Borderlands

So Borderlands is one of the more critically acclaimed games I’ve managed to complete recently. Apparently loads of people love it because... reasons. I will go in to those reasons shortly, however if you want to save yourself the bother of reading the rest of this review, I thought it was a bag of wank. And the reason I’ve started the review this way is because I wish someone has said to me, ‘here you go, you can have the achievements. You don’t have to play the game.’ It would have saved me a lot of bother.

Firstly, the story. You are one of four generic, personalityless douchebags on a bus on some kind of search for some kind of treasure on the unoriginally named unoriginal planet, Pandora, which is basically a rip off of Mad Max or any other obligatory post apocalyptic fictional environment.

Apparently there is meant to be some kind of playful humour to the game and the cartoony look sort of tries to be back this up, but at the end of the day, no cartoon effects can numb the pain of gun metal grey and pooh brown environmental backdrops. If the ‘dialogue’ was meant to be humorous, it fails on an epic level. For a start, there isn’t enough of it. The game even tries to trick you into thinking there is a lot by showing two characters with actual spoken lines talking at the beginning of the game and then nothing of note for the next ten hours. I’m not even over-egging these two character’s involvement, it’s minimal.

My point is that the story doesn’t add any immersive value to the game. Anyone who loves Borderlands for the story or colourful characters needs to wake up by playing Saints Row.

Sound and graphics have a lot less bearing on my enjoyability with a game these days but the sound can really ruin it. Borderlands does okay in this area. The sound doesn’t take over, which is exactly want you want from the game that endeavours to keep you playing for over 60 hours, and it remains relative to the environment for the most part.

Now the gameplay... I’m not really sure how I can go about this without upsetting the entire world... I was expecting a game filling with lots of colourful enemies with a lot of variety while I go about killing them with a wide variety of weapons. The reality is you fight, in order: some guys; some dogs; some birds; some other guys; some weird aliens; more guys; more dogs. That’s it for the variety throughout the entire game with the exception of two boss battles. Whoppie.

In terms of the guns, this is just a fuckass of a game. Everything drops guns, even the birds and the dogs. However, none of them are any good. I really struggled to get genuine better weapons throughout the game and it even has a colour-coding system to tell you that some guns are better than others, except when they aren’t. Which is all the time. I had a orange weapon for ages despite the fact that it was worse than my green gun because it was rare and worthless, like I was expecting it to transform into some super enemy killing badass weapon just by holding on to it. I mean there is no way to improve or keep your favourite guns, they just become irrelevant and then get replaced by new similar ones.

Another note on the weapons is that they don’t have much variety either other than they might come with an elemental damage effect which you cannot unequip or change. They also have supposedly humorous names as well but at this point, I was just thinking that the game was up its own ass.

Achievements – 1,750 Points – 80 Achievements

Now one of the main concepts of Borderlands is the fact that it is meant to be played with others in a co-op setting but about 90% of the game and its achievements can be obtained through solo play which I’m all for. However, I think half the reason the world felt so empty was due to the fact that you are supposed to play it with others so that there would be at least one other person who isn’t a total psycho to keep you company.

I specifically targeted the co-op only achievements first to get them out of the way. There are only 7 out of the 80 achievements that actually require you to play with a co-op partner and of these six, only one of them requires you to play with other people and not use a second controller. Basically you have to play online with people to get it as it is a viral achievement for playing with the creators.

As I mentioned earlier there are four different characters you can choose to play as and each one of them comes with an achievement  to use their special ‘power’ to kill a certain amount of enemies. As you don’t get this skill until level five, it basically means you have to play the opening of the game four times. Not cool guys. Not cool.

There is one notable achievement out of the rest that’s more interesting for its name than anything else. If you succeed in jumping on the head of an enemy you will do a small amount of damage. If you succeed in killing said enemy, you will earn the achievement, ‘My Brother is an Italian Plumber,’ an obvious reference to the Super Mario franchise.

The rest of the achievements in the main can be obtained just by playing the game and completing every mission you come across it’s really hard not to be able to do this. Unfortunately, there is an achievement for attaining level 50 as part of the main game. You do however unlock the ability to play through the whole game again to get to level 50. This was an option I didn’t need to use though because of the copious amounts of DLC.

Downloadable Content

There’s a grand total of 4 DLCs to extend the Borderlands adventure which made my late playing of the game an advantage for getting the level 50 achievement.

The first of these is Borderlands’ own interpretation of the zombies theme that seems to be a requirement of every franchise for the last ten years. You visit Ned’s Zombie Island and have to complete a bunch of missions, the most painful of which sees you collecting zombie brains. You have to collect a total of 435 by shooting zombies in the head and collecting their brains; a concept that doesn’t make any sense. If you shoot them in head, surely you would destroy the brain?

The second sees you take on Mad Moxxi’s Underdome, a concept so Mad Max, it may as well have been called Thunderdome. This one is designed for four players to take on waves upon waves of enemies. Even if you do this the easy way (get to level 50 and then plug in a second controller with a level 1 character) it still takes in excess of two and a half hours to complete just one of the things you have to do three fucking times. It’s a grind-fest made worse by the fact that there is more attempted hilarity in the dialogue throughout which, after your first two and half hour run, will grate on you worse than a... cheese-grater.

The third instalment of the DLC is the one which attempted to fuck me over – The Secret Armory of General Knox. Playing online with others, something you are encouraged to do I might add, will cause the game to glitch if you end up with people using mods. At this point, every fucker out there uses mods. What happens is that it will add all missions you haven’t yet got to your mission list and if you haven’t completed all of the missions after finishing the main quest line, it makes it impossible to complete all the remaining missions in the DLC. There is a way around this though but you have to either break the graphics to get through the door or modify your save file to remove the glitched missions – something that is against Microsoft’s terms and conditions. Needless to say I was not fucking impressed that playing the game normally caused a requirement for me to stack 100 medikits against a door that won’t open in order to complete the game.

The fourth and final DLC, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution, sees you go up against all the annoying Claptraps – complete with totally annoying dialogue – so they can annoy you while you kill them. This was actually pretty straight forward with the exception of the collectibles. You have to kill so many claptraps to get all of the rare drops from said claptraps of which there are 68 to collect. However, once you have collected say all of the oil cans, they will still continue to drop. It’s basically another 6 hours worth of grinding out kills to get all the items required which succeeds in making the game stop being fun, something that Gearbox have become experts at.

That above covers every area of Borderlands that pissed me off... pretty much the entire game after the first ten hours or so. I don’t get why people think it’s fun and I don’t understand why people still play it online doing the same thing over and over again, but to each their own I guess. This kind of rubbish certainly isn’t mine.