By Billy S. Garland
With their latest release of Borderlands, Gearbox Software has reached new heights in gaming design. The game was billed as a fusion between a first-person shooter and a role-playing game. If this was the goal, then the team at Gearbox lived up to the hype.
The storyline of the game takes the player on a treasure hunt of sorts, on the fictional desert planet of Pandora. According to the introduction video, an alien race set up a hidden vault at some point in the planet’s history. They filled it with untold riches and unheard-of technology. Players are presented with a set of four fortune hunters to choose from, but quickly learn that the enigmatic guardian angel will be guiding them, making random appearances to offer advice to the character.
In terms of game play, Borderlands is primarily in first-person shooter format. With action and graphics to rival Halo, gamers are immediately plunged into immersive fast-paced combat. The first-person action is further reinforced with a huge variety of weapons and opponents.
Where most first-person games fall short is in a lack of tools and weaponry options. In contrast, Borderlands stands alone, with a vast array of weapons. Advertisements for the game boast that there is “an almost infinite” amount of guns available to players. Gearbox accomplished this astounding feat through the development of a new content-generating system, which randomly creates weapons with increasing attributes and abilities, as the player proceeds through the storyline. This is necessary, as the enemies that the player faces increase in difficulty at a similar rate.
As the game’s storyline begins, the player is taken through a quasi-tutorial stage, in which the enemies faced are barely able to stand up by themselves, let alone put up much of a fight. This changes quickly though, as the first few missions are accomplished. The gamer inevitably faces innumerable forces of bandits, monsters and the occasional psycho midget shotgunner.
This plethora of options is brought to the table as a part of the role-playing aspect of the game. Working with a system similar to that of the best-selling game series Diablo, the player is presented with four choices of character types at the beginning of the game, and must play with that character through the entirety of the game. Each character possesses its own unique skill set and classification. For players who enjoy close combat, the soldier character carries extra proficiency with machine guns and shotguns. For the farsighted gamers, the sniper character might be the better choice.
Each character, like the landscape they operate within, is beautifully rendered using a combination of high-tech graphics and hand-drawn textures. Where some game designers seem hell-bent on putting out graphics that look perfectly realistic, Borderlands’ designers chose instead to put out a truly unique look.
Borderlands is rated M for Mature, due to excess blood and gore, intense violence, mature humor and strong language. This is definitely not a game for your little brother or sister, but for avid gamers age 17 and up, Borderlands is a must buy.
