Pandora is a shit hole. Supposedly it’s the new frontier, but only the wild and crazy have ended up on this planet. There are plenty of dangerous assholes to clear out across the land. Like any desert land, the creatures are particularly nasty. The only thing that makes it worth it is the loot. Treasure in the form of weapons.
The boiling air bites at your skin. A glance around reveals the total lack of shade. You are trapped between the sun and the crusty ground. You are here to discover the mother of all vaults. There will be plenty of shade once you arrive.
Borderlands is a first person shooter action role playing game, heavy on the action. The four characters available to play, each come with their own special abilities. Brick, Lilith, Mordecai and Roland have attributes that range from slow and powerful to fast and nimble.
Your character levels up with gained experience, which unlocks the ability to use more advanced weapons. These weapons are found through-out the planet and in large variety. Weapons are generated through procedural programming, so there is an astronomical amount available to the player. It’s common for the player to find a gun that is too advanced for their current experience level. They will have the choice to sell it for cash or keep it until they level up enough.
You also acquire skill points when you level up. Those points can be spent on the skills tree to increase existing skills or to unlock new ones. This is one of the more RPG like mechanics of Borderlands.
The graphics of Borderlands is a very unique cel shaded style that really makes the characters pop like a graphic novel. Cel Shading is this graphics technique that uses an outline around the objects and often uses less texture in the body. Gearbox Software started development on Borderlands back in 2005 using Unreal Engine 3. The outlined, cel shaded type graphics where used to set the game apart from other dystopian games at the time.
Borderlands plays like a very responsive first person shooter, but with a really large map. Multiplayer is a great way to boost those experience points and unlock some awesome guns. Not to mention, players can share and trade guns as the group levels up. Some of my best experiences with this game have been through the multiplayer.
If you are familiar with any first person shooter, you’ll catch on to this game real quick. Really this game is all about the weapons. If you are using an under powered gun, you will feel the pain. So a big drive in the game becomes trying different weapons and figuring out which ones work the best for your style.