Borderlands (2009)

Borderlands is a fantastic game. It combines high paced action with good mechanics, a fun story, upbeat dub step music, humour, filthy jokes and does not take itself seriously.

The story is a little cliché in my opinion but works well for the concept of a looter shooter like Borderlands. Just hunt for a lost treasure which is exceedingly difficult to find.

Borderlands is a massive game with many, huge, open world maps. There are tons and tons of side quests you can complete for a nice new weapon, some cold hard cash, or a new skin (colour for your outfit actually). Each side quest is more ridiculous than the previous one and the use of every inch of the map makes this game worth every penny you spend on it.

The cell shading animations are nicely done, and this is the first game that I saw that used this unique technique. It gives a cartoon feeling, while still playing a fully rendered 3D game.

In the music department, Borderlands does also not disappoint. It got a lot of energetic dubstep fight tracks and nice calming ambient music in the background, while you pump a bunch of psycho midgets full of lead.

The progression feels rewarding and the game is well balanced. Enemies get stronger with you but are still beatable. If you stray to far from the main story line and enter certain areas beyond your level, enemies will wipe the floor with you, so you know what to avoid and come back to later.

The main concept of this game are the guns, finding legendary shields, weapons and relics for your character and develop yourself into a well-rounded killer. It is really fun to play with friends and makes for a good evening of fun. The different elemental weapons you can find is a good concept and makes you think, and plan which gun is best for what situation.

The use of enemies like midgets, psychos and Bruisers makes this game as ridiculous as it is hilarious. Midgets make high pitched screeches when you blow them away with your shotgun and psychos list all the things, they want to do to you when they mindlessly run toward you. Bruisers complain about their beautiful faces when they melt away by the acid in your special Maliwan rifle. It is just great fun. Also, Claptrap and his stupidity is genius and gave a few good laughs throughout the game.

I enjoyed every minute of the game, it is story and the collecting of loot, cash and special items. And then I played the DLC’s. My god, they were even better. The DLC’s are all over the place and add a fresh new mini campaign in each one of them with a completely different idea and style.

You got Claptrap’s Robot Revolution in which he is tired of your sh!t and goes rogue. You stop his glorious revolution while blasting samurai Claptraps back to the scrapyard, collecting pizza and lady panties. It will not get any better than that.

Then you got The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, in which “totally not Dr. Zed” from the original game brings the dead back to life and you need to stop him. Collect brains, brains, and more brains, kill his monstrosities and eventually “Dr. Ned” himself.

They even added a wave shooter mode in Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot. I personally did not like this DLC as much because of the unforgiving difficulty and the fact that it is impossible to finish in solo. If you don’t have any friends (or friends with time on their hands), bad luck for you my bro.

And lastly, there is The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, in which you search for the holy room of guns to make yourself invincible. Of course, this is not easy, and a ton of Crimson Raiders try to stop you, just as the depressed General Knoxx himself, whose only wish is to die.

I like that they combined jokes, characters, and events from the main game and the other DLC’s into each DLC, it makes everything feel more connected. Examples are Zombie T.K. Baha (killed in main game) and General Knoxx as a puppet in Claptrap’s revolution, who finally died in The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, just like he so desperately wanted, but now is back as a zombie-puppet.

Overall, this game and it’s DLC’s are in my top 10 favorite games of all time, and I would definitely recommend it to everyone.

I played a decent amount of this game at release, as well as Borderlands 2 and the pre-sequel at release. I never completed any of them because of attention span issues, as well as other games coming out that meant my Dad and I would play something else together. Based on my initial experiences, I had some pre-conceived notions about the games. 2>Pre-Sequel-1... and in terms of impact on me, 1>2>Pre-Sequel. I remembered this game moving really slow, and some quests being insanely difficult because there was no mini-map.

I am a bit removed from that first playthrough, so it was hard for me to remember everything that the GOTY version changed. That being said, this game was vastly improved. Due to the graphical style, it did not feel like I was playing a game from two console generations ago. I played fully through BL2 when the Handsome Collection was released as a monthly PS Plus game, so my experience with it was relatively recent, though not fresh.

