Borderlands

I'm not a huge fan of first person shooters. I know a lot of you guys out there are, they're just not my cup of tea. I feel like once you've played one, you've played them all. But I have, from time to time, been enticed by first person shooters who try to get my attention by claiming they're not another first person shooter... kind of like Borderlands.

Borderlands is what you'd get if Diablo made sweet love to the first person shooter of your choice... beyond Thunderdome. Billed as an RPS (Role Playing Shooter), you wander around the backwater planet of Pandora as one of the four character classes, completing missions for the various people you encounter all the while searching for a mythical place called the Vault. What exactly is the Vault? Well, it doesn't quite matter... it's just the macguffin that the game uses to allow you to complete missions and shoot enemies in the face. But maybe that's part of the "role playing" aspect of the RPS? You can assign whatever reason you feel is necessary? Remember kids! Role playing is more than just branching skill trees!

But if you want branching skill trees, Borderlands has that too. Each character class has it's own unique skill tree which you get points to upgrade and modify as you level up your character. But even though each class has its own unique skill, ranging from a berserker state where you can do increased melee damage to a pet bird you can send to attack your enemies, the great equalizer or rather, homogenizer, are the weapons you discover while playing the game. While it's been said that Borderlands boasts millions of different combination of weapons, the practical number is probably much smaller. Each weapon has it's stats (firepower, reload speed, ammo, etc), elemental effects (fire, acid, shock, explosive) and special attributes (increased melee damage, increased critical hit percentage) but a gun's a gun. A revolver with a scope that fires explosive bullets kills just as easily as a sniper rifle that fires acid bullets.

And I guess that's where my prejudice against first person shooters comes in. Even with the role playing elements built in, it feels a lot like the other first person shooters I've played. The characters don't feel a whole lot different from each other to me... which I think should be a bigger deal for something that's supposed to be a role playing game. I think that mostly stems from the fact that your main mode of attack is shooting a gun. It levels the playing field across the character classes, but it also doesn't really differentiate them from one another.

But what I did enjoy and what actually drew me to the game in the first place is the art style. Everything has a hand drawn feel to it. It's a striking style that more and more games are starting to employ. It does give the game an almost cartoonish feel, which is a perfect match for the cartoonish acts of violence that you'll perform while playing through the campaign.

You can also play the campaign cooperatively with either two people locally or up to four people online. You can pop in and out of games in progress as long as there's an open slot, which is good if your schedule doesn't allow you to play for extended periods of time. However, I didn't really get a good chance to test out the co-op because the few matches I did play were choppy to the point of being unplayable. Was it the game or was it the connection? Or was it something else? I can't say for sure.

From my point of view, Borderlands really had the odds stacked against it. For me, it had an uphill battle to overcome the first person shooter stigma that I have. The graphics and the role playing elements got me interested... but in the end, this wasn't the game that I was hoping for to change my perspective on first person shooters.

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