Borderlands

I don’t think I’m a fan of Borderlands.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of Borderlands despite a massive shortage here on the East Coast, and proceeded to boot it up on my 360 and quickly dug in. Sitting through the opening cut scene I quickly became friends with a rather annoying robot who proceeded to give me a crash course on the basics, then got tossed into a combat situation.

It was this early in the game where I realized that much like Fallout 3 it didn’t matter if you shoot a dude in the head, he isn’t going down. You get rewarded with a quick flash of red ‘Critical’ text, and your target takes a slightly larger amount of damage. This early into the game I had to mentally shift gears and consider that the ‘FPS’ tag should be taken with a grain of salt — fine. I can deal with that.

Moving right along through the content I’m introduced to forgettable character after forgettable character, completing fetch and ‘kill x-number of these’ quests, straining to keep interested in the story that is slowly unfolding before my eyes and ears. That effort lasted until around level 10, when I realized that remaining interested in the story would be impossible as nothing had been offered that sparked an interest. Shooting my way up to level thirteen, I hit my first roadblock in the form of a boss encounter and decide to enlist some help from fellow gamers in the Giant Bomb community.

Instantly I was having fun. The addition of friends creates a situation where, as is the case for most (if not all) cooperative games it doesn’t matter what the game I happen to be playing is, because the game becomes secondary to just kicking back and having fun with people. The crew of us continued to play together and where time had been dragging by while playing alone suddenly the hours were flying by. In what felt like a matter of minutes, but in reality was several hours worth of gameplay I had jumped from level 13 to level 25 and decided to call it a night.

The next day I thought about booting it up and playing through some single player, and decided against it. Without the opportunity to jump back into a session with friends the game inspired no desire to play, so I loaded up something else to pass the time until I could reassemble a team to go shoot some more stuff.

The technical problems are a big problem for me as well. Lack of a minimap isn’t a huge deal until you have a quest that sends you running to every corner of any given area, and you have to constantly break the flow to pull open the map and look where you’re headed. The car you get to drive around drives terribly, and will come to a dead stop if any part of it nicks an object it isn’t designed to move past. The sheer amount of guns you come across in mere minutes creates a situation where you don’t bother with most of them until you start to notice a serious lack of things dying when you shoot them — something which only seems to become noticeable every five or ten levels.

I don’t hate Borderlands. I think it does what it sets out to do very well — working as a loot driven experience. But until it comes down to trying for all the achievements I doubt I’ll be putting any more time into the single player component. Until a game comes out that improves the Borderlands formula to the point where I can find myself drawn into the setting, Borderlands is the only choice.

So long as I have people to play with I’m sure I’ll be spending some more time in Pandora.