Borderlands Retrospective Review

It’s funny how things work out some times. Here I am, in the middle of a party, friends and new people all around me, beer flowing, music cranking, and I am fixated by the TV. The host of the party is sitting in his living room with a few other friends playing a brand new game that, to be honest, I hadn’t even heard of yet… and I like to think I am generally on top of things. The game is called Borderlands, and as I sit there being introduced to the wonderful world of Pandora, I can see hours of my life whittling away right before my very eyes. I got to play around with it for a while, and while I had absolutely no idea what was going on, I loved every second of it. The next day, it was mine.

Borderlands was one of the biggest surprises of 2009 and would end up winning a slew of awards and ranking as one of the highest selling new IP’s of the year. Created by Take Two studio Gearbox, Borderlands manages to blend all the excellence of a first person shooter with the addictive loot driven madness of an RPG and is set on a stunning comic book style graphics display. You can pick one of four characters to play as, with each bringing different strengths and weaknesses to the table and several unique, customizable options to improve your character with as you level up. Killing bad guys nets you XP and the possibility of loot drops. You could get a gun; you could get a shield, who knows. All the loot goes by a World Of Warcraft style coloring system that lets you know how rare it might be.

The first thing that really stuck out to me as I sat there and watched my friend play was the graphics. As I mentioned before, it felt like he was playing a comic book. They were very gritty and looked hand drawn. I know cell-shading has been done before in video games, but the textures of the environment really stood out, and even though the color scheme of the planet was very drab and ornate, the design really brought it to life and added a burst of vibrance to what should feel dead and lifeless. I’ve come to find out that Borderlands was supposed to have a realistic look and design to it in the original development of the game, and somewhere along the line they decided to scrap it because the concept art felt so much more alive. I don’t know if this style would work for many other games, but Gearbox definitely knocked it out of the park on this one.

The game starts with a cut scene of a bus driver named Marcus (who you’ll get to know throughout the game). Marcus babbles on and on about god only knows what before you arrive to your first stop in the wonderful world of Pandora: Fyrestone. It’s time to choose which character you’ll have hop off the bus and play as, and there are four choices. First, there is Roland the Soldier, a former member of the Crimson Lance who specializes in weapons. He has a special attack that allows him to throw out a turret that will attack enemies and provide defense, amongst many other things. Second, you have Brick the Berserker, a total brute packed with muscles on top of muscles that looks like the type of guy that beats off to Roadhouse reruns. His special attack is a berserker rage mode that renders him invincible as he runs at a high speed going Hulk smash on anything in his way. Next we have Lillith the Siren, said to be one of only six Sirens in existence. She has a phase walking ability that lets her travel in and out of dimensions while tearing to shreds anything in her way. Last, but certainly not least, is my character of choice: Mordecai the Hunter. He specializes in sniper rifles and pistols and comes with a pet Rakk named Bloodwing. Mordecai can let Bloodwing loose to attack enemies within site.

Playing multi-player, you’ll notice that Roland and Mordecai seem to be the two most popular charcters. Borderlands has an amazing co-op mode that lets you play with up to three other people as you venture through Pandora, destroying everything in your way. The enemies get tougher as more people enter the game. When any member of the party picks up money or kills an enemy gaining experience, everyone in the party gets the same. Loot is only available on a first come, first served basis, though. You can play with friends, make new friends by joining someone else’s game or start your own open session in which people can pop in and out as they please. It’s not uncommon to see four Mordecai’s running around together. What is cool about it, though, is that you can go to a “New –U” station and customize the color scheme of your player, so while there may be three other Mordecai’s in your party, it is likely that they all look just a little different.

The first thing that really stood out to me about Borderlands once I started playing on my own was just how important the multi-player aspect was. This is definitely a game that can be beaten solo (considering I beat about 75% of it by myself), but there are a few spots in the game that are damn near impossible without backup or tons of grinding out XP and leveling up. The first spot that comes to mind is in Fyrestone when you fight Bonehead. It’s early in the game and his shield shredding machine gun can really destroy you fast, especially considering the leveling and limited array of weaponry that will likely be at your disposal. There was also a Steroid Induced Badass in Sledge’s Safe House that was a total pain in the ass, and Sledge himself was pretty tough. From Sledge on, it seemed to get better. The key is, when you die fighting a tough enemy alone and respawn at your last save location or New-U Station, your enemy has regenerated health by the time you get back to them. With a friend or two playing with you, not only are you doing extra damage, but so long as you don’t all die at once, you shouldn’t lose any progress you’ve made attacking your opponent.

