threevue

We here at Threevue have been super busy with work, school, and women (hoards of them), so we asked our friend Blacktail to do a quick writeup on his initial impressions with Borderlands, a game that we all want to play but haven’t had a chance to get into yet.

Picture the scene: you’re playing an FPS, and an opponent wanders into frame spraying bullets wildly in your general direction. You lean into your weapons sights, take aim, and return fire; a scenario most of us are probably pretty used to. What most of us probably aren’t used to in or FPS’s though, is the sight of numbers floating gently up from your opponents head as your shots meet their target – a sight which is initially a little bit disconcerting, though this is a feeling which passes remarkably quickly.

After spending a little bit of time with the game, I can safely say I feel the same way about most of the other concerns I initially had with the game. Perhaps my biggest concern was that, as the game places such a heavy emphasis on co-op play, the single-player component of the game would feel a little soulless. Thankfully, this isn’t the case; missions are varied and fast paced, and the core shooting mechanic works well once you start to level up and get better equipment. Developers Gearbox have also done a great job in developing a fully formed game world; the art style is clean and crisp, and helps to create an environment which is both barren and strangely full of life, whilst the RPG elements bring an extra dimension to the shooting, without weighing it down unduly. Talking of the shooting, the in-game weapons feel reassuringly tactile, and the fact that you find new weapons so regularly, combined with the fact that enemies level up alongside you, means that you never feel overpowered or underpowered for very long; a dynamic which helps to keep things feeling fresh whilst remaining challenging.

However, I did have a few minor gripes with the game: as with Mass Effect, the frequency with which you acquire new items means that you often find yourself having to tweak your load-out. Combine this with the fact that, initially, the capacity of your inventory is quite limited, and you find yourself having to do a lot of micro-management from an early stage. Also, whilst I admittedly didn’t get to spend a lot of time playing the games
online co-op mode, the time I did spend with it served to highlight the need to play in a private match with friends, rather than with strangers.

These problems aside, I had a lot of fun during my time with Borderlands. In fact, the more I played it, the more it felt like a bizarre hybrid of Fallout 3 and Mass Effect – though thankfully with less dialogue and more shooting than both of those – which just leaves me with one further thought to share: why am I still writing when I could, nay, should be playing this game?