Borderlands is game of the “shoot and loot” variety with a wicked sense of humor, an unprecedented number of guns, and a snarky well written villain who you will love to hate. I really wanted to like the game more but the overly repetitive gameplay, excessive backtracking, lackluster narrative and character development held the game back.
Set several years after the original Borderlands, you play as a “vault hunter” who, as the name suggests, hunts for vaults. Vault hunter is an odd occupation what with the vault hunters from the previous game having already discovered the only “vault” on the planet. But as luck would have it a second vault is discovered so it remains a viable career option.
The game’s villain Handsome Jack, who you are trying to prevent from opening the vault is arguable the game’s most well developed character. He is an interesting villain and I wanted to know more about his past, how he came to power and what his relationship with “Angel” is, and for the most part the game satisfied my curiosity.
With so much emphasis being placed into the central villain one would expect that same care and attention to have gone into the playable characters. Sadly, that is not the case. The vault hunters you can choose to play as are some of the blandest cardboard cutouts imaginable. They have no real identity beyond their character class, i.e. soldier, mage, berserker, ninja, tax accountant, etc.
There are a few audio logs scattered across the world providing glimmers of backstory and justification for why you are on Pandora in the first place, but these are an afterthought to the shooting and the looting as you could easily play through the game without finding them.
Crafting some side missions specifically tailored to the hero you or your co-op buddy picks to play as would have fleshed these characters out into actual people we care about instead of the faceless class types they essentially are.
In terms of gameplay, Gearbox scratches that undeniable itch to pick up shiny objects and compare them with other shiny objects. But the implementation of that system is such a chore that half the time I couldn't be bothered with actually comparing the loot I was supposed to be so keen on hording. The depressing sight of row upon row of lockers, safes and random storage bins demanding your attention that you might suck up their contents like some sort of human vacuum cleaner becomes a tedious sequence of inventory management. Throw in an excel spreadsheet and let’s get this data entry party started.
The ever present hunt for better loot will keep you engaged for a time but for the game to position itself as anything more than a competent shooter with a good sense of humor there needs to be a narrative driving that central mechanic forward. Tell me more about the mysterious sirens, the vault creators, the corporations fighting for control of this backwater planet, literally anything would have helped make this a more interesting experience.
As for the optional side missions the sense of humor goes a long way to improving the kill-x-monsters-because-I-told-you-so quests as there are some gems worth seeing. But even these are bogged down by pointless backtracking and respawning enemies. There are better ways to handle turning in quests, such as a paypal account; just wire that crappy pistol to my inventory so I can get on with this vault hunting please.
There is a wide variety of guns with different styles, and trying out all the different combinations is fun and rewarding. Similarly, varied character skill trees offer players meaningful variations on how they want to play. An equally good design decision allows for respecting your skill points so you can test out different paths on the fly. Too many games lock players into these kinds of decisions without allowing them to experiment, and I’m glad Borderlands opted to buck the trend in this regard.
Borderlands is a competent shooter with a great sense of humor that is best experienced with friends. Whether it was discovering parodies of Batman and the Ninja Turtles, helping Scooter with his love life, or trying to get people to come to Clap Trap’s birthday party, the game rarely failed to make me laugh. Had the developers dug deeper into the world of Pandora, expanding upon the mythos, and crafting better heroes to match the well written Handsome Jack, the game might have lived up to all the praise and hype that surrounds it.