Now I know I have already referenced several key points in the game already, and I certainly have no intention of telling the entire story, but I feel like I need to establish the basic premise before we get much further ahead. Once I selected Mordecai, I was greeted by a “Guardian Angel” type woman. A distorted video plays in the top right corner showing the eyes of a woman who starts explaining to you this mission she has and just how important you are to the fate of the world. She will play a pivotal roll throughout the game, guiding you along your path while constantly dangling the carrot in front of you by being vague and mysterious about just what the hell is going on. She goes on and on about the vault, and how if it gets into the wrong hands, it will be the end of Pandora. She introduces you to her little buddy, the Clap Trap, and he kind of serves as your guide and gets you set up to start the quest. You will run into many different Clap Traps throughout the game, all of them offering comedic value. My favorite is the evil Clap Trap that prevents you from going to the Trash Coast. He’s pretty awesome. There are also some missions to rescue Clap Traps in distress. Do every single one of these you can, because the reward for saving each one is three extra slots in your inventory, and trust me, you’ll need them.

Along the way, you meet a cast of characters that will keep you entertained and intrigued. You’ll meet people like Dr. Zed, Patricia Tannis, Scooter and of course Marcus, your bus driver/arms dealer. There are a variety of missions pertinent to the main story, along with a variety of other side missions you can do just for kicks and XP. As you play through the story and ultimately get to the vault, make sure you pay attention to these characters and their stories. There are lots of twists and turns and while you can live without knowing much of it, a lot of little things make more sense because of it.

That kind of leads into one of my favorite aspects of the game: just how well crafted and thought out it actually is. It’s very cerebral and calculated, and of course very easy to miss. There are tons of pop culture references throughout the game, right down to the achievements. My favorite is “my brother is an Italian plumber,” which you achieve by killing an enemy by jumping on them (an obvious Mario Brothers reference).  Then of course there is the in-game achievement “who made that man a gunner” for firing a certain amount of bullets, a Spaceballs reference. There are two body builder type guards for Baron Flynt named Hanz and Franz from the old Saturday Night Live “Pump You Up” skit. You can go into one of the bandits houses and find porno mags. They even took time and went far into detail with the loot. There are several different gun manufacturers and if you pay attention, they all seem to play different rolls in the stories, whether it be everything going on in the Dahl Headlands or the zombie action on Jakob’s cove. If you look at the features some of the guns have, some of them even have one liners from movies in the tag. It goes on and on and on.

One of the main attractions to this game is clearly the guns and loot. Gearbox claims there are over 87 bazillion gun variations, but who’s counting?  I can confirm there is a least a metric shit-ton, so there’s a lot. Not content to just have a bunch of different guns, Gearbox took everything a step further by creating different companies that manufacture the loot. In total, there are 11 different manufacturers, with each manufacturer having special features and looks that make them unique. Now of course, loot drops from enemies can’t be the only way to procure weapons, so that is where Marcus the bus driver/weapon dealer comes in. I can’t think of a cooler way to buy a gun then from a vending machine, and Marcus has set up shop all over Pandora. Pay close attention while scrolling through the selection, as Marcus will make comments about what each manufacturer does. For example, Dahl has low recoil, Jakobs does high damage with a lower rate of fire, Maliwan does elemental damage, Vladof has a high rate of fire, and so on and so forth. When an enemy drops loot, a little window will appear as you look at it giving you the attributes of each gun, with red and green arrows letting you know whether the damage, accuracy or rate of fire is better or worse then what you have. Some guns do elemental damage on top of their normal damage.  Some do fire, explosive, corrosive or shock damage on top of the normal damage, with each element having specific benefits to certain enemies. For instance, corrosive weapons will eat through Lancer armor and shock will eat through shields. If that doesn’t sound awesome enough, wait, there’s more! There are even multipliers on some of the guns and elements. You could pick up a shotgun that does 50 damage each shot times 10, meaning it really does 500 damage. These are all things to pay attention to as you move along. A word of advice is to pick up every gun you can find and sell what you don’t need at vending machines. It’s a nice source of income, and every once in a while you’ll find something nice you want to buy from Marcus.

There are eight different types of weapons: machine gun, pistol, sniper rifle, shotgun, assault rifle, revolver, rocket launcher and the alien weapons. The alien weapons shoot weird lasers and are the only weapons that don’t require ammo. They are also very, very destructive, especially against most bosses. Unfortunately, they also make you move slower and over-heat after a few shots. Every other gun is about what you would expect.  All the different manufacturers have different looks to their guns, which is pretty cool too. Some have unique scopes. You’ll also want to pay attention to magazine size. My favorite shotgun was a beast, but it only held two rounds. I eventually found a replacement that did slightly less damage, but had nine rounds.

