Hundred Hand

I just got Borderlands yesterday and now I’m sitting here at work just thinking about it all day. I’ve only played about 4 hours of it so far, but from what I can tell, it’s a very fun game. This won’t be a full review, but I’ll talk about some of the things that seem to make this game work, and the new things it brings to the table.

I’m an RPG fan by nature. I grew up with Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior being my favorite series. If I got tired of the turn based combat I had things like Zelda II and Castlevania: SOTN to play, which had real time combat, but were still RPGs at their core. In my highschool years I was hopelessly addicted to Diablo II, which was just an action-RPG with a crazy loot system. I also played my fair share of Wolfenstein and Quake, which were fun, but always hated how once all the guns were collected, your character stopped improving. Honestly, once I found the secret double barrel shotgun in level 2, that’s basically what I used the entire game.

Fastforward to today. The two games I play the most are WoW and Halo 3. WoW is still fun, but I’ve been playing it for 5 years now and you need 9 other people who play specific types of characters in order to see anything new. The result is that I end up hopping on just one or two nights a week for scheduled raids, but play little at other times. Halo 3 is a great game to play when you have a couple buddies around, and I’ve wasted entire days just doing random deathmatches (I feel like I’m dating myself with that term) but after playing for 6 hours straight, I feel like I should be getting some kind of reward besides just a higher ranking.

So of course I was intrigued when Hellgate: London came out a couple years ago; I was even in the beta. It was the first game to combine an RPG and a FPS, and included the same kind of excessive loot drops featured in the Diablo games. But the company didn’t last long, and for good reason. The game was rushed and was released with some big bugs. It felt unbalanced with how many skills became obsolete just a few levels after first obtaining them. The weapon upgrade system was cool at first, but eventually meant that your upgraded weapon was better than anything that could drop, so it hurt the loot system overall. Probably my biggest gripe with the game was how similar and disjointed all the levels seemed and it started to feel very grindy after a while. It was one of those games with a good ideas, but some big flaws.

That’s where Borderlands comes in. Borderlands is a shooter-RPG set on a desolate planet with some humorous characters. The visual style is cartoonish, but like a cartoon intended for adults (as opposed to an adult cartoon). You play as one of 4 characters, all of whom have the ability to use every type of gun, but with skills that generally help to improve the 2 types of guns to which they are best suited. You complete quests which drive the main storyline, force you to explore, and give you nice rewards. Enemies spawn in small packs and drop the things you’ll need to become more badass. This includes mainly guns and ammo, but also can drop items to change the properties of your grenades, restore health and damage absorbing shielding.

The mechanics are largely that of a shooter, but you’ll have to gain levels in order to use the guns you’ll need to kill the harder enemies. One problem that often plagues RPGs is how grindy they can feel, having to level in order to do the things you want to do. Luckily this game has a nice experience curve, that a good player will be able to game to speed up the process significantly. The experience you get is largely based on your level in comparrison to your enemies’. You may not get any experience for killing an enemy 5 levels lower than you, 100 exp for something around your level, and 1000 exp for something 3 levels higher than you. There are definitely rewards for those that want to attempt some hard fights. There are also many achievements that reward experience. These are things like “Get 25 kills with a pistol”, “Open up 250 chests” or “Kill 12 enemies with no more than 7 seconds in between each kill.” With the right amount of planning, one could conceiveably jump from level 1 to level 7-8 in just a minute; however the way enemies are placed, and the timing needed to reload or change weapons without it interrupting your killing spree make these rather difficult.

I’ve been playing as a sniper and I really enjoy the way in which it works. Sniper weapons in general are pretty innefective when delivering body shots; their only real advantage being the range at which you can begin your attack. However, shots to the head (or whatever part of a creature is most vital) deal something like 4-5 times normal damage often 1-shotting enemies, and 3-4 shotting bosses. Thus, your ability to take on higher level guys, and advance quickly in level can be totally dependant on your aim. Likewise, how much damage you take is largely dependant on your ability to dodge attacks, and find good places from which to attack enemies.

The guns are fun and there are many different properties that can be randomly assigned to them. They can change the damage they do, clip size, reload time, recoil from firing, accuracy, add elemental effects to the shots, etc.. At first it was a bit of an overload trying to compare different properties and figure out which one was better. Eventually though, I stopped worrying and started basing my choices on just a few categories, weapon damage, weapon speed, and the availablity of a scope. As you progress through the game, you’ll start to notice weapons whose names are in different colors. They go from white, to green, to blue, to purple from what I’ve seen and each new color generally denotes a much more powerful and rare weapon. It may be racist, but after a while, once you’ve outfitted yourself in blue and purple gear, you can start ignoring the green and white items, and just sell them for cash.

So those are the things I’ve witnessed so far, and it seems like a good start. All the areas I’ve explored seem to be kinda Texas desert-like, but I’ve only been to 3 so I’m hoping the landscape has more variation as I advance. Also, I’ve been playing Single player to learn the game, though all the reviews I’ve read say that multiplayer is where the game really gets fun. I’ll have to check tonight to see if there is a way to find random internet party-mates.