“Borderlands” explodes through wastelands

Borderlands is a video game for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that is quite literally the offspring of a role-playing game and a first-person shooter.

It is a lot like any massively multiplayer online role-playing game where players choose a class and then complete quests to level up their skill and progress in the game.

Players choose from four classes: hunter, siren, soldier and brick. Each of them has a unique talent tree to add diversity to the game. For instance, the soldier gets to deploy a turret to help him defeat enemies while the siren goes invisible and can add more melee damage to her attacks.

The single player mode is relatively simple: Players are guided to “the vault” by an unknown female character. On the planet of Pandora, this is the most sought after location. No one knows where it is or if it even exists.

Players progress through areas completing quests and defeating tougher opponents to earn new guns, shields and class modifiers. While guns can be used by any of the four classes, the modifiers are class specific.

2K Games advertises that the game has a “bazillion guns.” While that is an exaggeration, the range of different weapons to collect is still quite impressive. The loot is color-coordinated with white being the most common and orange being the most rare.

In order to get the best loot, players must team up with each other, but, in doing so, the enemies get stronger. Individuals can team up with their roommates via a local area network or play online with other Game Spy account holders. Teams can have up to four players.

Gear Box Software added a bold outline to every graphic in the game, which added some nice visual effects. The creatures and human enemies are detailed, down to the enemy head flying off after a point-blank shotgun blast with blood splattering everywhere.
The diverse enemies force players to change their strategy for each encounter. For instance, the common “skag” creature has heavy armor around its head, but is easily defeated by attacking it from the side.

The questing system is fairly simple as it places a marker on the map to tell payers where the quest objective can be completed. The downfall is that while the quests can be completed at the same time, they cannot be tracked at the same time by the in-game system, which can lead to a bit of backtracking.

The quests have a level suggestion on them, but by the time I reached level seven I was given level-10 quests, which made progression difficult without the help of other players.
Borderlands is a game for fans of both first-person shooters and role-playing games that have a few friends who have time to kill and are just plain tired of waiting for events to unfold in other online role-playing games.