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
Guns, for those not following the game, are the core focus of things. Thanks to a randomization system, a ridiculous number of pistols, SMGs, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, assault rifles and even odd combinations of things like shotguns that fire rockets can be scooped up from almost innumerable sources, from crates to enemies, all of which are randomly generated, making no two playthroughs the same and rarely two players with the same unique weapon types.
It's all necessary, you see, because of the lawless planet of Pandora. Originally thought to be a source of almost infinite resources, private companies descended en masse, scooping up what they could while colonists were lured by tales of a mysterious Vault that had untold riches. A few years later, the planet's lengthy rotation around the local sun started a slow thaw, releasing the decidedly crabby local fauna from their hibernation and making it clear that the Vault was probably a myth and the cost to harvest wasn't worth the lives taken by the harsh local wildlife. Nearly everyone left that could, and those that were too poor or too hopeful of the legend of the Vault were left, turning Pandora into a new Wild West; lawless and driven by the person with the most firepower.
Years later, four Vault hunters are lured back by a notice claiming the alien artifact is indeed real, which is where you come in. Choosing between Brick, the game's human tank who goes all agro and literally punches things to death while screaming; Lilith an apparent descendent of the original Vault builders that can move into another plane to sneak around enemies; Mordecai, the hunter with a pet Bloodwing that can seek out enemies behind cover and Roland a soldier that can create an automated turret, you're tasked with finding the Vault... and with helping out some of the local residents in the process.
The class you choose opens up a bevy of options; each of the characters has three separate skill trees they can pour points into, and if you're not satisfied with how a particular build has gone over the course of the game or want to play a different role while online, you can simply pay to get back all your skill points and pour them into different attributes. This represents one of Borderlands' biggest advantages: you're rarely locked into one type of character. If you tire of using a particular weapon, you can simply use another until you naturally become so good at it that your default starting weapon is just another option.
What follows is a rather predicable series of quests (find this thing, shoot it, find this person, kill them, fetch this item, etc.), and yet such simple RPG tropes suddenly end up feeling fresh -- even after 50 hours. It's not that the game changes all that much from the first hour to the last, but the shooting and the art style are so damn solid that it becomes more about discovering who some of these characters are that you'll help or hurt and where they're located than just fulfilling a task -- and this is, again, a game with a heavy RPG bent that almost completely lacks anything approaching a story or character development. Even the main characters are utterly without development and yet I couldn't. Stop. Playing.
I wish I could explain what it was about everything that kept me going, though I have my suspicions. Yes, the game is a lootwhore's wet dream; every enemy felled, nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of randomly generated crates and lockers and boxes have something in them that can be harvested, sold, equipped or spent, and that coupled with a growing list of objectives always gives you something to do and a reward for doing it. Light though the game may be on the more meaty parts of a role-playing game, it know precisely what parts to pilfer to make the whole experience both rewarding and littered with that perpetual feeling of "just one more quest." I can't count the number of times I told myself I'd go to bed after finishing something only to have a new part of the planet open up or a nearby quest be just a few minutes from being turned in -- and inevitably I'd finally stop... hours later.
