Borderlands is a game with eight guns: a revolver, a handgun, a
sniper rifle, a shotgun, an SMG (sub-machine gun), a machine gun, a rocket launcher, and an alien
ray gun. This is not a miscount despite the marketing claims of "millions
of guns". There are eight guns, and a million permutations of those same guns.
There is more visual firearm variety in Call of Duty or Battlefield and there
the guns are rendered accurately and with care. Gun fetishists will find
nothing to drool over in Borderlands' arsenal. Consider this, a game that
claims to have over a million guns has no crossbow or flame-thrower. Because
these guns cannot be modified or augmented, I ended up ditching them often in favour of more capable variants. This made the game impersonal, I never formed any sort of attachment to my tools, they simply became a means to acquire
better tools. I found no trusty side-arm, no lucky shotgun, just of sea of
utterly forgettable, completely derivative variations on those eight guns.
The sound in Borderlands seemed tailor-made to cause pain to
my ears. Enemies scream and yell in over-the-top repetitive slanders that instil a deep hatred for the sound designers. The music was somehow more bland
and forgettable than the terrain, the game only just playable when accompanied
by my own personal playlist.
Borderlands has a poor sense of humour. Humour of course is
particularly subjective and is often highly dependent upon context and timing,
Borderlands has neither, and delivers
its disposable gags market-tested to appeal to twelve year-olds with
gleeful repetition. High pitched psychotic midgets and dancing robots aren't
the stuff of comic genius I'm afraid.
Borderlands is ugly. The words "fresh" and
"striking" are perhaps the antonyms I would pick for apt
descriptions of the game's visual style. Cartoon-styles can and have been
executed quite well in games, but Borderlands is not one such case. Textures
contain thick black ink lines intended to evoke a comic-book feel but instead instil a sense of flat sterility to the world. There is never the impression
that this is a world, just a set, a façade built for the player, and the designers
could not be bothered to put on the final coat of paint. Geometry is then
surrounded in thick black lines that look bad in stills and worse in motion.
The effect of so much ink on screen is nauseating. The visual experience is further worsened by the use of a
vignette over the screen at all times to obscure one's vision for reasons
beyond comprehension. Finally, the game enforces a field of view so narrow
that calling it tunnel vision would be too generous. There are no options to
change any of these ill-conceived decisions although some alteration is
possible on PC with moderate degrees of success.
Borderlands is not a rewarding game. Near the start as I
decided to get my bearings by trotting off exploring I came across hostile
settlements of enemies at my level but with an unbelievable level of
hit-points. It would take all of my ammunition just to kill a single enemy.
Later, when I got a quest telling me to explore that same area, I found the
same enemies, only this time their health was comparable to the other enemies I
had encountered. The game had fenced me out of an area until I received the
quest marker by making the enemies almost, but not quite, invincible. The message was clear: don't explore until we tell you to.
While one can choose to specialize in a few weapons, the ammunition one can carry for each of the eight guns is fixed and can only be increased marginally through purchase-able upgrades. Each variant weapon draws ammo from the same universal ammo pool as the base gun upon which it is a variant. In this way all sniper rifles draw the same ammo. There is no ability to swap the space shotgun ammo occupies for more sniper rifle ammo. The result of this is that I was obligated, especially at the earlier levels, to carry around guns that I had no interest in using simply as back-up. Because the enemies are such bullet sponges, I did run out of ammo.
While one can choose to specialize in a few weapons, the ammunition one can carry for each of the eight guns is fixed and can only be increased marginally through purchase-able upgrades. Each variant weapon draws ammo from the same universal ammo pool as the base gun upon which it is a variant. In this way all sniper rifles draw the same ammo. There is no ability to swap the space shotgun ammo occupies for more sniper rifle ammo. The result of this is that I was obligated, especially at the earlier levels, to carry around guns that I had no interest in using simply as back-up. Because the enemies are such bullet sponges, I did run out of ammo.
Borderlands is not a shooter at heart. It was not until I
had made it to the final boss that I acquired a sniper rifle along with the
proficiency and associated levelled skills that I could easily one-hit kill
enemies with a head-shot. It took until end-game before I was
powerful enough for head-shots to be appropriately effective. It took until end-game for the shooting to be any fun for me. Enemies move about idly until fired upon from
a distance, at which point all their gunfire immediately converges on your
position. They use cover awkwardly and rely heavily upon their ability to soak
up copious amounts of damage, rather than any sort of wits, to stay alive.
