Borderlands Review

Borderlands is so close to Game of the Year, it can practically taste the yellow ribbon dangling in front of its exhausted dust-coated lips. If only it’d partaken of perhaps one more Redbull, maybe churned out a few more reps on the elliptical in the off season, it probably would have qualified. But instead, Borderlands stumbles, trips on its own shoelaces, and breaks its legs just seconds before the finish line. You can’t help but feel a little twang of sorrow zip through your heart as you watch it roll over on its back, stare into the clouds, and wonder what might have been. Borderlands is the Winter Olympic games’ Jamaican bobsledding team: in the end it loses, but it was a fun ride down.

Borderlands takes what would normally be forgettable vanilla objects and makes them pop and titillate with artistic vibrancy.

The real misfortune? All Borderlands needed was a little PC developer tender love and care to get over that final hump. Because from the very second you fire it up, you’ll begin to see the console handicaps rear their fugly faces. Case in point: the beginning advertisements aren’t skippable unless you hack the directory’s .cfg file. And then, when the main menu eventually fills your screen, you’re treated with the ever-lovely “press enter to begin.” Are you, like, uh – kidding me Gearbox? See how there’s a little horizontally interactive device sitting comfortably underneath your hand that’s connected to the back of your PC? See how under your input it glides that little arrow all over your LCD? That neat contraption (called a “mouse,” by the way) works in game menus also. You could at least, you know, try and elicit some semblance of PC design effort.

One of the best parts of the game is where you accidentally stumble into The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

And while the opening cinematic is agreeably awesome the first go-around, you can’t escape out of it on subsequent visits. Ever. No .cfg tweaking here, it’s perma-watch or quit the game. And once the action gets rolling, the console-influenced missteps only grow like weeds, such as the atrociously mismanaged inventory system, and the cumbersome and awkward “hold respectively bound keyboard button for 2 seconds to view the world map.”  (Would it have killed them to enable an option for an always-on mini travel HUD? Work with me here people.)  Even more infuriating than the appalling interface, driving vehicles in Borderlands is nothing short of justifiable developer canings. Again, Gearbox: see that mouse? The one right next to the keyboard, begging for some type of in-game control catharsis? It usually lets us look around while moving forward. But not here. In this case, jumping in a dune-buggy and moving the mouse left steers your car directly into the side of a canyon wall. Strafe keys don’t do jack. Also, traveling 2 mph and lightly nudging any enemy will gib them instantaneously, but 17 rockets propelled from your vehicle cannon will still leave ‘em kicking. So either your rockets are filled with cotton candy and pixie dust instead of gunpowder, or your car’s outer frame is coated in hot lava and mixed with nitroglycerin. Either way: lame.

Roland’s automated turret goes head-to-head against Rosie O’Donnell.

Vehicular manipulation failures and consolitis aside, there’s lots of chewy goodness to be reaped from the game’s rich chocolaty innards. For maximum enjoyment, it’s best to think of Borderlands as an FPS-MMO. You pick from four possible characters – Roland, Lilith, Brick, and Mordecai. Each represents a typical RPG/FPS class: soldier (jack-of-all-trades), sniper (long-range), assassin (stealth), and tank (melee). The gunplay is pure fantasy (some antagonists absorb bullets like nerds absorb Lost episodes) and most baddies will respawn after 15 minutes or so have elapsed, regardless if you’re around or not. You’ll gain experience and level-up from fulfilling supplemental alternative quests, blasting mutated midget enemies, and propelling the main storyline. Each progressive earned level brings a handful of upgrade paths and overall potential improvements, but for the most part you’ll just end up pumping points into 6 or so sections of expertise, as many of the high-level traits can’t be reached without over-inflating lower areas of singular development first.

As the aforementioned side quests go, prepare to be underwhelmed. Most romps into the stark alien wilderness include such imaginatively innovative tasks as “Collect these five weapon parts,” or “Savagely murder this dude/monster/sparkly inanimate machine-driven object and come back for monies and stuffs.”  The most interesting quest thread revolves around collecting voice journals of an insane female scientist, who eventually becomes a main plot contributor. Other than that, you’re either a FedEx courier, or Jesse James. Pretty much nothing in-between. And on the main storyline nuance, don’t expect some sort of digital Hemmingway here. While the branches of the contextual narrative are somewhat enticing to start, they only wilt and shrivel as time advances, and ultimately culminate into one of the outright worst gaming endings ever. Luckily, the plot isn’t necessary to enjoy the game, but it would have been nice to see the fledgling chronicle successfully actualized.

Another rift in the space-time continuum allows you access to Bioshock’s weapon and ammo-dispensing vending machines.

