Borderlands Review
- Posted October 29th, 2009 at 11:18 EDT by Adam Dolge
- 12,455 views
- 29 Comments
Review Score
- PSU Review Score
- 8.0
- Avg. user review score:
- 8.0
Summary
Borderlands is a perfect multiplayer RPG-Shooter that offers loot hounds hours of fun. It has its flaws, though, and its grinding sensibilities probably won't appeal to everyone.
We like
- The co-op experience is one of the best on the market
- The countless loot scattered through the world
- The striking, artistic visual quality
We dislike
- The repetitive quests
- The lack of a strong storyline
- Glitches that got us stuck in awkward situations
See PSU's review on Metacritic & GameRankings
(continued from previous page) ...slowly regenerate over time or you’ll end up bitterly disappointed. Elsewhere, you will also find grenade mods that will add various effects to the normal grenades; such as having them stick to an enemy, bounce, or explode on direct contact, among others.
If you are a fan of loot, you are going to love Borderlands. However, if you are more interested in getting set pieces of equipment as you progress, you probably won’t care much for the randomly generated guns. We fit into the former category and loved finding different guns at vendors, on bosses, or in chests. We would have liked greater diversity in the later levels since weapons didn’t seem to change much after a while – we only noticed stat boosts. It would have been great to find that one awesome endgame weapon. Then again, there probably is a killer weapon out there - we just didn’t find it.
The plot of Borderlands is almost nonexistent, though we can’t say we had much of an issue with this, as there is just so much to do in the game. To be honest, the world felt a bit like an MMO. You know, the kind where you and 20 other players spend hours in a random instance, trying to take down a boss for some sweat loot. But the story isn’t nearly as deep as those games; instead it’s pretty vanilla and completely unimportant. As one of the four characters, you are essentially a treasure-hunter, brought to the planet of Pandora in search of the vault. The vault is believed to hold some alien technology, but that’s not really important to the story. You’ll start off in the desolate town called Fyrestone and are instantly contacted by a mysterious woman who only you can see. She starts to talk about the vault and tries to emphasize to the gamer that your character is important. Again, none of this felt really successful, though we’ll be the first to admit that a game doesn’t necessarily have to offer a strong narrative in order to provide for a compelling, enjoyable gameplay experience.
Despite this, the idea of an enjoyable experience is open for interpretations as we find it very likely some people will absolutely despise the gameplay and quest system. One of the fundamental issues with the quest system boils down to lack of variety in the quests themselves, and some players may find that the game becomes a monotonous grind in parts. On the flip side, the notion of grinding for your experience points is exciting, for others, it will probably sound more of a chore than it’s worth. Ultimately, we would have liked to see a greater diversity in the quests and a more options for levelling up.
The world of Borderlands is absolutely huge and traversing the wasteland will take some time. At the beginning you’ll spend most of your travelling time running from waypoint to waypoint. As you might expect, this task quickly descends in to boredom rather quickly. When you start using vehicles, your travel time is certainly cut down. There are, however, major flaws with the vehicles. Driving is incredibly cumbersome and the vehicles seem to have no recognition of weight. One of the moments that made us put down the controller and take an extended break was when our vehicle got stuck on a ramp, and when we tried to jump out, we got stuck again. After trying for a good 10 minutes to get ourselves free, we decided it was time to take a break. Flaws like this can, and should, be fixed in future patches, but at launch these are major annoyances. Eventually you’ll get the ability to travel from a location to location at the click of a button, facilitating your journey around the mammoth game world considerably.
It may sound like we are being overly critical about Borderlands; however, we feel the game needed a bit more work. Nonetheless, the co-op experience is one of the best we’ve played in a long time. You can play online with three other mates in a drop-in drop-out system, or you can play with a friend locally in two-player split screen action. The truly game shines when you play with others. You’ll split experience ... (continued on next page)
Comments
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Astonlover |
m0wUnlimited- 11:36am GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 3
Looks great gotta pick this up. I loved Fallout 3 and I love FPS and this has the best of both worlds but forgot to take out bethesda's fame for bugs.
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netherdragon |
netherdragon- 11:48am GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 4
once some fo the issues are ironed out this game will be amazing, that said im loving it at the moment though the glitches due get a little annoying at times.
Still if your gonna play this with peole id really recomendthis game. so fun that the glitches dont really bother you that much tbh.
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Acid-Hippie2007 |
Acid-Hippie2007- 12:21pm GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 8
I might get this, just to get me by for MW2 and AC2.
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Neur0toxin
- 1:06pm GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 9
The game is good in co-op, not so much single player. Its a good laugh when you got some mates running around blowing the **** outta everything. Its got its problems though, Frame rate is shocking in Mulitplayer whilst hosting a game with 3 others, frame rate can crawl literally at about 5 fps in firefights.
Not sure how many QA testers they have but they seemed to have missed a lot of Bugs.From the off in the first loading screen, the actual writing isn`t displayed properly, its interlaced. This is fairly simple QA. Not a good indication of a dedicated Dev or staff. You can clearly tell that its been rushed a fair amount for Xmas release which happens, but to unleash a supposed co-op game upon the public without testing how the network, friends list, item collection and levelling up work during MP sessions is actually shocking.
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Ocelot1987 |
METSTM- 2:09pm GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 11
This game is really fun. One of the things that makes this game so great is that it has splitscreen co op. Not many games support that anymore so this is really enjoyable. The enemies aren't pushovers if you are out leveled. I think this game is better and worse than fallout in some ways. It is better because the shooting is more accurate and you don't need to stop the action like you do in fallout to survive. Being able to play with 3 other people is a lot of fun too. Fallout however has a much stronger story. It doesn't even come close. Graphics in fall out are also better. The characters in borderlands say a lot of funny things though. This game is worth buying if you have even one friend to play with.
