Borderlands: Four Gun as One!

Nov 19 2009
by Ian Bowes [spelk]
Filed In: Action Adventure, Games Reviews, RPG

I remember many years ago, I was obsessed (or in love) with an online Dreamcast game called Phantasy Star Online, so much so that I started up a gaming community around it, and the tag line for that community was “Four fight as One”. Whenever I play Borderlands now, I am always reminded of that tag line, however Borderlands has very little in common with Phantasy Star Online other than you can play online, cooperatively, in your own game world instance, with four others.

Since Borderlands evokes this sense of nostalgia within me, and has a decent first person shooter behind it, coupled with a very moorish “loot and tweak” mechanic typical of action roleplaying games, writing a glowing report for the game comes almost naturally to me. Many have claimed it is basically “Diablo with guns”, however I’d prefer to hand that trophy onto the ill fated Hellgate: London. For me, Borderlands combines the action roleplaying spirit, with the adrenaline rush and immediacy of action shooters mounted on the breadth and depth of exploratory sandbox games.

You get to select one of four pre-defined characters, each of which has been stereotyped to the N’th degree. The Beserker is a massive chested Duke Nukem kind of guy, with a propensity to stove in heads at the drop of a hat, or more precisely his over proportioned fists. The Sniper is a weaselly lanky guy with a goatee beard, wearing some badly designed fetish gear, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a ball gag  in his mouth, and a pair of hand cuffs attached to his belt. The Soldier bloke is your typical supporting beefcake, with an armful of automatic weapons and a cigar tucked behind his ear, and finally, the sweetie of the bunch is the Psychic powered chick, all bra straps and attitude, with a bobbed haircut and a shock of white lightning flashed through it.

At the start of your characters journey, Borderlands drip feeds you rewards, from the initial take-up of your HUD through to the customisation of the colours of your outfit, every level gained seemingly rewards you with new items or mechanics to digest. You’re introduced to the concept of regenerating shields, and grenade modifiers, along with elemental weapons, quest boards, primary skills and specialisations as well as the liberating vehicular combat (2 man driver and turret gunner setup). So the journey is really comfortable for those new to genre and old hands alike, and it’s tailored around the first ten levels of questing and exploration. Even the quests loop in an out of the areas and landmarks so after a few levels you have an almost intimate knowledge of the environment around you. As an introduction to the game its a resounding success, however, it also becomes a bit of a burden if you’re wanting to try out a few of the classes and class specialisations because you have to roll through the same stuff for each of the different characters. Each class has a number of specialisation trees that can be followed as you gain levels and spec points, giving an overall level of flexibility and to the builds longevity to the play-style. You can roll two or three fairly different solider builds from the basic class, for example. This plays very much into the action RPG genre, and will have “Diablo fans” posting their favourite builds on numerous web site forums in no time.

For a game that ultimately boils down to a lot of running and gunning, its got a surprising amount of diversity to it, each class plays quite different based on their featured skill or their tinkered and specialised builds. The world of Borderlands encourages exploration and sandbox play, with many of the areas containing re-spawning combatants and obstacles, so you can effectively “grind out” some experience or some money, as downtime from following the main quest line. Plenty of side quests present themselves that you can take in any order. The inclusion of vehicular travel and combat spices the larger open areas up, re-enacting Mad Max scenarios, and going on almighty roadkill sessions, racking up the giblets count.
The single player game is enjoyable, and its more comic and quirky delivery could easily stack it up against Fallout 3 only as a more arcade action experience, however where the game really shines is its co-operative multiplayer. Suddenly the First Person Shooter Grand Theft Auto of cartoon wastelands becomes more an instanced Massive Multiplayer Online game without the Massive element. The Classes work very well together, even when multiples of class types are used. All the common MMO concepts becoming relevant – tanking, healing, crowd control, kiting, ambushes, flanking and crossfire based killzones all play a part in the frantic firefights. There have been one or two problems with the multiplayer, especially seen on the PS3 version of the game. There seemed to be a disparity between the in-game friends available for invites and the PSN friends. Some people were missing from the in-game list, and thus couldn’t be invited into a game, even if they were in Borderlands sat at the multiplayer menu. There was a workaround, but it involved creating a public game, and hoping they could see it listed in the public games list. Obviously if you couldn’t fill all four slots with your friends then there was a very good chance you’d get strangers logging in to your game, not ideal. However, after a week or two of troubles, thankfully it seems that most of the multiplayer problems have been addressed with patches to the game.

Each classes featured skill, is a unique power granted early on at around level 5 and is often enhanced through specialisation skills bought later on. The Bezerker can see red mist and go melee crazy, doing massive damage with his fists. The Sniper has an eagle familiar who can swoop in and make an additional attack on advancing enemies. The soldier throws down a scorpio gun turret, that not only provides extra firepower, but can have health and/or ammo regenerating properties. Whilst the Psychic lady gains the ability to phasewalk, dipping into another phased dimension affording limited invisibility and extra movement speed, whilst in this mode various effects can be brought about on the enemies you sneak by, with elemental attacks, or temporary stuns being applied. All featured skills are only active for a short time, and they’re on a lengthy recharge timer, so they can’t be used too often, but they can be saved for emergency situations or co-ordinated with others for maximum effectiveness. There’s nothing quite like having two soldiers drop health AND ammo regenerating shielded turrets, that you can stand behind, to mow down the advancing horde of charging skaggs.

Obviously in a shooter, most of your time is spent tooling up with the best weapons, and making tactical decisions on what weapons to use, and how to use them most effectively against whatever foe you may be pitted against next. Rather than adopt the Hellgate/Diablo model of having pieces of armour to worry about too, the game gives you a couple of upgrade slots to make your shields better (effectively your single armour slot), or to add additional effects to your grenades, plus a class specific slot to further tweak the emphasis on your builds specialities. Finding elemental guns, with various additional effects is key to maximising your damage potential, with fire, water, acid and electricity, along with firearms that penetrate armour rather than do actual damage, there’s a lot to weigh up when tooling up. Theres usually a balancing act, which makes for some tough decisions on your loadout, but this is a major part of the game, and there has to be odd timeouts here and there for your party to re-assess their setup and perhaps do some swapping or selling/buying at vendors.

One of the most unique design decisions to be adopted by the game is the Second Chance mechanism, basically if you die, you go into a death spiral, but you are still lucid enough to be able to fire your primary weapon. If you manage to make a kill whilst in this state, you clasp tightly onto your mortal coil and you are tugged back into the land of the living. Think Call of Duty Modern Warfare’s Last Stand perk, but with the ability to be revived if you make a kill before you finally suffocate on your own blood.

The stylised cartoon like art style of the game, makes it more accessible and places more emphasis on gun-toting fun, rather than having to recreate the desperate looking wasteland its meant to portray. Subsequently the game can afford to add a lot of humour to the carnage, and the cell-shading adds much the comic theme.

Overall, you have a gutsy stylish and polished co-operative shooter, that excels at pandering to the action roleplay genre. You’re always on the lookout for loot, you’re always assessing your weapons and trying to fiddle with your loadout to make you a mutant killing machine, or you’re tweaking your co-operative abilities to support your party members. The game brings shooters into the world of action roleplay games, and it does it very well indeed. So well, that after tasting Borderlands, you might be hankering after other action roleplay games again, or other shooters that give you this much to play with.
GD Star Rating
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