Borderlands

There does seem to be an awful amount of first person shooters being released for the consoles these days – Killzone 2, Left for Dead, the ever popular Call of Duty. There has however not been a decent RPG out for a while, although it is a genre that very rarely gets released, especially with the presence of MMOs such as Warcraft. However, a game has been released which combines the two – and that game is called Borderlands.

Borderlands is set on a planet called Pandora. Colonisation of the human race on this planet does not go according to plan, and as such everything goes mad – the mining companies leave, leaving their labour behind, who start setting up camps all over. and start killing each other, basically. In within the madness, a group of colonists are in search of the Vault, which contains alien artifacts and secret technologies. You play one of these colonists, each have their own skills and special moves.

The first thing you notice about the game is the amazing cell shaded style of the graphics. Truly original, and yet truly beautiful – there is no game as far as I know that gives you greater pleasure, just by looking great. Once you have selected your character, the next thing you’ll notice is that you have a little friend called “Claptrap” who guides you through the basics. You may originally think “Oh great, an annoying little dude who is going to get in my way”. Well, you will be mistaken – he turns out to be great fun, doesn’t get in the way often, and does actually provide handy information when you need to know it.

Gameplay is great, the game runs nice and smoothly, the controls are easy to get used to (if you’ve played enough first persons you’ll instantly get used to them) without being too basic. The RPG element however is what seperates Borderlands from the ‘others’ – pick up new weapons, sell old ones, level up your character to get access to bigger and better ones. How do you get to do that? Levelling up is achieved by killing enemies and completing missions that are assigned to you by talking to different characters. You can complete missions when you want, the sandbox element of the game allows you to do what you need to do, when you want to do it.

Problems with the game include the amazing difficulty at times when playing solo. Also, the “search for parts” missions can be wholly frustrating when the pieces are hidden in the most stupidest of places – and the map can be slightly misleading, even though the map doesn’t actually give a true representation of the location of the missing parts. Apart from that, the drop in-drop out mechanism works really well, allowing you to open up a game for other players to join and help, and vice versa.

Overall, this is actually a surprisingly great game, with the best elements of both FPS and RPG games rolled into one, encased in some fantastic cell shaded graphics. Get it, love it.