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Beasley2K |
Beasley2K- 6:15pm GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 13
Sounds interesting, yet although I haven't personally played it, there are a lot of flaws that I'm able to spot; one of the most significant being the fact that they use the Dollar as currency. The Dollar! It's stupid and seriously ruins the game world. It's set on an alien planet, with alien creatures - a world that is completely unrelated to ours - and for some stupid reason they use American currency. Whatever idiot decided to use the Dollar for currency is a complete moron.
It really is sheer stupidity.
Regardless, I'll be getting this game at some point anyway. I still find the financial standpoint of this game hilarious though.
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jello_snake
- 6:34pm GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 14
This game is waaay beter than fallout 3.
I made the mistake of pre-ordering fallout 3 (and afterwords wasn't sure if I should pre-order this, but am glad I did) because of how deceptive their marketing was. On the commercials they made it seem like the game was going to be creepy and dark (like bioshock) but instead it was just stupid. The story, characters, and pretty much the whole game are a joke. They made it seem the the brotherhood of steel were some big deal, like scary and stuff (there even on the cover!), but they aren't. You can kill them (like any enemy) with ease. They play a very minor role in the story, and are good guys (even the exiles aren't really bad). My character was so overpowered that if I shot an enemy in the foot their head would explode. Fallout 3 apparently wasn't designed for RPG fans, because if it was they would have anticipated players knowing how to build a good character. Most of the perks in the game are pointless (*cough* lady kller *cough*). If you choose all the good ones (like I did) you become a god. I put the game on hard early on, and was never challenged. I hate fallout 3. But let me just compare it to borderlands real quick:
graphics:
Fallout 3 decided to jump on the bandwagon lead by gears of war, by turning the saturation up to 98%. The only colors in fallout 3 are brown, gray, and brownish-gray. Then there's borderlands... full of color! I didn't go out and buy an HD TV so I could only see 4 of the millions of colors its capable of displaying! Thank you gear box for justifying my purchase of an expensive TV.
sound:
Fallout 3 is fully voiced, but has about 3 voice actors. I get so tired of hearing people with the same voice, especially the ghouls. Every ghoul in the game has the same voice! Its annoying! And get this, they had each voice actor record the same lines? Every character, no matter who's voice they have, will shout at some point, "whats the matter!? Cant stand the sight of your own blood!?" is it really that hard to come up with different lines for each voice actor?
weapons:
Fallout 3 only has a handful of guns, you get them all early on, and use the same guns the entire game. It gets really really boring. You're supposed to progress in an RPG, but in fallout there is no progression. You get good equipment early on, and use it for the rest of the game. And whats up with the naming? Chinese machine gun? I'm pretty sure that's not what the manufacturer named it. But as you know, borderlands has a bazzilion-plex guns. That allows the player to make progress, which gives him/her a reason to keep playing.
bosses:
Fallout 3 has no bosses. Makes this one pretty simple don't ya think? Some consider the super mutant behemoths to be bosses, but since there are 5, that really just makes it a rare enemy. Not to mention that like everything in fallout, they demand no strategy. Shoot forward and back-peddle.
Multiplayer:
fallout 3 has no multiplayer. Borderlands wins again.
vehicles:
fallout 3 doesn't have vehicles, one of my favorite parts of any multiplayer game and/or shooter.
glitches:
Borderlands has its share of glitches, but they are nothing compared to Fallout 3. Bethesda is the buggiest game company to have ever existed, but Fallout 3 set a new record for them. Oblivion wasn't as buggy as fallout, and at least they made patches! In fallout the only bug-fixes were included in DLC, meaning you had to spend more money if you wanted to have a properly functioning product, and even then they barely fixed any! Most of the DLC adds new glitches.
The only advantages of fallout 3:
In fallout 3 you can customize your characters appearance, of course after the first 3 hours you'll be wearing power armor so you cant see them anyways. Maybe gearbox could release some alternate costumes as part of an upcoming DLC? Or maybe as standalone DLC?
other notes:
I'm actually enjoying borderlands. -
supamariobrotha |
supamariobrotha- 8:00pm GMT - October 29th, 2009
- 15
im sorry but this game is sooooooo boring!!!! i trade my copy for the new ratchet and clank game : )
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PSX_Legend |
KillZone3000- 12:42am GMT - October 30th, 2009
- 19
well i guess this deserved a little more....like a 8.5 at least.
bosses,vehicles and multiplayer are the best aditions for this type of game that´s already a big win.
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Kostchtchie
- 3:58am GMT - October 30th, 2009
- 22
shame this game has so many issues, i so had this on preorder and was most wanted game this month :/ if they fix them bugs i may buy later on, but at the moment i wont part cash for trash, same reason i never got crappy fallout 3
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wufei |
Wufenopolis- 8:20pm GMT - October 30th, 2009
- 27
i agree with this review 100%. it's a great game, but the vehicle controls are TERRIBLE!!! trying to manuever into tight spots is really difficult. They need to release a patch that adds more customization options to the controls. it completely blows my mind that games are still being released that don't allow you to assign your own button layout. completely inexcusable in this era of video gaming...
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sevenrealms
- 11:52am GMT - November 13th, 2009
- 28
Great game but i still have bad sound issues on most levels
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pro-rockstar16
- 9:41pm GMT - January 13th, 2010
- 29
not a good game for buy but ok to rent. my big issues were the graphics and it really had no story line to it.
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