Sir Funky Introduces

Review Part

The Text Review

The sand is getting in between your teeth as you are reloading your shotgun on your knees. Bearing down on you are all the scum and villany of Pandora. And just as the psychos are getting close enough to plant an axe in your skull, you grin and put a shot right through their heads. With a howl you get to your feet and charge the oncoming horde of flesh. You are a Vault Hunter, just recently arrived at the front line colony world of Pandora. Drawn there by the rumors of the legendary Vault, you have soon realized you’re not the only one. Big mega corporations are there hunting for it as well, next to the crazed civil population getting caught in the crossfire.

The tale of the Vault Hunters is surprisingly good, from the moment you set your foot on Pandora until your search for the elusive Vault is concluded. However, the way the game is designed, it’s hard to progress the story without doing some of its many side quests. This in itself isn’t much of a problem, since many of the quests provide a nice flavor to the world. But it does undoubtedly feel like there is just one or two too many until your level is high enough to tackle the next story quest. It’s also a little hard to figure out just which quest is driving the story forward at points.

Although the game seems like your standard shooter at first glance, it’s actually much more of an RPG. The loot that every mob drops is completely random and can be anything from a simple magazine to a legendary weapon. This might seem like a good idea at first, but it makes the game far too dependent on luck. Combined with a lacking system to compare weapons, you might want to bring out the calculator to figure out if the new weapon that just dropped is actually better than your old one. And did I mention that all the guns have random attributes? A gun ten levels lower might be the best gun in the arsenal because it has better attributes. The only thing preventing the random nature of the game to be too much of a deterrent is the leveling system.

Like most RPGs, Borderlands comes with a talent and leveling system that makes it tolerable to get a string of bad loot drops. However, if you happen to pick the wrong talents, the game punishes you severely for it. The slow pace which you unlock hotkey slots for your weapons makes picking a suitable weapon very hard and unfulfilling, even when it’s clear that this is what the game designers wanted.

The core of every shooter is the gun play, and unfortunately, Borderlands is somewhat deceptive here. You might think that you can get off more hits with your sniper rifle than you can, since the bullets will scatter randomly until the recoil wears off . Even if you time the swaying of your gun perfectly with the enemies’ heads, you’re still more likely to hit their friends standing several feet away.

The quests in the game can be boiled down to “shoot stuff into pieces” and “find a person or a thing”, making the game somewhat repetitive. I really can’t recommend marathoning this game since the monotony of it will start to grind on most people after a couple of hours, so it’s better to play it in chunks. And respawning mobs in a shooter with limited ammo is a terrible idea.

Another part worth mentioning is the unique sense of humor which the game keeps hurling at you. If this kind of humor isn’t your cup of tea, it might just be better to skip Borderlands entirely, as the puns and bad redneck jokes will be a prevalent part of your Pandora visit.

The art style of the game is very unique and interesting, but it might put you off with its cel-shaded look. However, this does give the game an ageless quality that more and more games are trying to capture to avoid the trap of rapidly aging graphics. The sound design goes from brilliant to adequate. The music in the game is, when it plays, usually really good, and the intro No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant really sets the mood of the game. The sound design of the guns make most of them feel really nice to use, with the exception of some of the pistols. The voice acting in the game is superb, but unfortunately not all quest texts are voiced. Together, the art and sound creates a wonderfully gritty world that just makes you want to cock your shotgun and head out into the vast deserts of Pandora to look for the Vault.