Review : Borderlands

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 10:15

Entertainment

You are never short of loot, and comparing guns to currently equipped ones, or deciding what to carry back to the store for sale will be a constant decision making process.

Gearbox has kept things pretty simple in most aspects of the game, environmental interactivity is kept to a minimum, and vehicles are generic and armed with weapons of unlimited ammunition.  

Battles can get intense, with the guttural sounds of Pandora’s denizens along with the chatter of automatic weapons and grenade or barrel explosions adding to the chaos.  Top this off with player characters –somewhat disturbing – exclamations during an exceptionally bloody kill and the Borderlands combat experience is defined.  Enemy AI is limited, but the variety of enemies, everything from the many indigenous creatures right up to the varied size and mental capacity of roaming groups of bandits and your work will be cut out for you.

But this is a game best suited to co-op play, if I have one recommendation, jump straight into co-op right from the start.  Borderlands will scale both enemies and loot drops to the number and level of players in the game.

On the PS3 there were occasions of frame rate drop, and then there is the graphical effect of quick clearing blurring that is a little disappointing and distracting from time to time.  There are also some easily broken missions, which will require some patching.

The result of FPS action combined with low-tech RPG is a winner all in all.  Having played many excellent games in recent times, it is not often that, as a games reviewer one actually gets hooked on a particular title, but Borderlands has had that effect.  



8.5 Skrags out of 10