Badass Bruiser... He's badass.

The game starts up with a very awesome intro movie setting the scene for Pandora and the journey ahead. The intro is exactly in the same vein as the hype of the game, presenting a very upbeat tone for the game. The music, the class presentations, the way it’s designed is perfect to showcase what the game is all about. It’s not long into the game that you’ll start watching heads explode, jumping around Badass Skags, doing flips with your car, killing local bandit warlords and generally doing fun stuff.  The game is structured around the simple matter of ‘get quests’ ‘do quests’ ‘turn in quests’ and characters generally fulfill the need to have someone to get quests from. It’s a grind sure, but it’s all streamlined so you can get back in into killing dudes faster then you can say “HEADSHOT”. Borderlands knows what it wants and does it in style, whatever is not suited for the goal, it discards. You don’t have voice-overs to the quests, people you see either give you quests or try to kill you and areas are made as simple as possible, so you don’t run around half an hour trying to get somewhere. After playing Borderlands for half an hour, you pretty much got the game figured, as there are no extra hidden tricks up its sleeve.

What would a wasteland be without standing stones.

It’s not far fetched to say that the main star of the game is great combat. The combat, if haotic, is fun and has a subtle tactic feeling to it. You have a lot of ways to engage and you can use any gun you want without any serious penalty.  The game even offers you 4 weapon slots to fill with whatever situation you think might pop up. You think you’ll need a sniper to do a little long-range justice? Sure. You might need a rocket launcher that shoots incendiary rounds to make some spiderants burn? No problems. A shotgun to make sure that whoever gets in your private space will regret it? Here you go. For all the options the game gives you, you still end up using whatever your class specializes in. But sometimes, some items are just too powerful to not be used. I was a Hunter specialized in sniper rifles. All fine and good, but once i got my hands on a certain revolver, i pretty much used that so much that i’ve passed my proeficiency skill in sniper rifles. It’s a bit unbalanced, but since the scope of the game is co-op, i feel this is justified.

Me jumping Pisswash Gully in a nitro-fueled buggy. Hey mom!

Doing tons of quests and killing a ton of dudes has its merits though… LOOT! And it’s no surprise that the game prominently focuses on the guns. As seen by trailers and presented in interviews, 87 bazilion guns are availibile to the player. In theory, it’s true, in practice you have a normal item-generation system like you have in all the other tons of RPG’s out there, but with some twists. Besides stats, the system also generates a gun based on the type the gun is, and different parts. I’ve never seen a gun that looked the same as something i’ve previously wielded. That might be just because i’m a gun-nut and notice stuff like different stocks, barrels, and accesories to them, but i have to give the system props. Also, sometimes in the game you can receive some items that are just freaky. Like an SMG that fires rockets or a pistol that fires shotgun shells.  These are rarer but really make the random generation system shine. While it’s true that the system is a bit simplistic, and that you’ll be discarding most of the items you find, that one gun that you find in that one chest that’s so badass that  puts to shame whatever you’ve been using until now, is totally worth it.

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