Borderlands

You only need watch the intro and pass its fancy character select screen before you’ve fallen in love with Borderlands. You will have chosen whether you want to be Roland the Soldier, Mordecai the Hunter, Lilith the Siren or Brick the Berserker.

The over-arching story to Borderlands is pretty basic. You have to find The Vault, if it exists. Spoiler: It does! (Although this is obvious from the intro). The world of Pandora is a colourful wasteland populated with half a dozen different enemy types with a lot of variation within. It’s all so very Mad Max inspired that there’s a boss character by the name of Mad Mel. Mad Max never had skag, rakk, spiderants or temple guardians to contend with though.

The look of the game is best described as a comic book that came to life. You can see this in both the thick outlines of everything and the way the textures are drawn. The thickly outlined people and objects may sound unappealing, but it works so well that any complaints about Borderlands will never be about the graphics. Notwithstanding the usual Unreal engine problems; i.e. waiting for textures to resolve, but that’s only on the other side of a loading screen and only lasts a few seconds.

The music is a collaborative effort, with Jesper Kyd being the name that stands out. If the name rings a bell, he composed the music to all of the Hitman games and both Assassin’s Creed titles. As you might expect then, the music is always fitting and never grating.

As to the sound effects, they’re tremendously satisfying. It’s fair to say a shooter can live or die on the strength of its sound effects. All the weapons on Pandora sound just as they should, from the rapid popping of an SMG to the throaty growl of the alien energy weapons.

The structure of play in Borderlands is very much that of a first person shooter, but with the loot-lust of a Diablo game or, perhaps more aptly, World of Warcraft. The rarity of equipment is even colour-coded in a similar way to WoW. All items in the world have little colour-coded beams of light coming out of them with an icon at the top of the beam, like mutant sunflowers. You can therefore point at the item to see what it is from any distance; red for health, yellow for money, white for ammo, as well as white-green-blue-purple-orange for equipment.

The real addiction of Borderlands comes from that, at any given time, there are several different goals; missions, loot, trophies, levelling and challenges. Challenges are the games own sub-trophy achievements, with experience being the reward. It’s all laid out to keep you coming back for more as expertly as any MMO. Maybe better, since there are no monthly fees, whether you play with others is always up to you and gratification is never far off.

Once you’ve finished Borderlands, “finished” as in completed every mission, you’ve still not hit the level cap in the game. So, you can start Playthrough 2, where all the enemies are toughened up Diablo-style! With the game having no surprises at this point, this would be a great time to start playing with real people (if you haven’t already). You can play LAN, online or split-screen, and can even invite friends into your game when playing in single-player mode. The online option from the main menu lets you browse through lobbies of other players’ games or create a lobby of your own. Online play can be a little laggy, even with as few as two players, but for the most part it doesn’t interfere with gameplay.

So is everything else good here? Well, scrolling text up and down with L2/R2 is wilfully awkward, and it would be nice if player two could use their own profile in split-screen mode. The biggest gripe is that, in the PS3 version at least, the audio can stutter at times. However, this is quite rare and with no apparent cause. So minor niggles then? Yeah, pretty much.