Sloppy Potatoes

Borderlands is an absolutely great game

Many of you come here looking for Halo news, and with the new Halo: Reach ViDoc release and the two Halo games that released last year, you might expect to find some Halo in this post.

Instead, let’s talk about Borderlands… and Halo. Borderlands is the first non-Halo game that has had a Halo affect on me.

After completing one playthrough with one character (there are four characters and two playthroughs for each), every day the urge to dive back in for playthrough 2 AND the beginning of an alternate character beckons.

Few games have the ability to grasp the subconscious as strongly as Borderlands does. For weeks I talked about it to friends at work and on Twitter. It is so good at what it does — pushing that little start-quest, complete-quest, get reward button in the depths of the brain.

Story

If you want gobs of cutscenes and that kind of narrative, you’re not going to find it in Borderlands. The “story” here is the planet of Pandora, the interesting friends and foes you meet and your adventures in this world. The gobs of movie references offer another fun subplot to explore.

Guns

If you know anything about this game, it’s probably about the bazillions of guns and really, there are a lot of guns. Guns are located in chests throughout the wasteland and guns are dropped by enemies as loot.

There are the standard shotgun, sniper, assault rifle, rocket launcher, etc. classes, but each gun is further customized with performance-based changes to abilities like reload speed, fire rate and scope strength. Many weapons also have elemental abilities, they can light enemies on fire, inject them with acid or have explosive properties.

Borderlands is a shooter, the guns are what makes the game great. But there are strong RPG elements that expand the game into something truly special.

RPG elements

Role Playing Games are terrible. Littered with turn-based battles (how is that fun?) and micromanagement, they are an abomination to the video game world. Luckily, Borderlands is not like Fallout 3. Fallout is a good game, but it is still an RPG with a thin coat of shooter paint. Borderlands is the complete — and completely satisfying — opposite.

The questing system, leveling up and special abilities all work well. They wrap into the framework of the game so seamlessly you won’t notice that it’s a “hybrid” unless you really think about how good the game is at pulling everything off.

Shooter fans — yes, especially you Halo fans — need to give this one a try. There may be a little too much twitch action here for true RPG fans, but they’ll still find a trip to Pandora rewarding if they give it a try.