G l i t c h y G o b l i n !

Hey! I’m back for another review, and this time it’s Borderlands.  Borderlands is an FPSRPG, otherwise known as a firstpersonshooterrolepersongame… or something.  Woah.  How did they not think of this sooner?  Anyways, the gist is that a wasteland planet called Pandora is rumored to have treasure buried by aliens somewhere in a place called “The Vault”.  You play one of four bounty hunters (four classes) that travel to the planet to find out where it is, what it is, and all sorts of other things.

Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:

The co-op is… amazing. Grab a buddy or significant other and play this baby for 60+ hours.  It doesn’t even matter if they don’t care about the story or why you’re even doing the quests.  They won’t mind because shooting people and driving around is so fun.  After you beat the game, New Game+ begins and the enemies still level up with you.  It even renames the baddies and gives some of them differents skins.  You can create as many different characters as your harddrive can handle and play with your partner in any combination of them you see fit.  There are even Call of Duty 4-style challenges that give bonus EXP, like “I fired every bullet ever” is to fire 10,000 bullets over the course of the game.

I need guns.  Lots of guns. There are over 100,000 different guns in this game.  No, my ’0′ key did not get stuck.  Mostly they all look different, with different looking stats, attachments, colors, elemental additions, and more.  A lot of people say the guns are all the same, but they really aren’t.  In addition to guns are shield mods, grenade mods, class mods, and elemental mods, most of which are different from each other in stats and appearance.

It’s Cel-shaded. I actually like the art style this game has going on.  It adds to the goofy, redneck humor that the whole game conveys.  I really think it wouldn’t have been as fun if it was realistic looking.

Once Again, Easy Achievements. Again, I’m a little, naughty, achievement whore and this game satifies me more than… OK I’ll stop.  Pretty much every achievement is easy.  You have to beat the game almost twice to get to level 50 (the only one I haven’t got yet, I’m 49) and then get 15 kills with all 4 class’s action skill, but that’s about it.

The sequel will be better. Perhaps the best thing (besides the co-op) about this game is that with all they leave out (explained in the “cons” section), the sequel will have those things.  If they still have an awesome co-op and tons of guns, then that game will ROCK.  It is rumored that they didn’t plan on it selling well and never planned on it having a sequel.  They have now said that it would be a “no-brainer” to have one.

Cons:

All NPCs are zombies. Except for the CL4P-TP, all NPCs just stand there like rocks.  There is absolutely no life to them and they are annoyingly boring.  They just barely nod to you (sometimes), and their mouths don’t move when they talk.  By the way, the first DLC pack actually has zombies.

Bare-as-bones Story. At the beginning a “Guardian Angel” (some Japanese chick) is somehow talking to you and telling you to obey her and all sorts of stuff.  She somehow knows about the Vault.  That and the game description at the top is the story you’ll get at the beginning.  And almost nothing else at all until the end.  There are a few audio clips, but that’s pretty much it.  “Hey, this bad guy has a piece of the Vault Key, 3 or 4 of which you’ll need eventually by the end… go fight him for it” is NOT story.  95% of the quests you will do have nothing to do with that story, and the other 4.8% are the quests previously mentioned.  Again, this will most likely be improved in the sequel.  And no, not everything is explained at the end.  I still don’t know why some things happened.

Enemy Variety. There are about 5 different species of creatures, and bandits.  That guy on the front of the game who’s blowing his brains out?  You’ll shoot him in the head personally about 100 times, and specifically that model of bandit.  The New Game+ does really alleviate this problem somewhat, but some are still the same anyway.

Once You Go Co-op, You Can’t Go Back. After the tremendous fun I had in the cooperative campaign, the single player game is like the most boring thing ever.  Without much story, it just seems tedious to play it by myself.

Needs Moar Humorz. The moments the game actually tells jokes, it is hilarious.  These times are few and far between, unfortunately.  The screens it shows when you encounter the boss are the best comedic moments in the game.

For now, this has been Vegieza, Interplanetary Ninja Assassin.

Thanks Vegieza. Top notch. As a quick point, the FPSRPG has in fact been done before, like what I found with a quick google search:

Bioshock, Deus Ex, Fallout3, Hellgate: London, Mass Effect, Neocron, PlanetSide, Stalker, System Shock, Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines

Granted, some of them merely sport RPG elements (and some of them ARE mostly THIRD person shooters, not first) and aren’t TRUE role-playing games, yelling ‘level up’ every ten minutes, but Bioshock DID have you collect Experience points of sorts and level up your abilities.

That being said, Borderlands sounds awesome, and it seems to take the FPS RPG Hybrid to the next level, exemplifying both in a tight, high-quality, fun package, whereas most of the others can’t claim even two of those properties. We’ll see Vegieza next week to put your head in a Vice  once again.