Borderlands

Borderlands

As the videogame medium inches its way towards maturity so the traditional genre classifications disintegrate. In particular, the concept of leveling-up and developing one’s abilities over the course of an experience can now be found in almost every game on the market, from racing games to sports games to shoot ‘em ups. Borderlands is perhaps the first game to crystallize this cross-pollination into a new genre title: the Role-Playing Shooter or, RPS for short. Ostensibly a First Person Shooter in which you tear through a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic wasteland lining up headshots on anyone who stands in your way, underneath the topsoil there’s a deep and engaging RPG to mine.

As in Fallout 3, you’ll be taking on a wide variety of missions; some central to the game’s sci-fi plot and others picked up from the freelance bulletin boards that punctuate every town’s streets. Completing these tasks for the world’s various inhabitants earns you experience points that, in turn, level-up your character, increasing his or her abilities. Likewise, with literally millions of weapon variants to be found, all with slightly different appearances and properties, there’s an awful lot of loot to collect. Thus what starts out as a fairly run-of-the-mill shooter quickly transforms into something altogether different and unique.

While you’ll likely play the first sections of the game alone, to really start to appreciate Borderlands’ qualities, you need to team-up with friends in its fully integrated co-op mode. Arguably this is how the game is designed to be played. Design elements such as ‘Second Wind’ in which you're granted some time to try and score a kill to revive your character from a near-death state, make far more sense when there’s a friend around to help save you. Added to this, when playing in co-op the number of enemies on screen ramps up hugely, making for a far more frenetic and entertainment experience.

Friends can drop in and out of your game as they please, and you’re able to continue your campaign no matter who’s with you when hosting the game. That said, weapons and experience collected in multiplayer transfer back to everyone’s single player game, so no matter if you’re host or being hosted, it always feels like progress has been made.

The game’s riotous science fiction storyline and dramatic cel-shaded artwork complement each other. The story is good rather than great, but that’s not where Borderlands’ primary appeal lies. That’s in the loot gathering, the huge number of items, weapons, shields and grenade mods that litter the world and make you into a more rounded character. The differences between weapons are acute, so that a sniper rifle with just a small upgrade on its wobble stat will feel far more reliable in the hands. This provides the drive to explore the world, to take on different quests and to keep searching for that perfect rifle.

It’s a huge world too, ensuring that the fast-travel system is essential to exploration. Its breadth does mean that the gunplay and mission chasing can become repetitive in time, but keep playing with friends and most players will make it through to the end credits. A good-looking, intelligent, well-crafted shooter, Borderlands helps formalise the merging of RPG systems with other genres, and the result is electrifying.

4 out of 5