Borderlands Review

Borderlands is a science fiction role-playing shooter (a first-person shooter with RPG elements) that was developed by Gearbox Software for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. First off the bat, this game is fun, I like playing it immensely, and I was amazed by how many hours went by from just me testing out new weapons. This game is fun because of the action, the guns, and, for me, the humor element which come together to make an excellent time-wasting game.

The game starts with you choosing from between four different classes, each with their own name and back-story, (Roland as the Solider, Brick as the Berserker, Lilith as the Siren, and Mordecai as the Hunter). Each class has a cool power that only they can use. Roland can deploy a turret that shoots people with bullets, and later rockets; Lilith can turn invisible and fire out a waves of energy; Brick can fly into a rage and kill stuff with his fists; and, Mordecai can summon his pet, called a bloodwing, that murders enemies for you. All the classes have different skill trees that you can use skill points on to make them better at something. Roland can increase his ammo capacity for all his guns; Lilith can increase her damage with elemental weapons; and, to cut things short, all the classes have skill trees that you can upgrade to get better at killing people. Your goal is to find the legendary “Vault”, a supposed treasure trove of alien artifacts, technology, and of insurmountable wealth hidden somewhere on Pandora, the planet where the game takes place. There are a few problems in your way, almost everything on the planet can and will try to kill you: from feral dog-like skags, to the crazed bandits that were once convicts forced to mine the planet by off-world companies, to giant bugs that spit acid and try to rip your face off. However, lucky for you, there are guns, lots and lots of guns. The game has a cool system called the “Procedural Content Creation System” to create these weapons and items, which can alter their firepower, rate of fire, and accuracy. Add in elemental effects such as a chance to set foes on fire, and at rare times other special bonuses such as regenerating the player’s ammo. A color-coded scale is used to indicate the rarity of the weapon or item. It is estimated that the random system can generate over 17 million variations of weapons. Not only does this system make guns for you, it also makes your enemies change their attack patterns, abilities, and at high enough level, starts spitting bosses at you like crazy.

This game is fun, the guns rock. You are always on the look-out for more enemies, to get more guns, to kill more enemies. A fun and rewarding cycle of violence that leads you around Pandora, putting tons of lead into almost everything you don’t run over in your slick car. The guns also have really cool elemental effects: shock elemental weapons explode in bursts of lighting when you hit the enemy, corrosive guns (my favorite) splash your targets with acid, and when they die they turn into green goo! Now that is fun.      However fun this game is when you are playing by yourself, the fun is turned to 11 when other players join you. More players means tougher enemies, tougher enemies mean better loot, that you and your teammates can fight over in a special “duel” mode. This game is made for co-op, this a great game for two people and you can have a full party of four by hooking up another game system to it, or play online with your computer.          There are some problems with this game, sometimes you randomly stick to a piece of terrain; you have no place to store items, which is a drag, and it can get challenging if you try to rush through the game. You need to do almost all the quests and other stuff to have enough health to beat some of the later parts. But besides these minor issues, this game is a excellent buy for anyone. They have already released two DLCs for it: the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot
and are planning on making more, so go out and get this game, if you like shooters at all, you will like this game a lot.   5 Claptraps out of 5