Borderlands

North American box art.

Borderlands is a looter shooter in the form of a first-person shooter role-playing video game developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 2009-10-20, and later for Windows. It is the first game in the Borderlands series.

The game is set on a desolate planet called Pandora which was being mined by a company that employed criminals and the poor, but, once the ore dried up, they left the planet and their employees behind. Now, the remaining people have setup tribes to control the remaining equipment and buildings. However, a scientist who remained has discovered that the planet has a huge secret vault which has led militant groups to return to the abandoned planet to unlock the vault. You play as a vault hunter, someone who is trying to find the vault and open it before anyone else. To do this, you fight against the tribes, avoid the dangerous flora and fauna, and make alliances with some of the inhabitants.

Personal

I don't remember how I acquired this game, but I very much enjoyed it. I would love to see more games based on this engine, which always a good sign for a game.

I own this game and all expansions on Steam. I have beaten the main game with 100% quest completion and the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned with 100% quest completion. I have 44/80 achievements.

Review

8	8	8	6	8

Best Version: Windows

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The comic book style graphics are really impressive.
• Character movement, jumping, running, crouching, driving, etc., are all polished and fluid.
• The setting is wonderful and highly detailed. Each map has a lot of areas that reward exploration.
• The main story gives you plenty of play, and game has hundreds of side quests to keep you busy for ages.
• The dreary palette fits the game perfectly, especially with the night and day transitions, though it does feel a bit depressing over time.
• I like that subsequent play-throughs let you keep your stats, but implement a hard mode.

Bad

• While the game offers many types of guns (pistols, SMG, sniper rifles, launchers, etc.), I found most of them to be considerably inferior to the combat rifle. Every time I found a really expensive, say, pistol, I found it to be much weaker than even an average combat rifle.
• Having to manually pick up items that you'd always want to pick up (money, ammo, etc.) is annoying. These should just automatically enter your inventory when playing in single-player mode.
• There are a few glitches with some of the walls, especially near the end of the game, where you can get stuck.
• Later in the game, much of the game play is repetitive. Many areas feature the same enemies, the same graphics, and the same voice acting.
• Several of the bosses in the game can be defeated in complete safety with an accurate sniper rifle. It seems a bit odd that they'd refuse to take cover while being pelted from a distance by gunfire.

Ugly

• As with most games which dump out random items, 99% of them are useless. I pick them up to sell them, but I would much rather have an setting I could turn on where anything clearly weaker than your current equipment will just drop its monetary value and save me from having to sell junk.
• Money is almost useless throughout the entire game. It is rare to see vendors selling anything even nearly as good as the equipment you pulled from a chest, even in their over-priced "Item of the Day" sections. By the end of the game, I had over $2,000,000 with nothing to spend it on, and, after starting a second play-through, I quickly maxed out money. Aside from the extremely rare item upgrade worth buying, and capacity upgrades, the only time I spent money was from being resurrected.

Media

Documentation

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  BradyGames eGuide.

Links