Feature review: Borderlands

The items you’ll find in the game fall into several categories. Weapons are pretty obvious. Just like other games with random content generation, you’ll find hundreds of different weapon types with different attributes, allowing for literally hundreds, or even thousands, of possible combinations. Each weapon type uses its own kind of ammo, and has attributes like zoom capability, elemental damage, increased base damage, and some other special attributes. Always looking out for a new weapon with higher damage and a more enticing list of abilities is one of the biggest interest factors in Borderlands. Next up is your shield. Rather than armour, players have the option of equipping shields, which protect their base health. Any damage to the shield slowly regenerates over time, but if the shield is depleted, the player’s health bar starts taking damage. Any damage to the player’s health bar is permanent, requiring players to use health kits to recover it. Each shield can have a list of interesting abilities too, like faster shield regeneration when not under fire, or a slow trickle of constant health regeneration. Other interesting items include the grenade modifier, which changes the behaviour of grenades, and artefacts which imbue the character with very powerful boosts and abilities. Players can also find money everywhere, in boxes, crates, lockers, safes, and even toilets, which allows them to purchase more of everything mentioned above.

While exploring the huge world, players will meet and battle many different kinds of enemies, including small dog-like creatures, carnivorous birds, reptiles, insects and, of course, the raiders, who are a constant nuisance on every part of Pandora. On rare occasions, players may encounter enemies that are too tough or high level for them to handle, although if you stick to the quests that are specified for your level, you shouldn’t encounter this too often. Trust me, if the quest states that it will be impossible for your character to accomplish it at its current level, take that as gospel. To make travel sweet and short, there are vehicles for players to use freely, but this is one part of the game that could use a little work. The vehicles, especially when it comes to using them in combat, feel tacked-on and half-finished. They don’t feel weighty, they don’t handle convincingly, and they don’t sound good either. Still, they’re in there, and they serve their purpose, just don’t expect an adrenaline charged, power-sliding Mad Max experience, that doesn’t happen – but it should.

You can undertake this huge quest alone, if you wish, or you can get some friends to join you online or in a LAN (yes, even on the console versions) to help out. While Borderlands is a fantastic single player game, the fun is multiplied times death in multiplayer – the enemies are tougher, the loot is better, and the whole teamwork dynamic just adds something great to the experience.

Borderlands is a hard game to summarise, but in closing I’ll say that if you like the idea of investing time in a character and completing tons of action-packed shooter quests while constantly looking for newer and better equipment, then you should definitely give Borderlands a try. There’s literally weeks of play value in it, perhaps more if you’ve got friends with similar gaming tastes.