Ain't No Rest for the Wicked
Money don't grow on trees in Borderlands it's found on the hundreds of bodies of those you've killed. Probably with friends. Also, in about 82 bajillion storage lockers.
Published: October 22, 2009
This is the single best year video games have ever seen, and if you need proof you need only look at the scores we've been giving out lately. The latest in a string of high-scoring efforts comes courtesy of an unlikely source for me, though. Confession time: I've been following developer Gearbox Software since their first game, the Half-Life PC expansion Opposing Force. While I dug OpFor (and Blue Shift, the second expansion), I felt the studio was sort of stuck working on someone else's IPs (a fact that wasn't helped by having to do PC ports of stuff like Halo).
Then, finally, Gearbox broke out with their own IP, Brothers in Arms... and I just couldn't get into it. The subsequent sequels did nothing to fix this. In fact, they actually burned me on the dev house and left me with the distinct impression that their second new IP, Borderlands was going to somehow let me down.
I was wrong.
It was obvious after just a few hours just how wrong I was, but I honestly didn't expect that realization to hold up throughout the 50 or so hours I spent playing through the game both online and off.
It did.
Borderlands isn't just a solid game for Gearbox, it's one of the most impressive pairings of first-person shooter basics and role-playing game trappings I've ever seen, going far, far deeper than just a bunch of numbers spilling out of enemies as you unload a few dozen rounds a second into their bodies. No, this is a remarkably self-assured game, one that knows exactly what it is and revels in that realization. And, as simple as it sounds, a massive part of that comes down to the game's art style, which is so perfectly delivered that it instantly makes me cringe whenever I hear it referred to as "cel-shaded". This is a comic come to life, a sci-fi tale that's unfortunately light on actual story (especially given how rife with potential the world they've created is), but serves up a relentless sense of progression and exploration that lasts well beyond the first few hours.
I should probably tackle the online portion of things first, as it's easily the most problematic. A patch is apparently forthcoming, and a hotfix was rolled out the day after the game hit stores, but it's still staunchly dependent on the connection speed of all players that are traipsing through the near-wasteland planet of Pandora. Though things don't tend to stutter too much, I noticed plenty of instances of shots plinking at stuff late or missing targets, hitching, framerate issues that weirdly seemed affected by connection speed and most painful of all, garbled audio that would slowly get better the closer the players were or the longer they stayed in a particular area.
Even with those problems, though, the handling of the whole online part of the game is clearly well thought-out; there are lobbies you can join from the main menu to jump into games with any of the characters you've created and no limit to the levels of the players. It's actually possible to join a game with players that are ridiculously high-level (even ones that are on their second playthrough where enemies are insanely tough even at levels approaching the cap of 50), but there's a certain kind of glee that comes from hanging back and watching your character gain levels almost as fast as enemies can be gunned down.
Then, finally, Gearbox broke out with their own IP, Brothers in Arms... and I just couldn't get into it. The subsequent sequels did nothing to fix this. In fact, they actually burned me on the dev house and left me with the distinct impression that their second new IP, Borderlands was going to somehow let me down.
I was wrong.
It was obvious after just a few hours just how wrong I was, but I honestly didn't expect that realization to hold up throughout the 50 or so hours I spent playing through the game both online and off.
It did.
Borderlands isn't just a solid game for Gearbox, it's one of the most impressive pairings of first-person shooter basics and role-playing game trappings I've ever seen, going far, far deeper than just a bunch of numbers spilling out of enemies as you unload a few dozen rounds a second into their bodies. No, this is a remarkably self-assured game, one that knows exactly what it is and revels in that realization. And, as simple as it sounds, a massive part of that comes down to the game's art style, which is so perfectly delivered that it instantly makes me cringe whenever I hear it referred to as "cel-shaded". This is a comic come to life, a sci-fi tale that's unfortunately light on actual story (especially given how rife with potential the world they've created is), but serves up a relentless sense of progression and exploration that lasts well beyond the first few hours.
I should probably tackle the online portion of things first, as it's easily the most problematic. A patch is apparently forthcoming, and a hotfix was rolled out the day after the game hit stores, but it's still staunchly dependent on the connection speed of all players that are traipsing through the near-wasteland planet of Pandora. Though things don't tend to stutter too much, I noticed plenty of instances of shots plinking at stuff late or missing targets, hitching, framerate issues that weirdly seemed affected by connection speed and most painful of all, garbled audio that would slowly get better the closer the players were or the longer they stayed in a particular area.
Even with those problems, though, the handling of the whole online part of the game is clearly well thought-out; there are lobbies you can join from the main menu to jump into games with any of the characters you've created and no limit to the levels of the players. It's actually possible to join a game with players that are ridiculously high-level (even ones that are on their second playthrough where enemies are insanely tough even at levels approaching the cap of 50), but there's a certain kind of glee that comes from hanging back and watching your character gain levels almost as fast as enemies can be gunned down.
