Across the Pond Reviews - Borderlands Review

by BlackSabbath370 Fri Dec 25, 2009 3:15 pm

Borderlands (Playstation 3) Review

Description:
This game is a fusion of a FPS combined with a MMO element to it. You can choose between 4 characters, each having individual strengths. The basic story for this game is you land on this planet call Pandora (go figure), and are looking for the Vault that is believed there is a valuable object once when you find all the key parts and unlock the Vault. There are a massive amount of weapons in the game, so you can't find the exact same weapon twice (if you do a second playthrough) even after boss battles because the game generates various version with higher or lower fire power, accuracy or fire rate.

Seeing how Gearbox made this an MMO type game, it’s mean’t to be played with friends which makes it fairly easy to do the playthrough without any troubles, but that wasn’t the case for me XD. Its a really challenging game to do by yourself, but very do-able, most of the trouble was right at the start because of the amount of bad weapons there are. The game starts to pick up at around the first boss (which doesn't happen till the middle of the playthrough). Even though there are only 5 bosses, they were the best bosses I've ever played against in a while, they had the right amount of difficulty and strategy, you may lose lots of money for it but it hardly even bothers you because beating each boss gives you that satisfaction of "Yay, I finally did it" and makes you fell good about what you've accomplished. Dislikes about the game are the reoccurring enemies, it became a pain in the middle of the game because there's a lot of mission you have to go back-n-forth between areas to level up and killing every enemy gets boring and could turn you off from finishing the mission. As well the enemy difficult is not very flexible, to even stand a chance you have to be within 2 lvls with a decent weapon to kill just a common enemy, even if you're using strategy (eg. you're back 200' using a sniper rifle and the enemy is using a shotgun or even an axe and they're hitting you easily) There are some drops in frame rate but nothing major. As well, sometimes there would be a display glitch when the whole background would go red or white, but luckily it only happened when you were doing nothing.

Summery List:
Likes:
-Best Boss battles
-Massive Weapon inventory
-Graphics (the cell shaded fits the game perfectly)
-20-25 hour campaign

Dislikes:
-No story (there is absolute no story to this, they meant this game for only grinding with friends, nothing more)
-No flexibility in fighting enemies with higher levels
-Doesn't start becoming interesting till the middle of the game when you fight the first boss
-Came out in the fourth quarter (this game would have got more praise if it had come out earlier in the year or even next year)

Wrap up:
RENT IT, for the gameplay, but BUY IT, if you love MMOs
I say rent it first cause if you're not familiar with MMO's the first half of the game will turn you off,
but if you tough it out you will be deeply rewarded with the second half of the game

So that my review on Borderlands, hope you guys enjoyed it, Cheers and Happy Gamin