Borderlands

No wasteland, says Duncan

The stripped-down, immediate gratification version of RPG that Borderlands operates is evident in what is the closest the game comes to individual character development via Weapon Proficiencies. Killing enough villains with a type of weapon will increase your proficiency with it, increasing damage, accuracy and ammo reserves. The higher levels require the player to have preferred one type of weapon for most of the game, but this is unobtrusive as if you have been distributing that much lead with one class of weapon it will be because that was what felt good in the first place, rather than a grind to achieve a desired status of upgrade.

Borderlands is entirely about gratification, with an RPG mechanic working in the background only in order to reward you for your murdering ways and to lend the next instalment of slaughter a sense of freshness and homicidal acquisitiveness. The passive upgrade system will not get in your way, nor will the open and simple inventory. The quests will come with a big fat directional reticule on your compass in case you get lost, the map will be filled in already when you arrive on a new level. You will have the option to walk across the wasteland, bounce across it in free and heavily armed vehicles, or simply warp from frequent save point to save point. Everything is designed to provide the minimum friction between you and your next freakish, amusing target. Even death proves little impediment to the gunplay: if both your fast recharging shield and your health reaches zero, you will be given the chance to catch your Second Wind. This works a lot like the Last Stand perk in COD: Modern Warfare multiplayer - your character will sink to their knees and the screen will fade over the next 20 or so seconds as you bleed out. However, kill any other enemy on screen and you will leap back to your feet with fully recharged shields, free to go back hammering at the heavy individual who actually put you down. Most of the gigantic boss battles will be seasoned with a smattering of otherwise ineffectual peons whose only purpose is to have their heads blown off and put you back into the game versus the big bad, be they dinosaurs, maniacal pygmies, cyborgs, gun runners, mutants, or Mothra. Death itself will only cost you a small percentage of your cash no XP penalty or Resurrection Sickness and a respawn at a close by point.

Borderlands is perfectly satisfying as a singleplayer experience, but some of your best slaughtering will be done in the drop-in co-op mode, where online players can invite you to join their game, or you can drop into theirs. The quest progression will follow that of whoever is hosting, but the experience, weapons and cash will be carried over by the individual player, and taken with them when they leave. Whilst there is no loot sharing system, which can make for some irksome treasure hogging, the simplicity of the co-op system is as smooth and satisfying as the rest of the game's design. More players in a game will automatically up the difficulty and the number of hostiles, but will also commensurately up the quality of the drops. Tooling across the bandlands in a vehicle with a live player driving and a live player manning the turrets, smoking mutant fools for no other reason than the cash and the chuckles is hard to beat, and when you or they get bored and leave then you can just get back to the quest progression you were enjoying before.

The worst features of Borderlands are fortunately the ones you can ignore completely. Scattered through the land are player-vs-player arenas where you can throw down against your erstwhile co-op buddies. They are a waste of space in single player and in multiplayer serve no discernable purpose for loot, stats or enjoyment. Additionally, despite the vast mountains of guns youll come across and loot purely for the purpose of later resale, the extremely keen inventory system will always equip one of your hot-keyed slots with the new firearm if you havent found its like before. This can lead to more inventory resetting than the player would want in this otherwise extremely streamlined system.

The colourful, stylised visuals are backed up by a sense of humour in the dialogue and character design. You can ignore anything anyone says, play the whole thing in mute if you so decide for all the difference it will make for your ability to progress, but listening to the few repeat characters such as the helper robots (GIR from Invader Zim, anyone?) helps to make the whole experience that much lighter, more accessible and plain old fun.

Borderlands will not set any benchmarks or push any envelopes in the RPG genre, or even its niche FPS-RPG setting. It simply does not do anything that we have not seen in some form or other elsewhere, nor does any individual element or mechanic uniquely stand out. What it does do is take the most basely satisfying parts of the whole RPG genre and lay them out in a fast moving buffet of bloodshed and looting. The joy of acquisition and dominance inherent to role-playing games is married to the savage joy of slaughtering entire crowds of victi.. sorry villains, and in conclusion I can heartily recommend it.

85%

By Duncan Lawson