Encounters carry none of the weight or excitement one might expect from a
fire-fight in a typical shooter, and therefore serve only as a means to an end -
acquiring more loot.
It would be a mistake to see Borderlands' quests and NPCs (non-player characters) and mistake it for an RPG (role-playing game). Borderlands is not an RPG. There is no story to
speak of, no role to inhabit, no dialogue to choose. It borrows from the genre
in the most mechanical ways (skill trees, NPCs, fetch quests), but the fact
that it leads the player along a loot acquiring treadmill does not make it an
RPG, a distant cousin perhaps.
Borderlands is bland. A group of rag-tag clichés come to
Planet Mad Max to shoot and loot with the ultimate end goal of looting the
biggest prize of all, a mysterious alien artefact known as the vault. The story
never got any deeper, never offered any intrigue, never showed the slightest
sign of being alive as my player-character trudged mechanically across barren deserts, barren
caves, barren factories, and barren junk-yards performing meaningless fetch
quests in order to stuff his brimming pockets with more and more loot.
Borderlands tows the line of convention wherever possible.
Animal enemies that inexplicably drop gold upon death? Check. Re-spawning mobs
that go aggro while simultaneously yelling for the player-character to surrender? Check.
Enemies that spawn from behind the instant the wave of enemies in
front are eliminated? Check. And at the same time the game does not contain the base
functionality that one has come to expect from a point and click looter. There
is no simple way to compare the statistics of a given weapon against the ones in
your inventory, there's no pet to sell off inventory in town so the player can
keep looting even as his cup runneth over, the list goes on. Like all looters each nook
and cranny gives way to loot, exploration is merely a means to an end - more
loot. And so the world is hollow, as each locker, drawer, cupboard, reveals
more money, more ammunition, more guns, but never more personality, never more
plot, never more reason to carry on than the carrot of bigger and better guns
at the next drop.
But if anything really drove home for me the lack of care that went into making this game it was a
specific encounter. At some point in the game the player is asked to rescue the
best friend of an NPC named Crazy Earl with a reward offered. Upon doing so, the player discovers that Earl's best friend is in fact a whimpering skag pup, the game's
alien equivalent of a wild dog. With his puppy returned Earl is grateful and provides a reward. Later on I had my player-character visit Crazy Earl after he had long since stopped
offering quests and found in his backyard his pup, now all grown up and big.
The dog immediately went aggro, drawing my player-character into combat. I expected that
killing him was the wrong thing to do, that the game would punish my player-character or make me
feel ashamed somehow, but decided to go through with it to see how it ended. I had my player-character kill the dog and to my surprise he dropped loot, and it was decent loot at
that. I picked up the loot, surprised that the game seemed to be encouraging
this behaviour. I then went back to talk to Crazy Earl, to see his reaction to
the death of his beloved best friend. Instead he repeated the same tired lines,
completely oblivious to my actions. And despite the my player-character's mass murder and
completely selfish actions, the game never treated my character as anything other
than a hero, never so much as dared explore the possibility of the player not
having a moral high ground. This is a game that celebrates being the villain
while being too unaware to realize that it is doing precisely that. And it does
that while espousing some twisted sense of morality. I was encouraged to help
repair annoying defenceless robots, even to the point of murdering people who
got in my way, while the many humans my player-character killed were never given a second
thought (but it must be okay because they all wear masks). The wild animals I
encountered, no doubt hostile as my player character intruded on their territory, were okay to kill
too because, hey, they dropped good loot. These actions are made more loathsome by
the precarious pretence through the game's woefully thin narrative that they
are anything more than the power fantasy of a sociopath.
With its unsatisfying story and game-play, the only thing
that drives one forward in the game is the desire to acquire more loot and to
complete the game. These are hollow goals that offer no rewards, and the game
seems to drive this point home by offering absolutely no fanfare, no
resolution, no exposition to the player upon completing the final quest in the
game. It's treated like every other quest before it, only this time, there
aren't any more that come after. Perhaps that is the message of Borderlands, an
existential nihilistic point of view: the game is a mirror of life, devoid of
objective meaning, purpose or morality.
