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.

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

Following the last Sherlock Holmes adventure and his fictitious pursuit of Jack the Ripper, we now join him on another quest to solve murders, only this time he has a far less annoying voice. That’s the only real difference though. He is still an arrogant son-of-a-bitch who continuously breaks the law. During the course of his ‘investigation,’ Sherlock Holmes commits a series of crimes including but not limited to; springing a convicted mass murderer from prison; blackmail; arson; countless amounts of vandalism and, my personal favourite, murder. While on a murder investigation.

Still the most intriguing part of the game is Sherlock’s relationship with Watson. He is constantly mugging him off, undermining his intelligence and making him an accessory to his crimes and yet Watson still thinks this is okay, probably because Holmes occasionally refers to him as ‘Mr Dear Watson.’ There is no way any other human being would take the level of abuse subjected by Holmes and still call them ‘friend.’ It is bizarre.

Visually the game is okay but I would have expected a little bit more from a game in 2012. For the most part the sound effects and background music win points for being spot on with the atmosphere of the game and in keeping with the period, however there were a few exceptions to this. In the prison area, the pace of the music is really fast and completely out of context with what you are supposed to be doing. The music is so fast paced that it implies you are in a rush to do what you have to do there which is not the case at all.

Gameplay wise there is only one criticism – some of the puzzles are ridiculously hard to work out what you have to do. I’m not talking about the ones that require you to solve mysteries with the clues you are given but more specific when you have to define chemical compounds at Sherlock’s flat. There are no instructions on how to use the chemistry set and I had to look it up to figure out how it worked.

On the other side of the coin, the environment-based puzzles are really good. They give a great sense of achievement for figuring out what you need to do from the clues provided and most of this involves using your own intuition.

I do think that the character dialogues and interactions with the environment could use some work. I’ll discuss the dialogue in the achievements bit as one of the achievements relates directly to this subject. The environmental interactions feel a bit silly at times. For example, you can choose between third person and first person perspective. The differences are that in third person, your character handles badly, can’t easily interact with the environment and walks like a robot crossed with a brain-damaged rabbit. It’s awful and there is no real need to use it as it seems like the game was designed to be played in first person anyway.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 32 Achievements

Okay so there are 19 unmissable achievements for playing through the main story of the game and three which are completely missable.

One of the missable achievements is for having three separate dialogue conversations to enact Sherlock’s love of blackmail. Although to be fair, one of these conversations is Watson’s, but still. Anyway what I would have liked to have seen from the game would have been a variety of different dialogue options that had a variety of different outcomes. You have three opportunities to blackmail people but they are only there for the achievement and to make Holmes look like an asshole. They have no bearing on any character outcomes or the overall storyline. Basically, it’s one of those areas that had the bare minimum work put into it to allow the game to function.

My complaint from an achievement perspective is that there is scope for variety here which is unused. As well as the 19 out of 32 achievements being story related, the other 10 non-missables are for completing the individual puzzles in the game and the reason they are not storyline related is that there is a feature that allows you to skip the puzzles if you are not able to do them. While there is no conceivable problem with this, it is kind of weird that this story driven game allows you to get its final reward (the ending) without making you complete any of its challenges.

Another one of the missable achievements is for finding one item and fully examining it. This item is in no way connected to the storyline of the game so it begs the question... why only include one achievement of this type? It feels very strange, almost like there was a plan to have a much vaster game experience but it wasn’t completed and the game was forced into an early release.

The last missable one is for completing all of the in-game puzzles that you can skip, missable obviously because of the in-game ability to skip the main content of the game. You have to do this on one playthrough though so it makes sense, seeing as you’ve paid money for it, to actually play the game through properly as there are no conceivable short cuts to unlocking this one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s another Sherlock game that can gather dust or be sold once completed as there is no replay value to the puzzles and no alternate ending. It feels very rushed and underdone but in its defence, the puzzles are good and offer a sense of satisfaction if completed without aid.

Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation has created much spite in the gaming community. It has been describes as perhaps one of the most shittiest games ever to grace the Xbox 360 and while I thought it was not the best, it most certainly doesn’t deserve the title of ‘worst game ever.’ It is still really shitty though, but more on that later.

The story line follows John Connor in events that I can only imagine took place before that of the movie as he is not the leader of the rebellion against the machines at this stage. Instead of being evacuated from a random starting battle in the post apocalyptic world, John decides to embark on a rescue mission with one other comrade (co-op utilisation) to save three people who would otherwise have been left to be killed by the machines. It’s meant to be the whole ‘never leave a man behind’ scenario but the story shits all over itself half way through.

You meet up with several people along the way and one of them sacrifices their life to save the others. Afterwards John is upset because he feels responsible for her death, however your comrade mentioned above says, ‘what are sad about? You inspired her.’ And now she’s dead. Well done. And so much for the ‘never leave a man behind’ thing.

The graphics, I was led to believe would be rubbish, however they aren’t as bad as some of the other games I’ve played recently. That said, the environments are pretty repetitive in looks after the first few levels and consist of similar looking blown up buildings and streets. In a game with only nine levels, it is quite the achievement to have such little variety in level design.

In addition to this, you have to fight your way through a series of chest high walls which you can hide behind when robots are trying to kill you. The layout of these is so glaring that you pretty much know when you are going to be faced with a fight due to the series of chest high walls laid before you in the middle of the street along with blown up cars. The cars make sense. The perfectly formed chest-high walls do not.

In addition to the level layout there are a very limited amount of enemies. Let’s see, there’s small flying robot, larger flying dropship, spider robot, two types of man style terminator and... that’s it. There also vehicle sections where you have to shoot from the back of a car taking out machine bikes. That’s six different types of enemies. And nine levels.

The music is in keeping with the Terminator theme however, it was pointed out to me that the repetitive nature of the music was infuriating and I was only playing with company for about an hour so that’s saying something.

The gameplay can make or break a game, however Terminator Salvation was already a write-off before going down this dark path. The aiming is clunky, the shooting accuracy is questionable and you remember the chest high walls I mentioned earlier? Well, John can pop out over them to shoot stuff however, on several occasions, when he would aim ‘around’ a wall, he would fire directly into it instead. It was the most annoying aspect of the game by far. This was even more apparent during the last level when I fired a rocket ‘over’ a barricade only to have it explode in my face. I didn’t die though which made me think that the friendly fire coding is questionable/non-existent as well.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

Earning all the achievements can be gained by playing the game through on hard and despite the gameplay frustrations mentioned above, this can be done in less than five hours. There was only one aspect that was difficult. In chapter seven you have to fight off robots while keeping your team alive. It’s a small area and you have to fight off two of the super hard robots. It is only a matter of figuring out the pattern though and after a few tries firing grenades into walls directly in front of me I got there.

Completing the game on hard caused a lot of debate in the gaming community. Apparently there is a trick where you can manipulate your save file to complete the game on easy and then fix it by deleting your save and doing something with a second profile but it was all a little convoluted and apparently you can have your gamerscore reset by Microsoft if you do it as manipulating save files is against their rules. For a game that isn’t even that difficult on hard mode, it’s really not worth taking the risk, especially with the amount of effort involved too.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I really don’t think the game deserves the horrible reviews despite my unforgiving comments. It’s bad but it’s not bad to the point of burning the disc and sending it to hell. Another complaint is that it is a poor movie adaptation but personally, I would rather play a game where I don’t know the ending rather than rehashing something that would always be better in the cinema.