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Borderlands is an RPG/FPS hybrid with a fairly simple, yet surprisingly rich setting. After you choose your character class, you'll receive your HUD module and be given an opportunity to name your character and customize the colors of your character's outfit. It's not a lot of customization, but that's not the strong point of the game. As your advance you'll kill and loot your way to higher levels and better weapons.
Pandora
Borderlands is set on the world of Pandora, which is a fairly desolate planet filled with desert and garbage. You play as one of four classes who have come seeking The Vault, a mythic place rumored to be filled with untold treasures. Along the way you'll meet a variety of NPCs who will send you out on missions. A lot of the missions involve going out and killing a certain number of a certain type of enemies, while others send you out to retrieve certain items on the NPC's behalf. These missions provide you with XP and various items that you can use to complete future missions.
Aint no rest for the wicked.
You have four different classes to choose from: Hunter (Mordecai), Soldier (Roland), Siren (Lilith) and Beserker (Brick). Soon after reaching Fyrstone and doing a few simple missions, you will gain your action skill. Your action skill is unique to your class and will effect how you tackle various situations as you progress through the game. The Hunter is able to deploy a bird to attack his enemies for him. The Soldier can deploy a shielded turret which will help him mow down enemies. The Siren can become invisible and speedy, allowing her to get away unharmed and into a better position with which to deal with her targets. The Beserker can go beserk, enabling him to do massive melee damage to his foes. There is a cooldown to your action skill, so you wont be able to spam it right away.Which brings us to Skill Trees. As you advance you will gain skill points which you can then use to gain and advance various skills in three separate skill trees. This can give you access to a number of new abilities, such as better shielding, more healing, more damage and faster cooldown timers on your action skill. You can also pick up Artifacts along the way, which you can then use to change the damage type of your action skill, such as enabling your turret to do fire damage or enabling your Siren to do Corrosive damage to enemies while invisible.
Certain skills are more suited toward group play than others. The Hunter, for example, can put points into a skill that will make enemies drop more loot when you use your Bloodwing Action Skill. In the long run, it's best to experiment around and figure out which build is best for you.
You also gain proficiency with weapons as you play. The more you use a particular weapon, the more proficient with it you become as you kill enemies. This will effect things such as reload times, magazine capacity and accuracy.
Kill them and take their stuff.
As you kill enemies they will drop loot. A lot of loot. This can get you better weapons than what you currently possess or can just gain you more money as you sell unwanted weapons at the various merchandise machines scattered about the landscape. One way to get good weapons is to loot chests you find in towns you are in. In the Single Player game, you can actually loot all the chests in a town, exit out of the game, load back in and loot them again. This becomes surprisingly addictive, especially after you come to towns in higher level areas. The quality of the guns you find are color coded, with white being the worst and dark orange being the best. However, you should still check the stats of the weapon in question against what you are currently packing as it may not actually be the best for you. With that being said, early in the game you will often find that more loot has been dropped than what you can actually place in your backpack. You will be able to expand the number of slots in your backpack as your progress and the amount of ammo you can carry. Until then, you will have to be very choosey about what you want to carry back to the vending machines with you, as some guns are worth more money than others.There's also challenges you can complete to gain even more XP. The challenges range from opening a certain amount of chests to killing a couple thousand bandits. Unlike in the console versions, there's no online achievement system in place where you can show off your accomplishments to your friends. You can, however, take screenshots of your favorite guns and show those off.
Co-op Mode
Single player mode is fun but starts to feel like a one trick pony after a while. Where this game really shines is in its Co-op Mode. You can get together with three of your friends and take on the various missions in the world. The only complaint I have about this mode is that only the Host can determine what missions you're actually going to go do. So if the host is ahead of everyone else, you're either flying blind to complete those missions or you'll have to go back and do them later. This also lends itself to a bit of power leveling. A lower level character can be parked someplace safe on the map while his higher level friends go someplace else on the map and kill stuff. This can lead to some rather quick leveling with no risk or investment on the part of the character being power leveled. While it's a neat mechanic, you'll find that Borderlands is best experienced with other people closer to your own level.There is also dueling in this game. You can duel anywhere and there is an arena devoted to allowing you and your opponent to duke it out and see which one has the stronger character. This can be rather fun, but I don't see the need for an arena when you can duel anywhere you choose.
There aint no Heaven
Borderlands is a great game which will keep your busy for a little while. It is over in a relatively short amount of time. You get two playthroughs per character you create with a level cap of 50. A lot of the quests you pick up by the time you reach the end game areas will be marked as Trivial and while Playthrough 2 is supposed to be harder, a lot of people find that they actually have a much easier time as they have better weapons and more skills than what they had in Playthrough 1.Borderlands is also riddled with bugs. Some people lose weapons and skills after reloading a game. Some people find that they cannot finish the last boss fight after loading into that area. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions have already been patched. As of this writing, no word has been made available on when to expect the PC patch, which is supposed to optimize the game engine specifically for the PC.
Some users may find the PC version daunting for Co-op play as they will have to forward port on their routers in order to host or even connect to online games. Gamespy has not been an exactly good fit for multi-player, though there is the option of connecting to and hosting online games through the GameRanger service. Still, it would have been nice if multi-player worked out of the box or at least came with a server tool such as what Valve uses for Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead.
