Some games pride themselves on storyline. Some game pride themselves on great visuals. Some even pride themselves on being new and unique. Borderlands prides itself on delivering, pure, raw, unadulterated fun mixed in with a healthy dose of loot. Lots of loot. Tons of loot. Did i also mention gore? And laughter-inducing death animations? This game stands in a category i like to call “Awesome” simply because it strives to be that way, without falling in the “Lame Awesome” category.  The only way it could be more awesome is if it had a gun that ’shoots shurikens and lighting’ as Yahtzee might say. Wait.. On second thought, it might have one.

Welcome to the desert wasteland. This is your car, that's the rocket launcher on top, have fun.

Borderlands is a first-person-role-playing-sandbox-shooter made by Gearbox Software that introduces the player to the world of Pandora, and it’s many secrets and dangers, in order to find an ancient Vault that it’s said to contain everything a man could want. Gearbox Software is mostly noted for it’s success with the Brothers in Arms series, and less so with contributing and making ports of Valve games, especially in the Half-Life series. So when we get hit with a triple A title like this, it kinda makes you wonder what the guys there have been doing until now. There was a lot of media and hype around the game during it’s ‘hype up cycle’ a couple of months before the game launched. They were quirky and ‘in your face’ types of videos and really presented Borderlands as being an unique game, with a ‘chip on its shoulder’ attitude and semi-cell-shaded-graphics. And in the most part, they weren’t wrong. The game somewhat delivers on that promise and offers humorous with-attitude gameplay and gets its point across. But there are problems.

Let’s take it from the top shall we? The game’s storyline circles around a mysterious Vault on Pandora, and the people hunting it, named Treasure Hunters. You get to play as one of the four Treasure Hunters, the four classes of the game, helped by a shady blue figure of a woman helping you towards your goal. That’s all you get to start, and very few things change along the way. Seeing how  most of the game you’ll just get vague references to it, and the ending coming off as a slight rush to the finish line, the storyline does the core of what it’s supposed to do. Push you onwards to more areas with more quests and with more creatures to kill. The problem isn’t with the story itself, but with the way it is presented to the player. Early on you are told to kill a guy, which leads you to killing another guy which has something you need. Then for the next 10-20 hours of game, you’ll literally be left to your own devices, only towards the end of the game picking up and really diving into the matters that you’ve been sidestepping for most of the game. It doesn’t help that even the sidequests, are generally one-sided and dull. At one point in the game a character died, and i really wanted to find out who did it and to avenge him. Oddly, the game denied me that pleasure and continued on without saying another word.

This shotgun is so tacticool that i have a scope for my scope.

The four characters you get to choose to play as are Mordecai the Hunter, Lilith the Siren, Roland the Soldier, and Brick.. the brick. All four character classes focus on a specific type of playing the game and have unique Action Skills. Mordecai is the sniper, and can use his pet, an eagle named BloodWing, to attack his foes. Lilith is a Siren, a being that can go into a Phasewalk meaning she’ll be invisibile and move faster during it, that focuses on SMGs. Roland plays a combat/support role, being able to deploy a turret that can also heal and regenerate bullets for your team-mates. And finally Brick is a tank/rocket launcher type of dude, which has an action skill named Berserk, that has him laughing maniacally and going into a punching frenzy. The classes all behave and play out differently but besides that screen where you choose the character, there are no other references made to them in the game ever. No special quests or mentions by the NPCs.

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