I started playing as a break between slower more strategy based JRPGs and tactics games that I had lined up, and ended being so drawn in I wanted to play through the whole game. I really forgot how much characterization was done through text and side quests instead of dialogue as in BL2 and PS. I ended up finding my time in BL1 more enjoyable than BL2, even if there was not as much variety in terrain. The game felt like it was designed with totally different goals in mind than the second one. Rather than trying to build a hyper-effective skill tree to make a specialized play-style, it felt like I was playing a fun shooter with small RPG elements to augment a skill or two of my choice. The world being smaller was not a downside to me; it felt like each bandit camp and side-quest area was more tightly designed and I wasn't running or driving for ages through an empty expanse to an actual area designed with flow and progression in mind. As long as I found a decent weapon every 7-8 character levels, I was playing a a fun shooter with some stat manipulation that was focused on how well I could aim, rather than "Min-Max: The Grinding Simulator". I played through the first couple of chapters of the pre-sequel, and found the smashing and boosting made traversal between quests far more enjoyable than BL2 as well. Maybe I was used to the slower movement of BL1, as the movement was always my complaint with the PS in prior attempts to play.

Other Notes: There were definitely some issues with clipping through textures, but I never got stuck in an OB area and had to reset. I think the music was severely lacking in variety, but definitely captured the desert-wasteland themes well. The Mad Mel fight was one of the dumbest bosses I have encountered in any game, but once you inevitably get killed the first time, just walk to the ramp and stay outside of the dome and shoot him on foot.

TLDR: This game takes the Overwatch approach to RPG Shooter, while Borderlands 2 takes the Battleborn approach. If you want mainly shooting and less min-maxing around your action skill, give one of the remastered versions a shot.

The thing that first met my eye in Borderlands more than a year ago was its distinctive visual style - cel-shaded world of Pandora looks phenomenal. But, obviously, graphics is not enough for a videogame to be great.

To my surprise, in the beginning I didn’t like the game too much. The FPS style of gameplay was solid, but to me the world felt lifeless and uninteresting to explore: there was not much happening outside of Fyrestone, there were only a few NPCs, they didn’t talk too much and the quests were given as brief text notes. Even though I’m not a fan of an RPG genre, the promised combination of action-RPG and FPS felt too weak on a role-playing side. By the time we (all this time I’ve been playing in online co-op with a buddy of mine) have finished Sledge (the first big boss) I had a serious doubt I was going to like Borderlands.

I took a pause and the next day decided to play the single-player mode to try all the character classes other than Soldier I’ve been playing earlier. This time I used headphones instead of speakers and.. I was stunned by the game’s atmosphere and great music so much adding to it. While just wandering around the world in between combat sequences without someone talking in the headset, the game brought a strong feeling of abandonment and estrangement and it was fantastic. Since the moment I realized it, I looked at Borderlands from a different angle and enjoyed every moment playing it.

After a while I’ve returned to online play and this time I chose to play as Brick and really liked this class as the berserker mode brought some variety and even more fun to gameplay. 3 days after, we have finished the game. I think, the story was intriguing, but met with a major failure in the finale. Opposite to my first impression I really enjoyed exploring the world and doing the quests to discover its background. Also I liked the game’s specific sense of humor and I’m sure Gearbox won’t fail on this department in Duke Nukem Forever.

After finishing the game we’ve checked out all four DLCs. “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” is a very funny chapter, but has an easy combat. In “Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot” developers overdelivered the challenge “The Island” was missing, but underdelivered the rewarding component – bringing countless waves of enemies without giving any experience for killing them feels like at least a questionable decision to me. Also “Underdome”’s rule of losing a round of progression with each death is extremely frustrating. “The Secret Armory of General Knoxx” returned the game’s course to its roots – it is both fun and good in combat and has a couple of new types of quests. I didn’t like the length of stages you have to travel across without any teleports, but overall it’s a minor complaint I’m not even sure worth mentioning. The fourth and last DLC “Claptrap's New Robot Revolution” is a great addition and probably you could even call it a short summary. All this Robolution and Hyperion’s corporate stuff amused me a lot.

On the whole, I truly enjoyed playing Borderlands with its awesome visual aesthetics, immersive atmosphere, solid FPS gameplay, sense of humor and an interesting to explore world. The weak ending and occasional glitches didn’t bother me much.

2011