When I first heard developers Gearbox were working on a RPG/FPS hybrid, I was pretty skeptical. Typically FPS games are faster paced where as RPGs are slower paced involving plenty of micromanagement. Fortunately what Gearbox put together turned out quite good, albeit mostly thanks to good integration of cooperative play.
The start of the game jumps you right into the planet of Pandora, where you choose one of four classes to play as. You have your well rounded Soldier class, your tank like Brute class, an elemental Siren class, and finally a sniper type Hunter class. Each class is different enough, but some classes really do not lend to a good solo experience until later levels.
As far as the story goes, it’s definitely delivered as a secondary consideration to the gameplay. Aside from an opening cut scene explaining what you are looking for and your motivation to do so as treasure hunters, all the story pieces are handed to you by an attractive blue eyed mystery woman as you play. Mostly the story is just tied together to provide some form of progression, and it’s easy to ignore while the game is going. If you just want to follow the story, the game does a good job of scaling the difficulty of the enemies to you and your party’s level. One thing I would have liked was to be able to customize my character’s appearance more than just a color scheme on a base model.
A good move on Gearbox’s part was changing their visual style from their original planned art style. The cartoony art style looks fantastic, and really lends to the hilarious sense of humour trickled throughout the game. The environments, though a little uninspired, come alive with bright colors and personality. The downside to all this is the variety in the appearance of the environments and the enemies. Although there is some, everything generally looks and moves the same. There is only really a small handful of different enemies and each environment looks largely similar. The exception is as the game advertised, the amount of weapons. There are truly many different weapons, with different looks and characteristics to keep your weapon of choice and play style constantly changing.
If it wasn’t for cooperative play (up to 4 players online, 2 via split screen), this would be simply be a decent game. I spent the majority of the game play cooperatively and it was a fantastic time. I definitely recommend you play with friends, especially since there is no form of loot control. Everything that drops is fair game, so having a good friend to coordinate with on what to pick up makes it that much better. The interface is really intuitive, if you hold your cursor over a weapon, a little information panel will appear to show the weapon’s information as well as how it compares to what you have currently equipped.
For an FPS/RPG hybrid, this game definitely felt more like an FPS. There is that RPG leveling progression, but it’s fairly limited to just bonuses to your shooting, melee or special ability (which is different with each class). The only other RPG element is the looting and weapon micromanagement which I already covered. Otherwise this is just straight up cooperative FPS against hordes of enemies.
One gripe of mine is that there really is no end game content. Once you reach max level (which is level 50) there isn’t much motivation to continue. I would have really enjoyed a more fleshed out competitive multiplayer mode so people would be motivated to continue trying to find stronger weapons. All there is competitive wise are some arenas that you can play in with the people who joined your game. There is no risk/reward at all for playing.
Ultimately, Borderlands is a game well worth your time. If you rushed through the story, you could complete it in about 10 hours, doing all the side quests gets you about 25 hours, and going for level 50 could clock in at around 40 hours (you can play through the game again once you beat it retaining your level and items). There are moments I definitely felt bored, but overall I did really enjoy playing this title, especially with a friend.