Borderlands

Borderlands

Borderlands is a first-person shooter role playing game (FPSRPG), taking place on a wasteland-esc planet called Pandora, but not that one. 

The game opens to a thick accented, eastern European man named Marcus, regaling us with the tales and legends of this new, scary world. Apparently located somewhere on Pandora is something known as The Vault, a magical, mystical place that could contain any number of things. Some think it’s treasure and riches, some think nothing awaits the entrants except a small case of buggered and a big case of death, and then there are some that don’t believe it exists. That aside for the time being, you play as one of four characters that heard about The Vault when they were kids and weren’t put off by all the buggery and terrible death and decided to all go on a quest to find it.

 Along the way they’ll encounter trials and tribulations; the natives of the planet, most of which have gone crazy or maybe just like the idea of driving around spraying everything with bullets because apparently, no one gives a shit and it looked like fun. The native animals, if you can call them that, more like twisted abominations, that have even less of a preservation instinct. Most of them choose to gleefully run up to you, completely oblivious to the ten or their pack that you’ve already blasted away right in front of their very eyes.

 Then there are the others that have ventured to Pandora also with The Vault in mind. These are probably the sanest of Pandora’s inhabitants, sane used in a very loose term especially when they send their flaming minions in your direction, but hey one less person to take their share of The Vault riches and one less witness to account for the boss’s arson.

So, we got the location, the plot device and the hazards along the way. What about those four glory hungry kids I told you about earlier by which I mean playable characters. We’ll start with Roland. This soldier character has a proficiency for guns, giving him a slight damage or recoil bonus for example. He also has a special ability to create a turret content with filling enemies with bullets to give you covering fire to move forward. Next up is Brick. He’s the berserker, a melee focused character who has fists like cinder blocks and isn’t afraid to use them, especially when you activate his rage mode. Mordecai, the hunter. Armed with his trained pet rak, Bloodwing, that he can send into battle to dive bomb the enemy, Mordecai can sit at a distance with his high-powered sniper rifle, picking off stragglers that could escape the aerial assault one by one. Last is Lilith the Siren. Not much is known about the Sirens in the universe except that they have incredible powers, involving the manipulation of elements. Lilith can phase-walk, meaning she can turn invisible to bypass enemies or unfriendly turrets. Except when you’ve misjudged how long it will last and end up phasing back into existence right in the middle of a group of bandits that are only too happy to wail on you with whatever they have to hand.

Borderland’s “addition” to the FPSRPG scene is its “Shoot and Loot” system. RPG players will be familiar with this system as it’s what any RPG player does after entering a town. You kill all the people you can kill and the search the place and take all their stuff; brings back great memories of smashing all those pots in Ocarina of Time, so basically they just gave it a fancy name. You can pick up weapons left by the dead bandits, most probably after you shot them in the face, and some people just give you ammo and grenades if you talk them enough, and then there’s the chests. These can be found in various place around Pandora but most commonly located somewhere near a boss in their base camp, ready for you to explore and collect your winnings after clearing out the peoples. All this killing and thieving, while questing of course, means racking up the experience points (XP) to fill you experience bar to level up. An RPG wouldn’t be complete without inventory micromanagement, making sure which of the weapons and shields you have picked up along your merry way are slightly better than what you have equipped. So, Borderlands is constantly throwing up items for you to laboriously sift through to make sure you’re shooting or healing efficiently even when you’re over encumbered with useless, low level items that you’ve been lumbering around just to find somewhere to sell.

Borderlands is designed to be played in four player coop and, as an informative loading screen will tell you, “More players=harder enemies=better loot”, so the difficulty does scale but if you are playing solo, you still get a good experience without other players stealing all the good weapons in addition to health and ammo. After completing Borderlands, you might want to play with friends, and the game nicely offers the ability to use the character you have invested in, so no one has to start from zero thus creating a greater experience all round.

The game play is pretty standard, you shoot at things until they don’t move, steal their wallet, go to another area, repeat. Apart from that, the game world is split between two main hub towns and you get quests from talking to non-playable characters (NPC’s) or consulting the bounty board. Constantly running back and forth, shooting various bandits in the face to get whatever thing whichever NPC asked you for but can’t be bothered to retrieve themselves, can get tiring and repetitive, but the beauty of and RPG is that little experience bar I mentioned before. Gaining any amount of XP, steadily increasing quest after quest until, BING! Another level gained and another chance to fiddle around with you character specific skill tree. To start with you only have a couple that you’re pretty much forced to put your skill points into but as you get further into the game, completing the many side quests and leveling up more, you have access to better skills that require more skill points to unlock. All four characters have three skill trees each contributing to their abilities in different ways, ranging from duration of abilities to damage buffs with certain guns or elements, so it comes down to what takes your fancy. If you prefer to look your opponent in the eye through your sniper scope, efficiently putting a bullet in their forehead from a town over, then you can put points into Mordecai’s sniping tree to increase his head shot bonus. If you’re afraid of confrontation, or low on health and would rather send in Bloodwing, you can put your skill points into his rogue tree so you regain health whenever Bloodwing hits your foes.

The story to Borderlands is thin with it pretty much being a case of “Go there, kill him, return to town”. Most of the story is explained to you through the opening cinematic told to us by our friend Marcus, but it starts to shine when it comes to the character design, backstory and writing. All the characters on Pandora are well rounded, interesting and the emotion they convey, mostly verbal because video games hasn’t yet master faces, does make you feel for them sometimes. I mention this because of one specific NPC, Claptrap. This little boxy robot is essentially your tour guide through this adventure and he comes fully equipped with an annoying personality and grindy, synth voice ensuring to get on your tits at some point. Personally, I enjoyed the little bastard, but I am the kind of guy that thought Ja Ja Binks could have been worse and Ocarina of Time’s Navi was absolutely delightful. I am also aware that the design of Claptrap was to annoy and Gearbox achieve this with an almost scary amount of gusto.

To open this Vault, you’ll need a key, I mean what vault doesn’t need a key right. Unfortunately, this key is broken into pieces and scattered around Pandora. So, as your main quest, given to you by a lady of questionable frame of mind, is to retrieve them. As you discover new worlds, pillaging camps and doing the odd side quest, you will come across characters of…well… character. These individuals range from friendly NPCs you interact with during story missions to bosses you fight at various points through the story. All of which are introduced with a dramatic freeze frame, colour effect and quick zoom in on their face while the screen is hogged by their name accompanied with a witty/punny one liner. Borderlands is fairly linear and has a bad habit of making you run through the same areas you have already explored quest after quest, but the colourful characters and imaginative writing really pull their weight. Most quests have you meeting a new character or delving deeper into a character you have already met, which kept my interest if nothing else. From having a conversation with Claptrap about the bandits using him and his robot friends for target practice, to blind TK Baha about surviving on Pandora, to crazy Doctor Zed with his lack of medical license and dubious methods, Borderlands is littered with characters that I found engaging and funny.

At the end of the day, Borderlands is a good FPSRPG with some very good writing. The world is expansive and you can spend a long time running through the camps and finding the caves, preferably on foot because the cars are a bit crap. I found myself playing for hours on end without realising and the downloadable content (DLC) adds so much more to discover. If you’re into the standard FPS and maybe feel like reaching a little out of your comfort zone, I would highly recommend Borderlands.