On the planet Pandora, an enormous wasteland inhabited by loony, psychotic, and generally unhinged gang factions, four mercenaries take up odd-jobs and collect bounties on their quest to find and claim the legendary Vault, a supposed cache of powerful alien technology.
other then the start of the game feeling like a dread on new characters its a blast. i played mechromancer the most since her funny robot was funny
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Borderlands is, for better or for worse, the most 2009 game possibly ever made. It is an abominable Frankenstein's monster of role playing elements and skill trees, needlessly crude humor, film/games/music "references" culture, open world design, rigid mission-based game structure, and an unabashed obsession of gore, violence, and guns. It also manages to thread these seemingly endless and disparate points of inspiration into something cohesive, addicting, and clever enough that it actually appears somewhat effortless in its execution.
In Borderlands, you are the Vault Hunter - a mercenary bounty that is trying to track down the Vault, an ancient dimensional portal filled with enough resources to bring anyone unimaginable wealth and power across the galaxy. To get there, you have to traverse the completely insane and violent Pandora, a planet full of insane bandits, giant insects, flying birds the size of cars, vicious skags and spiderants, a highly-advanced capitalist militia taking everything of value from the planet, and an uncountable number of people trying to mislead you, kill you, manipulate you, and take your findings for their own. You travel across a number of increasingly more dangerous areas, taking down regional scourges and acquiring parts of the key to the Vault to complete your destiny.
While that might sound like a story-filled Godfather-type adventure, it really isn't. Though there are some "twists," your player character does not directly speak with any character, does not have options for dialogue or quest plotlines, and generally experiences the plot as much as you do. The game features a barrage of characters, some friendly and some not, and while I consider the game to have pretty okay writing and world building, the quantity is simply not there, and that will either turn people on or off from what the game is trying to do. This is not Fallout, nor Elder Scrolls - many explanations for why quests are being assigned and how they are being resolved and rewarded by the client are in a flash of text on a HUD menu. Make no mistake, this is a game about shooting things and feeling powerful before literally anything else.
Pandora itself is a cel-shaded wasteland of deserts, mountains, rotting caves, shantyhouses, tented encampments, ghost towns, malfunctioning industrial plants, and gang hideouts. It takes obvious inspiration from Mad Max, but also stuff like Grindhouse and other high-octane mid-00s gorefest flicks, Westerns, slapstick comedy, and of course the chief inspiration for the game's visual direction, the short film Codehunters. What helps sell the place as real is how doggedly commited Gearbox is to making sure you know what Pandora is. Almost every single area is a sunbaked rock face or coastline. The waters are unilaterally polluted. Most private citizens either never come outside or have disfigurations or illnesses. There are no paradise cities, no oases, no bastions of modernized civilization. It is always hostile, all the time, and you'll eventually find comfort in the familiarity. While you poke around, the soundtrack is a really fitting whirlwind of slide guitar, tribal drums, throaty horns, dilapidated strings, and dark ambient. Pandora sounds tired and dying, much like its inhabitants that you'll meet.
Despite the interesting world, the game actually disincentivizes independent exploration outside of a few occasions. While there are literally thousands of weapon chests, lockers, ammo crates, safe boxes, dumpsters, mailboxes, and bodies to loot, every area on a given map was created first and foremost as the backdrop for a quest. In fact, this is so consistently true that you will find yourself actually refusing to poke around an area more than required for the mission, because if you haven't seen a place in the map yet there's a near-100% chance you'll be back later with another quest objective in hand. Instead, those loot vessels described earlier are meant to be stacked along with quest bonuses and rewards to create a non-stop flood of stuff for you to purse through. This makes sense from a setting standpoint, but I can imagine this putting off those who like that aspect of role playing games. For me, the pace of the game is key and this helps mosey along the content at a fun briskness.
