Borderlands
Borderlands is a science fiction role-playing FPS, i.e. a first-person shooter with RPG elements, released in 2009. At the start of the game, players select one of four characters, each with a unique special skill and with proficiencies with certain weapons. The four characters are: Brick, Lilith, Mordecai, and Roland.
Brick is a Berserker, a tank that is strong in melee combat with the special ability of entering a berserker rage mode to rapidly punch through the enemies. Lilith is a Siren with a special Phasewalk ability that allows her to temporarily enter another dimension and then exit within a group of foes, causing a shock-wave blast that harms them. Mordecai, a Hunter, is aided by his pet bird Bloodwing which can be used to assist in his long-range attack skills and scavenging. Roland, a former Crimson Lance Soldier, is able to deploy a turret to help with close-range combat.
Playable in either a single player mode or with a co-op team, players take on quests assigned through non-player characters or from bounty boards, each typically rewarding the player with experience points and a reward item. Players also earn experience by killing foes and completing in-game challenges (such as getting a certain number of kills using a specific type of weapon). As they gain levels from experience growth, players can then allocate skill points into a skill tree that features three distinct specializations of the base character. When more players are present, the game alters the statistics of the generated enemies, balancing the game due to the larger number of players.
Players start the game with the ability to use two weapons, but later gain up to four weapon slots, as well as slots for an energy shield, a grenade modification, and a class modification. Items collected but not used can be sold back at vendors for money that then can be used to buy better items. One of the key features of Borderlands is the randomly-generated weapons and items created – either as dropped by foes, found in storage chests about the game, sold at vendors in the game, or as quest reward items. The game uses a “Procedural Content Creation System” to create these weapons and items, which can alter their firepower, rate of fire, and accuracy, add in elemental effects such as a chance to set foes on fire, and at rare times other special bonuses such as regenerating the player’s ammo. A color-coded scale is used to indicate the rarity of the weapon or item. It is estimated that the random system can generate over 17 million variations of weapons.
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Gemmy
- Tagged with: co-op | fprpg | fps | pc | rpg | science fiction
- Wikipedia: Borderlands
- http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/borderlands
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5 Reviews
I really had a lot of fun with this game, but it has some serious and very annoying issues. The item management system is terrible, the lobby/multiplayer system could use some serious work, and there are numerous reports of bad graphics glitches after the most recent update.
All in all, though, I really enjoyed this game. The story is compelling, the characters are fun and distinctive, and you can have a whole new experience just playing as the various classes. Multiplayer is awesome, when you can get it to work.
A really enjoyable game. It’s pretty huge, so it will take some time to complete; getting new weapons is addictive; and it’s fun to go around with your friends shootin’ and lootin’. Quests accomplished and loot acquired in co-op transfers to your single-player game, so you never go backwards. You don’t get credit for quests too far beyond where your own story is, but that’s OK— it just means you’ll probably replay some quests if you co-op a lot, and they’re highly replayable.
Frustratingly, it’s not integrated with Steam, so you have to make separate Gamespy accounts. Worse yet, you need to mess with port forwarding to get co-op working… though once you do this you don’t have to mess with it more.
The UI is… adequate. It seems it was designed for consoles, then hastily adapted for the PC. You can do what you need to do, but they definitely made some poor choices.
Still having fun with this. It hits my fun spots in a way Fallout 3 never did, even in single player. UI isn’t a deal breaker for me.
When it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, it’s just a pain. After jumping through all the hoops of port forwarding and such, I was able to host private games (usually). The fights are fun, and the game doesn’t take itself too serioustato.
The UI is a bit weak, being finicky about mouse vs keyboard controls. You can hit enter to click the button, but then you need the keyboard to close the confirmation dialog box or visa versa.
Still working through it since I’m pretty busy, but at level 27 and still having fun when I can play it from time to time.
I’ve been playing the hell out of this lately, more than any other game other than the mainstays of TF2/L4D2. I still haven’t delved into the co-op aspects, and maybe never will — I’m enjoying the single player in bursts of an hour or so most evenings, which is pretty much my limit.
It’s so close to being truly great, but misses the mark in almost as many ways as it hits. I think it would have been a better game if it had been designed for PC first and consoles second, but like so many games in the last couple of years, the opposite was clearly true, and that’s a shame.
My favorite kind of game is the same as it always has been — exploring interesting environments and killing bad guys with ludicrous guns, using twitch skills but also some degree of tactics-on-the-fly. This scratches both those itches for me, and though I’ve never been one to enjoy the quest-for-better-loot mechanic of a certain type of game, I really do like finding newer and better weapons, and the way they’ve implemented means that you actually can develop skill sets around various weapons attributes, rather than having to relearn combat with each new shooty-thing.
Excellent game, but like another recent games that I liked, at lot, FUEL, the enormous potential was squandered a bit by questionable game design decisions, I think.