Other loot that you might find would be money, ammo, shields, grenade mods and class mods. Ammo is self explanatory, you’ll need it constantly as you move along. Shields give you extra protection on top of your normal health. Like the guns, there are all kinds of different shields. Some regenerate health, some are good against one of the four elemental damages, some add a certain amount to your health (usually somewhere between 20-40% extra), and so on. My personal preference is one of the shields that adds to my health. There are also class mods that are unique to each individual character. For instance, there are a few different mods available to Mordecai. My favorite to run with is the Survivor class mod because it gives me and my team health regeneration. There are also some cool Hunter class mods that allow my pet Bloodwing to attack multiple enemies and speed up the cool down time between when I can use it. Like the class mods, there are also grenade mods that let your grenades do all sorts of different kinds of damage. Some add elemental damage, some regenerate life, some act as a landmine and don’t explode until an enemy is within range. There are literally so many different combinations, that it would take forever in a day to go through each one, so I hope you get the gist. Marcus also has an ammo vending machine that you can restock ammo and buy grenade mods, while Dr. Zed gets in on the action with his health vending machine that lets you heal, as well as buy shields and mods. Stock in all three vending machines constantly changes every 20 minutes or so in game. There are also treasure chest stashed throughout the game that will offer every kind of loot I’ve discussed.

As if that wasn’t enough to digest, there is also a coloring system that tells you the level of rareness. White is the most common, Dark Orange being the rarest. There is said to be a Pearlescent colored rarity level that is the rarest, but if it exists, I’ve never seen one after over 200 hours of game play. All items will stack in order of rarest to most common in your inventory. Now keeping in mind the level and rarity of a lot of the guns I have found, I have to say I am kind of confused. I would think that the rarer the gun or the higher the level, the better the gun would be. Unfortunately, I did not find that to be the case. In fact, I found myself using some of the more common weapons, and I am pretty sure I have sold ever single orange or dark orange gun I have found.  Even the boss weapons were disappointing.  Maybe I was doing something wrong, I don’t know. There was a level 19 Shattering Machine Gun or something like that in which I couldn’t replace until I was around level 33 or so because everything I found did less damage. It’s an odd quirk, especially considering that the enemies rise throughout the game.

Borderlands is often compared to post-apocalyptic style games like Fallout 3 because of the lack of human life, the fact that the land seems to be over-run by outlaws and savage beasts and the run down cities and towns. I guess I see where that comparison comes from, even if I don’t really agree with it. In my mind, Pandora is what it is: a baron wasteland with little to no resources where only the strongest survive. There is little-to-no vegetation and sand and rock dominate the landscape. The native creatures have adapted to the struggle for life and are vicious creatures straight out of your worst nightmares. Skags are sort of a wild boar meets rhino type creature with Predator style mouths that open wide with all sorts of teeth. Watch out for their long tongues, because they will lash them at you. Then you have your bat like Rakk that will hit you from the sky, Scythids, which look like a bunch of different insects merged into one that will come up from the soil to attack you, and then you have my least favorite of them all, the Spider Ants. These guys look like they have the Alien (the movie) heads put on top of a Star Wars Vulture droid, four legged creatures from hell. With all of these beasts, just like the weaponry, there are different variations that have any of the four elemental damages. So watch out for the Skags that spit corrosive venom at you, or the Spider Ants that shoot fire. Like I said, it’s a constant struggle to survive.

On top of the creatures of the land, you’ll have to watch out for bandits, and once you get into Old Haven and the Salt Flats, the Crimson Lancers. All forms of enemies drop loot. Apparently Skags like to eat guns and money. Who knew?

As you battle through Pandora, visiting over 30 different areas of the land once you factor in download content, you will have different missions that you will need to complete. Some are given to you by your Guardian Angel or one of the characters you meet along the way and have to be completed in order to continue on your way, others can be found at bounty boards and are completely optional. My recommendation is to do every possible quest that comes your way, find every piece of loot you can find, pick up every piece of ammo you can. Do it all. It will help you level up and you will constantly be churning through different guns and shields as you find bigger and better things. Always keep at least one Eridian (alien) weapon in your inventory. Like I said, they are great against bosses.

As far as the main mission goes, it is a pretty captivating story in that the Guardian Angel keeps dangling a carrot in front of your nose, and of course that just makes you hungrier and hungrier for more information. She is always vague and mysterious, and constantly asking you not to ask questions and just trust her. I know I always trust the voices in my head, so I guess it makes sense that your character follows along through all of this unknown. The biggest complaint from anyone who beats the game is the ending. There is this massive build-up all along the way, and then you get to the end and you are kind of left with this feeling of… “that’s it?” It all makes sense, and it totally opens everything up for a Borderlands 2, but it is understandable to go through the cut scene before the final boss, watching these people that have been chasing you  and generally making your life suck throughout the game die and then finding out what is inside “The Vault,” only to have your Guardian Angel come clean at the end. Again, no spoilers here. You’ll have to figure it all out for yourself.

