Borderlands Review: XBox 360

When you first start playing Borderlands, a few things will cross your mind.  The first is the similarity between it and Fallout 3.  However, besides the whole apocalyptic setting and some similar level up/game-play, there are quite a few discernible differences. In my personal opinion, one of the greatest things about the game is the quirky dialogue throughout the whole thing.  This dialogue comes from interactive characters that give you side missions, plot info, and also random one liners from enemies and your playable character.

You start off in the Borderlands riding a little bus.  It’s during this trip that you find out that you and your team of mercenaries are looking for something known as “The Vault.”  The Vault is apparently some myth that has been spread around the land that says that there is some large collection of alien technology that will fetch a large fortune.  All through the game you come across characters that deny its existence, but as the story unfolds, the myth becomes more and more reality.

You choose your class out of 4 possibilities.  Each class of character has distinct special attacks and stats for its particular character.  I chose to play as Mordecai, mostly because of his epic bad ass name, and his resemblance to something crossed between a ninja and Mad Max’s meth-addict brother.  Mordecai’s special attack is unleashing Bloodwing, his hawk-type pet that will dive bomb your enemies and wreak havoc upon their cute little eyes and bodies.  As you level up, you can spend stat points on different abilities and proficiencies to enhance your character’s aim, reload speed, weapon damage, special attack efficiency, etc.  There’s not a lot of customizable options, but the stinginess of stat points makes you really contemplate what to slide that point into.  This adds to the challenge of the game, in my opinion, and makes you really take a look at your weapons, equipment, your personal game-play style, and your character before spending that hard earned point.

The greatest part of the game is the wide variety of weapons available to your character.  Each character type is better with certain weapon types, so you have to kind of gear your character towards the weapons, or the other way around.  As you use a weapon more and more, it levels up your ability to use that weapon.  Your reload time will increase, the damage will jump up, and so will your fire rate.  I found myself keeping an eye on these stats quite a bit so I could discern when a certain weapon in my arsenal would benefit me the most.  I’ve found myself torn between using a sniper rifle that does a high amount of damage, but the zoom kinda sucks, or using one that holds a whole bunch of bullets and does much less damage.  I’ve even found myself making the mistake of selling a weapon that I thought useless at the time, only to find out later that the corrosive rounds or incendiary rounds it held were something I needed to drop an enemy with resistance to certain types of weapons and attacks.

You gather up money by robbing little lockers, tool boxes, and selling equipment you pick up along the way.  you use this cash to buy armor, health, bullets, weapon upgrades, grenades, and guns.  You have limited space in your backpack, so be careful what you decide to keep and throw away.  All is not lost, the limited space in that pack can be upgraded by completing side missions that involve repairing little hyped up robots.

The graphics are quite fitting to the game, considering the off the wall humor and goofiness of the game.  I’m not usually a fan of cell-shaded graphics, but it didn’t bother me with Borderlands.

I love the small tributes it gives to certain loves of my past, like Mad Max.  You’ll complete side missions that actually include the words “Road Warriors” in the title, and you’ll fight a boss named “Mad Mel.”  I found myself laughing maniacally at the latter, considering you fight Mad Mel in an arena, sort of Thunderdome style, only you blow his ass up using your car instead of random garden tools and power tools.

All in all, the game is a ton of fun, and has a lot of replay value.  The side missions add a lot of flavor to the game, and make story missions easier to complete if you hit a rough spot.  Go quest it up doing a couple favors for the locals, level up your character, and move on to a story mission that may have gotten you ravaged by giant spider things that shoot corrosive acid at your face the first time around.  I’m not a big fan of crab spider alien monsters puking acid in my face.  Not a fan at all.

The game-play is pretty smooth, and uses pretty simple controls, and I had no trouble adapting to them.  If you’ve played Call of Duty, Halo, or Fallout, the controls will give you very little grief.

The online play is pretty cool, especially if you find yourself in need of some sort of special weapon that shoots corrosive rounds or something so you can drop a boss a little easier.  You can have a buddy come in, hook up with you, and you guys can drop unneeded equipment to each other.  Pretty cool, if I say so myself.  I can also see this being abused by achievement whores that just want to beef up so their gamer score will increase.  Turn your character into a beast without having to put forth the effort, roll around, vomit up achievements, and brag to your buddies.  Getcha some.

I really think first person fans should give this a try, and also fans of RPG’s and MMO style games.  A lot of first person shooters have forgotten the importance of single player game-play and plot development.  Borderlands offers a little bit of everything to multiple gamer styles.  I’m overly picky with my video games, and I’d definitely go pick this up at full price.

Tags: 360 borderlands Call of duty fallout 3 fps mmo xbox