“Why did you run so far?”
“I have my ult going, I kinda have to.”
“Yeah but now I can’t reach you.”
“I have like 10 seconds left, I might get it… OK, I’m up.”
“Damn I’m down.”
“Coming…”
“Almost… ahh, he walks away.”
“I’m almost there… damn, I’m down.”
“OK, I killed one, I’m up, coming…”
All right, let’s do this. Let’s do a straight-faced review of a video game that is more than 10 years old as of the writing of this review.
In Borderlands, you play as a mercenary team of 1-2-3-4 mercenaries. There are four different classes with somewhat differing playstyles. You have your generic soldier-type figure who places turrets, a sniper samurai with a cool hawk, a mage chick, and a fistfighting tank brute.
At the beginning of the story, you arrive on Pandora, a weird planet populated almost exclusively by bandit psychos and armored corporate psychos and various mutant monsters, and then you start looking for a mysterious vault in the most roundabout way possible.
The game is a proud looter-shooter, the gameplay is almost entirely about shooting things, comparing things dropping out of those things against your currently equipped things, and ultimately deciding which one is better based on money value. And that’s basically it. Who needs more?
Fair enough, there are feather-light RPG elements sprinkled on that core mechanism. All classes have their own skill tree, and you can decide from three different branches to level up. For example, with the brute, you can go with a melee build, go full tanky, or become an expert in explosives. You gain XP by killing enemies and doing missions. (duh…)
The Good
The first and very obvious thing to praise about Borderlands is the art. The comic book art style has become its own trademark thing since the game’s release, it’s original, looks astonishing, perfect choice for this bleak and yet colorful setting. In retrospect, it also made sure that the visuals have aged well. It looked as cartoonish back then as it does now. The music has a great post-apocalyptic barren wasteland cowboy type vibe, also perfect.
Shooting through hordes of enemies together is satisfying, fast-paced and crazy, and occasionally epic. Some enemies are annoying, especially the endlessly slowly respawning skags, but in general, the variation is OK, and most of the enemies provide a unique challenge and they are fun to fight against. There are also midget psychos (or psycho midgets?). Who needs more?
This game feels like it should be boring to play for the Xth time, but when we played it for the review, I honestly had a blast with it. It has a very specific nostalgic feel to it, looks great, but it does feel old in a nice and cozy way. It feels like home, at least the starting area. When the two of us got the car the first time and drove through the desert with some quiet guitar music while the sun was slowly rising – that was a nice feeling. It’s moments like that why I play games in general.
The world feels large and open and breathing, there are no sandbox time-sinking activities required. The levels are very similar, it’s all gray and rusty rundown industrial Mad Max stuff and yet somehow it’s very memorable. We were playing the game after many many years and I could remember most of the levels as we were advancing through the story. So that’s a good sign.
Humor is incredibly childish and rudimentary but I don’t mind it.
Claptraps are cute. Rescuing all of them is a must.
The Bad
Level design is great from an art point of view, but it’s quite frequently annoying gameplay-wise. There are lots of backtracking, you finish the mission in the lair, so now you have to walk out. The worst is probably when your car explodes in the middle of nothing, but you don’t die. You can see that the next goal is 700m away, and the game is kinda realistic in walking speed, so it takes minutes to get there. In general, the pace is all over the place. The final push through the caves and then the snowy mountains is very exciting and fast and explosions everywhere and crazy combat but there are also missions that are very stretched out and 80% of them are basically walking.
Fast travel is annoying, and the overall interface is very console-peasant. Sorry not sorry. Simple activities like switching your weapon switching, buying ammo are surprisingly frustrating in this game, and in general, I can’t really point at a piece of UI that is not annoying.
I mentioned that the game is occasionally epic, well, that very rarely happens with the boss fights, which are supposed to be the high tension points of the game. The difficulty is usually not well calibrated, and it doesn’t help that if you die you can usually just respawn and can rejoin the fight without the boss regaining health. This criticism is sadly true for the final big boss as well, and that is probably one of the main issues with the game.
It’s also very easy to get over-leveled, and that completely ruins the game. There’s not much story, (see next point), so if you are not enjoying the shooting part, which becomes dull with even a few levels of advantage, there is not much left to enjoy. Now, it is actually easy to circumvent this leveling issue, you just have to be very strict about doing side-missions. You have to do a couple, but only until you catch up with the main story’s level requirement, and at a point, you have to silence your inner completionist.
And now the previously foreshadowed point about the story. Well. It’s not good. Silliness, over-the-top violence, and larger than life everything does not mean you cannot have a meaningful story. Borderlands 2 will prove that with a great villain. Here, everything is incredibly cookie-cut, go there, pick that up, kill that, go there, put that down, kill that. Insert cannibal or sexual references so everyone can see that we are big boys. And the story progresses, oh no, she was evil the whole time, who would have thought, and, most importantly, who cares. This lack of effort in the story is also reflected in the base locations, apart from the Arid Badlands opening settlement that has like one habitant, none of the places felt like home. (Yes, I did say earlier that the game feels like home, wrap your head around that!) There is a place called New Haven that is supposed to be the base of operations for the second half of the game, but it feels like we are hardly ever there and it’s just empty and foreign. Once again, that will be improved with the next title’s epic central hub, Sanctuary.
And finally, the bug issues. I don’t know how widespread this is, we used to play the game a lot on good old-fashioned CDs with no issues, but the game of the year edition was very buggy for us (random disconnects, flashing background, no sound, etc).
The Co-Op
Co-op is good. Reviving each other is really important, and it organically provides its heroic moments. You need to focus on 2-3 weapon types so you can level up your mastery with it, which means strategic looting.
Combat does feel like you are fighting foes together, and not like you are competing for things to do on the battlefield.
The Recommendation
Well, here is the question: if you are a person who has not played the original Borderlands, should you pick it up now, 10 years after its release?
And here is the answer:
- If you are seriously into co-op games, first of all, why haven’t you played this game yet, and second of all, yes. Yes, you should. True, its successors improved on almost every aspect of the game, but Borderlands is still a fast-paced action-packed game with gorgeous artwork, and I do feel like it’s important to experience the classics of the genre. I think the best allegory would probably be the first Terminator – there is a better Terminator movie, sure, but you should still see the first one if you consider yourself a movie fan.
- However, if you are a person who occasionally does some light co-op gaming, no, I think Borderlands would be a waste of time for you.
Info
| Release Year | 2009 |
| Genre | Third-Person Shooter |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 10 - 15 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Good |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Good |