All of that would be passable and excusable if only the game really delivered on it’s initial premise.. the ‘awesomeness’ factor.

Welcome to New Haven, dumping ground of the galaxy.

As said, the game starts up with a fantastic intro getting you totally pumped. You go in, you kill some bandits, you have a nice 70’s TF2-like presentation of the first two human NPC’s you meet and you’re having fun with it. Play a bit more and you start to notice it. A couple of hours in and you wonder where it all went.. and by the end of the game, you’re really missing it. Mutant bandit midgets, Badass enemies, quirky NPCs and their quotes, 70’s style presentations of people in the world and other fun facts.. these are all ideeas i’m sure came from the developers when around the watercooler they started saying “Man.. wouldn’t it be great if we had this!”. They started with a great attitude and with a nice creative spark, but as the development cycle moved on, it became diluted and nonexistant.

To put it in laymans terms, this is the kind of game that should have not fallen in the ’serious’ pit. It should have stuck with the taking the piss out on itself and being as retardetly funny as possibile. It should have put classical music in boss fights against flaming squirells, it should have had NPCs more like TK and less like Helena Pierce or Marcus. It should have had that everytime you killed an enemy, he’d do a stupid dance before dying.

That is the kind of game that started out with the right ideea, with concepts like Claptrap, Nine Toes, TK, Midget Bandits and rocket-shooting-SMGs, but fell on its face later on, totally failing at the end. I compare this to the Serious Sam situation, where Serious Sam 2 went totally-comical and it sucked. I wish the roles were reversed with Borderlands, since then we’ve have gotten two great games.

Finally, we get some snow. Snow wasteland.

If you do manage to power through and enjoy yourself enough to finish the game, this is where the replayability factor kicks in. Once you finish, you can start a second playthrough, keeping your level and your items and starting the long journey towards the cap of level 50. You do have bonuses for doing this, monsters of your level with different names, such as Badass enemies turning into BadMutha enemies, more gibs and gibs flying higher, better gear, the ability to finish up challenges and generally minor stuff that you can push forward to and have a reason for playing through it again. Personally, i think my initial journey into Pandora was enough.

In the end.. All of Borderland’s problems only creep up on you if you’re playing single player. Once you’re with friends over voice-chat, being amazed at the fifth Badass Corrosive Skag that spawned and fighting for your life, it becomes irrelevant. Borderlands features four player co-op, scaling up the number and toughness of enemies as it goes making for a satisfying, if lenghtier, experience. It’s enjoyable and as said, makes the rest of the complaints vanish by simply not noticing that they’re there in the midst of all the damned bandits attacking you.

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