Borderlands - Review
(for PC)



Initially I had a very frustrating time with this game. The game was chiefly developed for the 360 and Ps3, but was ported to the PC. All versions were developed by Gearbox. They started out by saying the PC version was the best of the set and was a more in-depth experience. In one way they were right; the graphical potential of the PC version is way, way beyond what the console versions offer. The real problem lies in its online. Borderlands is a real co-op game and playing it offline just isn't the same; the online portion of the PC game is so broken it isn't funny. You have to manually set up and forward the right ports if you're behind a router of some kind, and you can't host any kind of game until you do so. This makes playing with friends impossible unless you know what you're doing. I'm lucky enough to actually know what I'm doing and got it running after several hours of frustrating senseless failure. This is the year 2009 and a PC game doing that is inexcusable.

In any case, despite a whole paragraph of initial bitching you'll have seen the four stars first. Well, that's because this game is excellent. It plays a lot like WoW, which sounds odd for a first-person shooter. But the game is quite like a stripped down version of it. It's very heavily class-based, and you modify those classes with various upgrades and mods you find throughout the game as you level up. Each class has its own ability that usually takes random benefits from the upgrades, and fits different playing styles pretty well. Trying out all the classes is pretty easy as they level up rather quickly at first and teach you what you need to know without wasting any time. You'll probably want to do this as the game is super fun and you'll want your character to fit like a glove.

That's pretty easy to do with the random and custom mods that appear in the game. You can add to your shields, health, find perks that grant you bullets, melee damage, augment how you use one of the game's eight weapon types, and more. They boast that you can find "bazillions" of guns, which is technically true but not really as each gun is randomly generated with various stats and perks, but each one still fits into one of the eight weapon categories; it's pretty much usually either an assault rifle, an awful assault rifle or an awesome assault rifle.

The main story can be done on your own if you want but it's far more fun with three other friends. There's actually plenty to the story, and more than enough sidequests to keep you moving if you need to beef up your character. But either way you'll find more than enough loot along the way to make any longtime Diablo fan happy. Most of it is quite sellable but once you find that one perfect gun for your class and level up in that department, everything just clicks.

Bottom line: it's Diablo-like, and it's an action packed shooter. Buy it on consoles if you want an easier, better controlling, more fluid experience; buy it for the PC if graphics mean everything to you or you just need a mouse/keyboard for shooters. Either way just buy it. It's great.