game. If you like RPGs, FPSs, and a game that has a long main story and quite a bit of replay value, then you will most likely love this game. The looting system allows for a lot more replay value. Claiming to have 17 million different guns, which is strange since I’ve found the exact same gun twice, and had them in my inventory at the exact same time. Also with the downloadable content on the way, we all have our hopes up for things even greater. This game is near greatness, but falls somewhere around pretty darn good.  This game is worth buying. You won’t get the full experience if you rent it, since it’s pretty long. Buy it if you have someone to play it with.