And when I say finished I mean I beat it on normal; there is still Playthrough 2 to come where everyone is super tough, and lots of 4 player online play and duelling. Safe to say I am getting my 50 dollars worth out of this game.
Okay so my Hunter has completed every last mission in the game with 21 hours 12 minutes of play on the clock. On a second playthrough I expect about fifteen hours; not a whole lot of time was spent trying to figure stuff out. A lot more time was spent putting rounds through bandits heads and watching the beautiful chunks spray in all directions.
Visually I am in love. The concept art slash comic book style slash cell shading works wonders. Each piece of the terrain has a full texture which is then surrounded with a chunky black border that stays the same thickness at every distance: so from far away things appear blocky and chunky, resolving into pieces when you approach. The enemies are one of six types but with many variations, each with their own unique model. The guns – oh, the guns. Having picked up easily five hundred guns and used most of them I have to say they are still fresh and exciting. The models are created with a modular system, so each one can have any of a dozen different magazines, stocks, barrels, scopes, etc, etc. Which means no two guns look alike, and you really notice it when you’re handling so much weaponry. Borderlands doesn’t let the modular randomising system take over though: I came across easily twenty ‘unique’ weapons all obviously hand-crafted to look specifically awesome – most notably the Patton revolver, all brushed silver with a minimalist, Old-West revolver appearance, sporting a quote from General Patton in its description.
The best bit about the guns isn’t how they look like, or even how they sound – though the crack! of each revolver has a distinctive sound, and are all equally satisfying – it’s the shooting. I have never experienced such super-smooth hit detection. Critical spots are difficult targets, but not because the hitboxes are off: they are difficult because the models move realistically, duck behind cover, work in pairs (nothing amused me more than hearing a bandit yell “Nobody kills my buddy and lives!”, except maybe Tannis’s utter insanity) and die in such a satisfying manner.
That said, it’s not a perfect game. Multiplayer is deeply flawed, requiring players to host their own servers on their own internet connections, requires port forwarding and the like to avoid 15 second timeouts, and much of the glorious hit detection is lost in the milliseconds of lag. The bosses, while climactic and terrifying and introduced with hilarious, Inglourious Basterd-style freeze frames, tend towards being too static and simply beefcakes without much killing ability. Maybe as a Hunter my play style exacerbated that issue as I tended to run backwards and shoot them in the eyes, but that’s still a point against them. Indeed, I died once to Sledge and killed every other boss first try. I found myself dying to the average grunt when I wasn’t paying attention or managed to get caught in between two or three of them. The challenge level in the first playthrough is bumpy, though – a badass (elite) grunt, due to its clever AI or good positioning, was often more challenging than the boss he was protecting.
That said, the battle against Krom ranks in my top five boss fights of all time, up there with Salazar from Resident Evil 4.
Mission design was seamless, pulling of the go-here do-that kill-this-guy turn-in quest system from many an MMO with relative ease for a shooter. The missions themselves are creative, amusing, varied, and sometimes even challenging on their own.
Anyway, the final verdict is that it’s a great game: the loot system of Diablo, the aesthetics and black humour of the Fallout series, a peerless shooting experience and characters worthy of Bioware. Don’t be fooled by the sandbox gameplay tagline – this is pretty linear. And damnit, that’s a good thing!
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