During the tour of your bullet-dispensing, department of defense budget-crushing foray into the gi-normous desert world of Pandora (still waiting on the James Cameron lawsuit over that planet name), you’ll begin to appreciate just how well-crafted the incidental item procurement system and impromptu combat really are. For one, all loot drops are randomized, just like the recent Torchlight or the classic Diablo series. And similar to Mr. Hugh Hefner, you’re anything but married to your equipment. In fact, you’ll go through guns and grenade mods like a bowling ball through a wet Kleenex. It’s all about lightning fast upgrades, constant new gear, and fresh untarnished acid-bursting shield generators. You are, by the very sense of the definition, a filthy gun-slut.

It’s like the New Jersey shore, only less polluted!

But of course, every self-respecting wise guy needs a mistress to break the “tedious” norm, and in this case, the sultry harlot sashays into the scene in the form of your character’s special ability, such as Roland’s automated sentry gun (which you’ll instinctively want to hide behind and beat with wrench to heal, but can’t).  All unique abilities are limited to a few seconds of activation, but recharge semi-quickly post-expenditure. Use ‘em often for best chance of survival. Another cool little facet: when you shuffle your mortal coil, you’ll get an opportunity to kill any on-screen foe before eventually bleeding out. Upon doing so, you’re given a second wind, and brought back to life. This adds some truly memorable and tense moments into what would normally be a standard FPS quit and reload.

Armament-wise, the marketing hype actually came through; guns are what Borderlands does best. Each new unadulterated piece a mechanized killin’ looks, feels, and operates differently than its counter-brands and models. Some rocket launchers fire triple spreads of corrosive high-yield tips, while others lob singular slow-moving tubes of pure explosive power. Some shotguns set hapless victims on fire, while others expend six chaotic shots with a single press of the trigger.  Rates of fire, raised critical hit chances, reload speeds, accuracy, recoil effectiveness, ammo capacities: all of these stack on top of potential elemental damages for some seriously captivating destructive violence.  Of course, every now and then you’ll stumble over that ultra-rare perfect weapon that’ll never leave you satchel, but these instances are appropriately limited.

If you’ve got a sharp eye, you can sometimes catch comical props stashed around the wastes.

In a somewhat surprise, the voice acting in Borderlands is outright phenomenal. While your interactions with NPCs are strangely limited, the conversations and encounters you do have end up savory, eagerly anticipated, and often hilarious. Pandora’s Claptraps (little roughshod R2D2-esque mobile droids with passive-aggressive abused personalities) are especially memorable in this department. If the Academy gave Oscars for acting in games, Borderlands would pull a Lord of the Rings clean sweep. Never have I been so gleefully entertained by such perfected dialogue scripting, actor performance execution, and voice-direction.  ARMA II? Go stand in the corner. Borderlands? Here’s some pie.

On second thought, gimme that pie back you little punk. I just looked over your multiplayer homework, and you’re now grounded for 17 years. Congrats. Seriously Gearbox? A mandatory GameSpy ID for multiplayer access? What the hell? Oh and I hope you know how to configure and apply port forwarding, because if not, you won’t be hosting any multiplayer games anytime soon. Borderlands even managed to defeat ex-Maximum PC editor David Murphy’s attempts here; no easy task, believe you me. After 40 solid minutes of troubleshooting, swearing, and arm flailing, we did manage to get a game going, but I really have no idea how. Unless you buy this game through Steam or use GameRanger, prepare yourself for a good ol’ fashioned screaming fest. And there are no mic options or voice-chat volume controls without a patch. Out of the box, you just talk and hopefully the other players will hear you. Most often they won’t. Terrible. Just… terrible.

Rescuing vertically-challenged Claptraps from certain doom grants extra inventory space upgrades. It also grants visual robotic porno moves! (Seriously.)

Graphically, Borderlands is a 10-foot tall powerhouse baddass temple of raw fantastic… ness.  This is the single area where the PC version truly shines apart in direct comparison to its consolized clones. If you’re sporting a quad core and a GTX 280 or better, you can crank the settings to the proverbial ceiling and jam the resolution to 1920×1200 with little to no hiccups. And boy howdy: this is one purty game fellas and gals. The cel-shaded environments and ultra-stylized renderings got me killed more than once as I suddenly stopped shooting and juking altogether, instead remaining stationary and transfixed over some new artistic oddity. Pretty impressive feat, especially in the wake of ocular monsters like Crysis.

Wandering beyond the established map parameters gets you perforated by sensor cannons. Beats invisible walls, but not by much.

So all in all, Gearbox concocted a pretty damn sweet title, but they just seem pissed that they had to create a PC version. With even a paltry ounce or two of PC spit and polish, it could have been a shoe-in for this year’s highest critical awards, sprinting through the end of the race rather than running out of gas at the last second. Truly, a monumental missed opportunity. Nevertheless, Borderlands remains one of the must-play PC games of 2009.