Borderlands: Positives
By Chris Cesarano
Hrm? What? Why haven’t I posted all the good things about Borderlands yet?
You’re telling me you actually want to know that? Oh, fine. Have it your way.
Hrm. Let’s see…
You see, this is why I didn’t have it up yet. Trying to explain why Borderlands didn’t completely suck is like trying explain why The One is a decent movie. There is nothing innovative or mind-blowing done that its competitors don’t do. The plot is only there as an excuse for all of the bad-assery. It just does the basics well enough that you don’t want to put a gun to your mouth halfway through.
Ok, I’m actually being a little unfair to The One here. It was the first film I watched where the “bullet time” didn’t feel like it was a total rip-off of The Matrix. Plus, the plot actually makes sense and works well enough that you sort-of kind-of care what happens in the end.
Borderlands doesn’t even have any of that going for it. The biggest positive is that the game has two to four player co-op. Anything can be made fun as long as there is multiplayer. I actually had more fun playing the co-op missions in Turok (2008) than the single player game despite all the frustrations that came with it. I can only imagine how much more single-player would have been ruined if Gearbox had tried to make the other three characters A.I. controlled. Chances are it would make Left 4 Dead 2’s companions look like M.I.T. honors graduates too busy calculating where black holes come from to notice they are trying to heal the God-damned Charger (I shit you not it happened to me twice).
Considering how many poor deluded suckers were starry-eyed enough to drop sixty hard-earned American dollars on this game day-one, finding other people to play with should be no problem. I just hope they are your actual friends, otherwise you are bound to be left behind as they go to perform the same old song and dance they’ve rehearsed since the October launch.
Wait, wait. I’m supposed to be discussing the good things about Borderlands. Not the bad. Take a breath. Relax. Regroup.
Honestly, there isn’t much to say about why the game remains fun despite all of its glaring flaws. There are a variety of foes with different behaviors requiring separate strategies to take out. Some enemies charge you with wild abandon. Others shoot at you. Some will fly from the skies and peck out your eyes! It requires the player to determine which weapon is most suitable for the situation and when their abilities might come in handy. Let’s face it, making the act of shooting things is a bit hard to screw up. It’s a feat so special it may as well be an event in the Special Olympics (do they still do that, by the way? I imagine you’d get a lot more ratings televising that than you would the actual Olympics).
The rest of the fun comes from the feeling of accomplishment. The name of the game is side quests (well, actually, it’s Borderlands, but honestly if they titled it Side Quests it would have been a lot more descriptive of the content). You nab like five of them, complete them in five to fifteen minutes, earn experience, money and maybe a little bit of gear that you will probably sell to get more money. It appeals to that greedy side of us that wants to get stuff for as little effort as possible. Not only are you rewarded for pushing some thumbsticks and mashing a couple buttons, but you only have to do it for roughly ten minutes before someone is saying “here’s something for your trouble!”.
Then again, I suppose dealing with the shoddy mechanics would be trouble.
Dammit! I did it again! Good things! Good things! Just the good things!
Ok, well, the amount of fun depends on how much you enjoy doing side quests. I enjoy it well enough to a certain extent, but at some point I begin to feel like I’m some sort of errand boy. Once this has happened I feel the need to push on with the story, only that feels like it’s one giant side quest itself. If you didn’t get the memo, the plot and story to this game are complete crap. So the only thing to really keep you playing this game is the desire to do chores for other people, even if they are as dumb as “buy a grenade from a vending machine”. Oh, low-level quests at the start of the game. How silly you are.
For some players, the joy of earning experience and money every ten or so minutes is as addictive as CRACK COCAINE MUDDA-FUGGAH!!! For me, however, it drives that feeling that I’m accomplishing nothing. After all, you complete one side quest and there’s another there in its place. It’s like running on a treadmill. No matter what speed you set it at you’re still going nowhere. You’re not even getting nowhere fast. No matter what speed you set it at you’re going nowhere in the same amount of time as if you set it low.
Well, that’s not true. The higher you set the speed the more chances there are of you falling and going backward on the machine. That would certainly get you somewhere, but nowhere productive.
I seem to have digressed to the point that this metaphor has nothing to do with the game.
Honestly, the only thing I can say with no smart-ass commentary about Borderlands is the artwork is fantastic. There are plenty of other cel-shaded games to have come before it, sure, but it wasn’t until I was a few hours in that everything had this great, consistent feel to it. Even the textures are hand-drawn to look as if they are from a comic book or animation. It allows for a consistent feel you don’t get out of titles like Tales of Vesparia, where you have the black outline and then a very…flat looking set of textures on a character model. Or like in Robotech: Battlecry where the character models looked fine and dandy, but the environments lacked detail and looked incredibly bland and flat.
Borderlands worked excellently with cel-shading to produce what looks like an incredibly detailed environment. The only problem is, due to the use of cel-shading, there are times when shadows look incredibly pixelated and distracting. It breaks the consistency of the game’s appearance and pulls you out of the immersion a little bit. Fortunately you’ll forget it in a few seconds and get right back into feeling like you’re in a three-dimensional cartoon.
Which is awesome.
Unfortunately, that really is the strongest thing this game has going for it, and you can’t recommend a game simply because the art director was the only competent member of the team. It was executed well and I’d love to see it in other, better games, but it’s not a selling point. It’s merely an aesthetic.
Let me just jump to the conclusion here. Borderlands is fun because you can’t really screw up a first-person shooter that easily (unless you’re Codemasters or the folks that made Darkest of Days). There are tons of quests and plenty of reward the whole way through.
However, like so many games this generation, Borderlands is wrought with oversight and the sort of mistakes that the people in QA should have been catching really early on. I mean, really, how hard is it to say “yeah, my scope was lined up perfectly with his head but the bullet landed on that trash can ten feet away”? Evidently hard enough that it remains in the final product.
So if you ever want to drop some cash on a game for cheap that you can enjoy with friends, give Borderlands a whirl. That is, once it hits the $20 range. Maybe. I rented it from GameFly and honestly, that’s enough for me. Good riddance.
Seriously, I can’t believe so many of you shlubs actually bought this game.
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