Right ok, Borderlands is a FPS RPG.

Upon first loading the game up I’m faced with a console menu, console interface controls (poorly adapted for the pc, i.e. press enter and space bar)……yeah it hardly impressed me.  Nevertheless I took this in my stride and continued on with the game, albeit with not very high hopes.

The story line has you shipped off to Pandora, a planet said to hold a fabled legendary alien weapons cache.  Its your sole mission to ultimately find this stash and nick off with all the guns.  Yeah guns that’s right, the entire game is based on the multitude of weapons you can get hold of.  Now this sounds great for marketing purposes.  I think they coined the phrase ‘Bazzilions of guns’ in the various promotional videos they produced.  The simple fact is 90% of the weapons you with either leave on the floor as you have no inventory space, or you simply sell them.

After going through the tutorial and getting to the point where i had the chance to fire at some bad guys, I noticed the weapon aiming was being done for me, lol!  I know this game is designed for console but they also stated the game runs best on PC’s.  So there was me thinking they would take the time to adapt the game properly, but no, I guess not.  In the options auto aim was turned on, seconds later it was off.

All this negativity being said, the game is not actually that bad, in fact its pretty good at what it does.  That’s give you an environment in where you can adventure throughout with 3 of your friends battling against armies of npc’s while completing the various missions you are sent off on.  With multi player comes better weapons too.  The difficulty is also ramped up and it makes for an entertaining gaming experience.  The game is broken down to 4 different characters you can play, these are the classe:

Mordecai – Sniper.

Lilith – Stealthly lass.

Brick – Melee powerhouse, the ‘tank’ if you will.

Roland – Solider, assault rifle kinda guy.

Each class has its own specific special ability.  I found myself playing the game as Mordecai – and also found myself extremely disappointed at his special, which seems to be a giant pigeon which swoops down to shit all over the target…yeah, it never looked all that good.

Borderlands uses a type of cell shading style of graphics, think Team Fortress 2.  Initially they looked quite poor to me.  As time went on and I started to clock the game play hours up they really began to grow on me.  The world is full of detail and the graphics engine really does compliment the game.  If anything and this is really picky, the gun on screen size seemed a bit to big to me, but that’s more of a personal thing than anything.

Ultimately if your after some co-op action, with an element of RPG inside a gaming sandbox, then buy Borderlands.  While the game is entertaining, it can quickly become tiresome and monotonous if you go at it alone.  The overall game play experience really comes to life when you join up with some online friends and it makes for a fairly unique experience.

Unit Lost rating 6/10 If you like guns, you’ll like Borderlands!