The game was branded as a "first person Diablo" and frankly that's the mechanical base of the experience. Enemies explode like pinatas of limbs, glibs, cash, and loot and when you are even a few levels above your opponent you will start to one-shot them and receive a pittance of 1 XP for your troubles. Progression through the game is lightning quick, and they encourage you to always be improving, rifling through new guns in your inventory, and selling the old stuff you don't need. There are a number of mission hubs in the game, and a typical "cycle" of gameplay for BL1 is to accept every mission you have unlocked, go to the area most of them align in, complete them all in one swath, come back and rake in the rewards and loot, sell the surplus loot you don't need or grew out of, and take on more missions again. Initially limited inventory space also means the player will learn to do mental math quickly, as they calculate DPS for a weapon on the ground and evaluate its usefulness. Mercifully, there is a color-coded rarity system to help players quickly determine what they should probably make room for. There's a small HUD preview of the stats for every bit of loot, including the most important one - the resale price. Even the most ardent communist will become a cold-hearted mercenary in no time, selling off old gun favorites for scraps the second they are no longer useful.
The guns, grenades, and shields themselves are randomly generated, allowing for a stupid number of permutations. This gives an extremely literal equipment hierarchy for not only you but every enemy around you, because their gun is yours as soon as you kill them. A very large majority of the stuff you find will have flaws in some form, but every once in a while you will find a total death machine that allows you to ravage another hundred potential replacements. The thrill of finding a replacement to one of your 4 gun slots is really intoxicating, and it helps the player push forward through otherwise tedious portions of the game. Many map sub-areas have at least one hidden chest in them, so looking around a bit or using your ridiculous Halo jump to climb some structures is usually a good use of your time.
In addition to the onslaught of items you'll have, you also level up, and in addition to base stat improvements you'll have skill points to unlock abilities in one of 3 class-specific skill trees. Having played through the game with 3 of 4 of the characters I can say that they are balanced quite well and all feature cool, unique abilities that change how you'll approach both combat and your gun prioritization. Lilith's absurd elemental bonuses will incentivize you to keep those element-charged guns. Roland's ammo replenishment and turret health regen will keep you well armed and alive more often than the others. Mordecai's bonuses for critical hits and snipers will make many encounters trivial for those who can aim. I'd recommend looking at the skill trees for each character beforehand to get an idea how they play, because it's a highly personal choice, even if you end up roughly as strong in the end.
Borderlands makes good use of its excellent controls and gunplay, addictive loot system, and setting to create something that is worth a play for both the Call of Duty folks and the Fallout folks of the world. It is a very competent combination of traditional first person shooters and open world role playing experiences with a unique visual style and memorable world to conquer. Although I still enjoy it a fucking decade after its release, the sequels have revealed that Borderlands' simplicity and accessibility is also its content downfall. To the pessimist, this world may seem empty and overly hostile, with not enough variety to offer. For those who understand the narrow lane this game is trying to pave, you will find a lot to offer here.
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Lacks the charm that's presented in Borderlands 2. Not a bad game, just kinda feels devoid of much creativity. It's a good stepping stone to a great series.
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I remember years ago when I used to get Gameinformer magazine and seeing this game advertised as a somewhat realistic open world exploration game where you would have thousands of weapons you could customize and make and how big the world would be, and the graphics would go for a dark realistic tone. Then the game was revamped and the graphics became cell shaded, and to be honest I didn't mind too much. I decided to rent this from the library during my first Summer break after my Freshman year in college, and well actually sort of enjoyed this. It was a fun game just to go around and explore, the combat was okay if not a bit generic, and it had a leveling system that was a tad addictive. On the other hand the tedium of this game did come out at times, the gameplay and waves of enemies did get a bit repetitive, the story of this game is almost nonexistant and the characters hardly have any dialog, and the thousands of weapons just meant weapons that have random mods attached in loot and you generally would just go with the weapon with the highest damage output so the customization really didn't mean much. Borderlands 2 just fixed much of what was wrong with this, that game had more story and personality, where this was mainly focused on gameplay, which was solid, but this game is a little boring and doesn't have enough of its own identity to stand out from the crowd of the thousand of other FPS games.
