Run for the Borderlands

It's no secret that I'm not the largest fan of Diablo, so when the phrase "It's basically Diablo with guns" started getting thrown around to describe Gearbox's Borderlands it's understandable I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to get my hands on it. After spending a considerable amount of time with the game both on the PC and the 360 I can say that they're absolutely right, and it's great.

An over-the-top sci-fi action-RPG set on a distant planet in the future is not the kind of thing anyone expected from Gearbox, the studio that, while starting with an expansion to the original Half-Life, made a name for itself through their Brothers in Arms franchise, a series of semi-tactical super serious World War 2 games. The game takes place on Pandora, a desolate desert world rules by vicious creatures and murderous raiders, and you play one of four characters that are searching for "the vault," a mythical, hidden place filled with alien riches. The storyline is paper thin, you can get by without reading any of the quest text, and it doesn't really matter. The game isn't about presenting an epic world with a grand narrative, it is entirely focused on getting you to shoot guys and collect loot.


Borderlands is a shooter, first and foremost, sort of wrapped in a role-playing game candy shell. Sure, you gain experience and skill points, but everything about the RPG aspect is purely mathematical. There is no room for personal interpretation or expression; no dialogue trees, no moral choices, you simply accept quests and get on with the murder. You'll earn money and equipment for completing these tasks which you will use in turn to buy and sell more equipment. And there's a lot of it.
Their method of procedurally generating weapons and how the game goes about that process led to a fairly well publicized claim of the game having, effectively, over half a million guns. This does involve in the creation of many, many guns you will simply pick up only to sell, and guns that are almost exactly the same except for a couple point differences in accuracy or damage, but the allure of opening every weapon cache hoping to find some crazy revolver that fires shotgun shells that do acid damage is strong. But it's just neat to jump back into the game after playing it earlier, find a weapon cache you already opened before and have it give you something completely different, albeit not always useful.
It's just a fun game to play, using your most prized weapons to wade through groups of enemies, giving it that distinct Diablo feel, but different in giving you complete freedom in your movement and actions. Playing online, with up to three additional players, simply increases the amount of hostile creatures you face at any time, and while it usually makes the game more fun, playing it with friends mean you all need to leave your character untouched in the meantime, because having just one person a few levels higher means they can tear through most quests while you're struggling to keep up with their murderous pace. For the most part, though, it works, and there's nothing wrong with just going it solo.
It's a big game with a lot to do and a lot to find, with my main character only a little more than half way to the level cap after about 15 hours of play, and definitely worth giving a look.


-K.