After beating the game, you are given the option to start a second play through in which everything you’ve fought along the way gets harder, and many of the creatures and bandits become even more badass (literally, some of them are called things like Badass Skag and so on).  You also have the option to go back and clean up on your first play through. Since I knew that download content would be coming after beating the game the first and second time, I decided to stick with my first play through.

The download content so far has been a bit of a mixed bag. The first batch that came out was the “Zombie Island of Dr. Ned.” This mission brings you to Jakob’s cove, a property formerly owned and operated by the Jakobs Corporation.  They had employed Dr. Zed’s evil brother Dr. Ned, and his experiments have turned employees into zombies. Obviously, zombies are all the rage for most people, myself excluded, so I can see why Borderlands decided to jump into the zombie craze. I think the missions here are a lot of fun, and it offers a really different atmosphere from the rest of the game. It’s also really funny to see all the Halloween themed variations of the different creatures you encounter throughout the game, like WereSkags. Again, pay attention to all the conversations you can. Like all the main missions, there are tiny sub-stories that are told that make things make more sense along the way. Also, another little hint, when you kill zombies, you can collect their brains. This is completely meaningless until you find the zombie TK Baha and accept his mission. A word of advice would be to seek him out as soon as you can, because you are going to need to collect A LOT of zombie brains. I’d say think expansion pack adds at least another 10-12 hours onto the game, and can be played at any time once you reach level 8 or higher with no direct implications to the main story. If you are into the whole zombie craze, then you will enjoy this way more than I did, and I still rate it pretty high without caring about all the horror movie madness (which is incredibly ironic when you consider: A. I was born on Halloween, B. My name is Jason and C. my middle name is Michael).

The second round of download content is also the most controversial. “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot” brings you to an arena called The Underdome, where the owner Moxxi is in search for her fourth husband and thinks she can find him with these little battle tournaments. The only problem is, they are not so little. There are three arenas in the Underdome, and in order to unlock the “long” tournaments, you have to complete the three “short” tournaments. For the short tournaments, you have to complete five rounds, with each round having five waves. Each wave takes about 3-5 minutes to complete, and will have various enemies coming at you from all directions. Each wave is unique in that one wave will have melee only combatants, someone will have guns only, some will be a mix bag, and then there is the final wave of a round which sees the lights go onto a stage located at the head of the arena. When the curtain lifts, you will fight one of the bosses you encounter in the game and a few of their henchmen. It is virtually impossible to beat these tournaments solo. You absolutely HAVE to have at least one person playing with you. If one of you were to die during a round, that person would go to the penalty box located above the arena, right in the middle. That person can keep firing on enemies, but you have to wait a certain amount of time to get back in the action. If the whole squad dies, you lose and you have to restart the entire round. So if you are in the fourth wave, sorry, you bounce back to the first. If you are playing solo and die, there is no penalty box. That’s it, you start over. This is why it is imperative that you play with people. Now here is the second biggest flaw in the Underdome: I have NEVER been able to find people to play with through match making. I will start a new session in the Underdome lobby area,  and wait and wait hoping someone will join. It just never happens. So that leaves me reliant on waiting for friends that have the game to want to play. Now I have a buddy Steve that I play this with a lot, but there is just so much other stuff to do that is so much fun, we always neglect the Underdome because of the time necessary to complete it.

Which brings me to the biggest flaw for this piece of DLC: it is way too freaking long. Normally, that would be a good thing, but in this case, it just isn’t. The short tournaments consist of 25 waves, the longer ones have 100. Each wave takes anywhere from 3-5 minutes. Do the math. The longer tournaments can take anywhere from 2-3 hours to complete, and once you start, you have to finish. There are no save points. You can bang out 50 rounds and say  “OK, let’s finish this one later.” Nope. Once you start, you have to finish or you have to start over. Now Steve and I have gotten lost in the game and had marathon sessions of Borderlands and never even noticed it, but it is a little different to go in knowing that in order to complete it, you have to go start to finish. The best part of jumping in and out of each other’s game is that we can do just that, come and go as we please. If there is a phone call or you have to run and eat, you can bounce out and rejoin when you are done. Not here.