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Forget everything you've heard about Borderlands. I can't be bothered to write a proper review here, but despite how stylized and interesting this game may look on its exterior, its thematically devoid of any value. It's like Fallout 3 but braindead. In terms of how it plays, it's mechanically acceptable, but it's just such an ugly and brutal game that it cannot be redeemed by being a competent shooter. I've heard that it fares better in a group setting, but like most games, I played it alone. Some people might enjoy it with a buddy and a few beers, but there are so many better games that you could play, so I have to give this a hard no, no matter how you look at it. Please don't play this game.
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Dubbed a "role-playing shooter" by the game's creators, Texas-based Gearbox Studios' Borderlands was a rather commonplace shooter that never would have met with the praise it had received if it were not for the game's stylized visuals (that toony look of cell shading) and "quirky" (code for "childish") sense of humor. However, fans of the series would counter my label of the game as "commonplace" for the following reasons: 1) "The game-world is REALLY BIG." True. Borderlands's world -- the uncivilized planet of Pandora -- does provide many different caverns of peculiar minerals and animals; underground military complexes overflowing with many more armed mercenaries to gun down; and various towns of friendly characters to salvage story-objectives and side-missions from-- but as epic as that sounds, I will say that all this is... all there is. Pandora, after all, is very similar to many depictions of Earth in the aftermath of an apocalypse in the sense that it is trashy, relatively barren, violent, and ruthless. For any writer to keep up these characteristics of Pandora, the different settings in Borderlands are limited to what makes these said characteristics work, while at the same time trying to keep the situation coherent to the story. Needless to say, to present the same taste of settings in every area over time can get tedious. 2) "Dude, there are sooooo many guns..." That's debatable. My argument here is similar to the last one: there is a lot given to us, but limited variety. The designers should value quality over quantity. The weapons in Borderlands are the usual array of guns that we've seen in games since Goldeneye 007 separated by type of ammunition: Pistols/revolvers, Submachine gun, Assault rifle, Rockets, Grenades, Shotgun shells, and Sniper rounds. These may be further diversified by elemental-effect weapons such as corrosive, shock, and incendiary damage, and be diversified further still by the unique abilities of special weapons like boosting player-health or increasing the amount of loot dropped by killed enemies; yet by the end of the game what weapons you choose will depend how much damage it can deal and the rate it will reload; the majority of the game's weapons will be discarded or ignored in favor of the most powerful one available. 3) "Playing with your friends is a lot of fun!" Irrelevant. It is distinctive that Borderlands does allow multiplayer for a genre typically designed for single-player experiences (IE Fallout 3); but playing this way does not change the missions or gameplay at all; it just makes some of the levels feel less empty with the presence of some online friends, which is not too drastic of a change in tone. I am sick of explaining time and time again that the protagonist of a DIA is not the player-character but the design of the game-world itself, so if the game design is not changed in multiplayer, looking at the game single-player should be no different. 4) "The missions follow an interesting story and interesting characters." False. 5) "Oh come on." YOU COME ON! The main story is focused on the weak "Let's get rich with treasure" motive with a disappointing conclusion, and side-missions are nonsensical detours of shooting different things with flippant descriptions under the objective briefings. As for the characters, I fail to see how a cast of such immature psychopaths -- that includes a "quirky" and annoying robot, a ghost-like girl so Hot Topic-core she is in fact devoid of any characterization, an obnoxious trailer-park hick, and several greedy business owners -- are an ensemble worthy of any person's time and attention. While I do understand the traits I said about them are often exploited for laughs, the bits where you are meant to take the characters as serious, professionally-written, multi-dimensional characters are unbearable. Long story short, Borderlands is a "role-playing shooter" that barely offers anything new or immortalizing to the culture of shooters; there is not a trait about it that will be salvageable after one plays titles like Fallout 3 and Bioshock, despite the feature of playing cooperatively.
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