Written by Citizen Alpha Sunday, 28 February 2010 19:39

I'll have to admit I was really looking forward to Borderlands after giving a lot of my gaming life to Fallout 3.  I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic RPG's, what can I say?  I'm also a big fan of anything that features cooperative play because I'm always looking for an excuse to be slightly social while gaming so me and a friend picked up Borderlands and a bottle of Jack.  Needless to say this recipe typically puts me a bit under the gun in forming a solid opinion and progressing in the game, I only have a few hours before we're both too retarded to play.  Unfortunately, sober or drunk, Borderlands didn't deliver all that I had been expecting.

Borderlands had a rather uninteresting formula.  Basically you pick up missions in "town" then head out into the wasteland to battle it out, level up, and collect weapons and goodies to sell or use.  All the hype around Borderlands suggested there'd be a wide array of weapons and customizations.  There was a wide array of weapons, however rarely did I ever find a weapon better than the one I was carrying and I kid you not, I used 2 sniper rifles an entire 6 hours of gaming.  The extent of adding any sort of personal flavor to my in game avatar was dying my shirt pink at the loading screen. 

My partner was getting especially frustrated with the fact that he couldn't find anything besides the crappy nerf gun he had been initially issued.  The character customization was trumped near immediately through necessity.  You built up your character by using a particular weapon, it was a skill based system that while great in idea was poor in execution.  I was gearing myself to be a sniper however sniping required 1 type of 4 available ammos.  I never seemed to have sniper ammo so I was forced to used second hand gear leveling up the wrong skills a big chunk of the game.

There was also a skill tree of power ups that proved to be nominally useful.  My character got some sort of hawk...falcon...thing that I would toss out and it would attack enemies.  You'd imagine this bird would go around decimating things for an amount of time, maybe even do some sort of retrieval and bring back something like sniper ammo or loot but instead it was far more useless.  It would be good for one hit and then it would fly off from what I could judge.  It took you aiming at something as a bit of a loose suggestion.  I'd throw the bird at some level 100 mega basher brute motherfucker 2000 and it'd veer off course and hit the vacationing furby next to it.

My partner had a turret but by the time he had it leveled to any sort of usefulness he was much to drunk to make any constructive use of it.  Lets also not forget the inclusion of vehicles.  Typically when a game includes vehicles I'm pretty excited, worked out great for the Battlefield games, was properly executed in Halo, but they pulled a real Mass Effect with this one and managed to make it suck so incredibly hard.  They even managed to kill cooperative play with the thing because as we shortly discovered the turret on the thing was far less effective than simply running them over.  We could either spend 5 minutes shooting at some guy or 2 seconds running them over.  For no notable experience or loot.  Complete waste of time.

After many hours of drinking and putzing along in Borderlands everything got considerably redundant.  The atmosphere was nowhere near as engaging as Fallout 3, the RPG elements were busted by sparse ammo,  and after my partner decided to go "puke in the yard like a man" and disappear I went home rather disappointed.  Anyone have a better experience with this game?

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