On top of all that, you gain no XP, no money and there are no loot drops. At the end of each wave, there are health and ammo drops, and at the end of each round, there are about 10 guns dropped in the middle of the arena where you start. Unfortunately, the guns left behind aren’t usually anything to write home about. So on top of asking for a huge time commitment to complete the missions, they also don’t help you work towards leveling up, you don’t make any extra money and the guns left behind kind of suck. I applaud Gearbox for trying something different, and the tournaments themselves are pretty intense. Steve and I have managed to finish of one of the 25 rounders, but that is it. I don’t think either of us plan to go back for it. So unless you are an achievement hunter, and it really hurts me to say this, this may be a round of DLC you consider skipping. Again, I think Gearbox had their heart in the right place, the execution was just a little lacking.

With all of that considered, the third round of download content more than makes up for any and every possible way the Underdome may have been lacking. As a matter of fact, “The Secret Armory of General Knoxx” may just be the best value in DLC ever created, easily adding an extra 15-20 hours to the game, bringing the difficulty up a notch, raising the level cap from 50 to 61 and adding tons of new weapons and enemies to the game. It starts you off in a new area called T-Bone Junction, and right away you get attacked by assassin ninjas sent by the Crimson Lancers. This first battle was really tough, and I actually had to leave T-Bone Junction and level up a couple times before I could actually beat them. On these missions, you get to know your buddy Scooter a lot better. Scooter runs the Catch-A-Ride stations, which you will find throughout the game so that you can spawn your mini-car/tank looking thing, which you now find out is called a Racer. You will use the Racer throughout the main story, but Scooter has some other vehicles he is working on. One of your first missions is to help him build a new vehicle called the Monster, which packs heat seeking missiles, which totally rule. Later in the DLC, you will start a new mission to find the plans for the vehicle the Crimson Lancers ride in called the Lancer, and once you do, you’ll be given the option to use that one as well. The cool thing about that one is that it can seat four, with each person having something different they can do. It also drops landmines, which is pretty badass.

As I have stressed throughout this review, pay attention to the conversations. There are a lot of little sub-plots building and they all really add drama to the story, especially what you find out about Moxxi and her relationship with Scooter and one of the bosses you fight named Shank. The battles along the way to the Armory are going to be tough and the loot is going to be a lot better. The reward for defeating General Knoxx is insane. I highly advise that you have every possible weapon slot unlocked and available before you go into the armory. Either sell it all or go to the Underdome and store it in your locker there. Other than what you have equipped, I would keep just one extra item on you: any class mod that includes “find rare item.” Keep that as a back-up, and equip it after defeating Knoxx. Again, you will thank me later.

The last part of the DLC is an optional boss that is easily the toughest enemy in the game: Crawmerax the Invincible. They ain’t shitting you when they add on “the Invincible,” I still have yet to find a way to beat him. My Mordecai is all the way up to level 61, which is where I happened to be ranked the first time I went in to try and face him and he is a level 63. Insane! I need to find a few other guys to run in there with me so I can take him out. One thing to keep in mind: there are vending machines outside of Crawmerax’s lair, and they are easily the best vending machines in the game. One reason for you to keep accumulating money even when you don’t think you will need anymore is this group of vending machines. They are guaranteed to have one item that costs $999,999 and will be beastly. I’ve only managed to grab one, and it was an incredible shield that adds 40% of my hit points on top of my hit points as well as having a shield level of like 1400. Needless to say, everyone other than Crawmerax has a tough time dealing with me.  Right now I am just cruising back and forth along the Ridgeway trying to fight enemies, load up on guns so that I can sell them all again and buy my next beastly item.

There are rumors of a fourth batch of DLC coming out at some point, and I have to say that I am very excited to see the support Gearbox has given this game. Each wave of DLC has come out at a cost of 800 Microsoft points, or $9.99 in the Playstation Store. On March 30th, 2010, an add-on disc was released in stores that contained both the Zombie Island and Underdome DLC’s and sells for $19.99, so for those of you that can’t get your systems online, you now have a way of grabbing the download content.

Borderlands is easily one of the most addictive games I have ever played.  Not only would I call it my favorite First Person Shooter of all time, but I’d also say it is my favorite game released on a next gen system as well, as it sits firmly behind Knights Of The Old Republic as my favorite game ever. I have already beaten it three times through, done some missions 10+ times while playing with other people and easily logged over 200 hours of game play. It’s the type of game that I just keep going back to and I especially love playing it with friends. At some point, I plan on going back to the Underdome to finish everything out, simply because I have just about every other achievement in the game and I want my perfect score back (was 1000/1000 and 1125/1125 after first DLC). The whole thing is a unique experience to say the least.

Rating: 9.5/10