By Jeremy Azevedo

Borderlands is a strange sort of game. Of all the shooters and all the RPGs I’ve ever played, I never really thought that the two flavors would ever meet in such a complimentary manner.

It’s tempting to compare Borderlands to Fallout 3 right away, on account of it being an FPS/RPG hybrid set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But to be fair to both games, that’s where the similarities begin and end. Where Fallout is deeply rooted in dialogue trees and story, Borderlands is all action. It’s really more like Halo than it is like Fallout. There’s no mysterious underlying “Dungeons and Dragons” system of chance that dictates whether you hit or miss, or whether your shot was critical or not. You have to relay on your old school run and gun FPS skills to get ahead in Borderlands. Which is not to say that said skills are not fully customizable… There are dozens of different skills that can be attributed to any of your four different character classes, some of which really change the way you play. Not to mention the millions (not an exaggeration) of different guns that you might find as you blaze through the game.

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up the game is how great it looks. The graphical presentation is incredibly stylish, reminding me a bit of the Dreamcast classic Jet Grind Radio, though the cel-shading is not nearly as overbearing. In motion it looks very fluid, though I sort of wish that there were a 3rd person view option so that I could see my character in the space and have a wider field of view. Most wouldn’t agree with me, but I always feel like 1st person games always have too narrow of a visual focus for my liking. Also, I just spent all this time agonizing over which colors to make my clothes, and now I can’t even see them. WTF, at least put some mirrors in the game or something. Aside from that one minor complaint, Gearbox has constructed am incredibly detailed world in which you genuinely feel like a lone mercenary scavenger, living off of loot to survive the harsh and lonely wasteland.

The enemies, of which there are many different sizes and shapes, look crazy as hell and act equally so. In the first few missions alone, you’ll encounter warthog type creatures with mouths that look like a vagina dentate, various pissed-off midgets, fully-grown mongoloid flipper babies, and a metric shit-ton of dudes wearing hockey masks. (Apparently, hockey mask are like the cockroach of the sporting goods world.) As Mordecai the hunter, I initially found it frustrating that my sniper rifle didn’t do jack to most of these enemies, that it took forever to reload, and that after one or two shots they were all over me like a Kardashian on an NFL superstar. But after leveling up a bit and upgrading my weapons, I found myself performing better and better, softening up “skags” from a mile away with my scoped rifle and finishing them off up close with my fire bullet spewing machine pistol. Although I’m still pretty sure that the retarded bird special attack is the worst of the four. Why have a health and ammo restoring shielded turret, turn invisible, or “hulk out” in a nigh-invulnerable frenzy when you can have a goddamn bird flap around doing absolutely f**k all, so far as I can tell? Why indeed.

After playing the single player campaign and leveling up a bit so as not to come off as a total n00b, I joined an online party where I was almost immediately exposed as a n00b anyway. I don’t play games online very much, so it took me a little while to get up to speed. But by 1AM in the morning, I had a group of new friends playing as a well-balanced team, sharing loot and picking our way through hordes of over-leveled enemies in places that we most likely had no business being. I also had a sorta pissed off wifey. Invariably, some asshole always snagged the really l33t loot before anyone else could, but then, you’re constantly finding randomly generated weapons that are significantly more awesome than the one you had before so it’s not that big of an issue. I’d imagine that Borderlands is probably very similar to WOW or Diablo in it’s reward and loot sharing system, though I wouldn’t really be the one to comment on that. I’m about as likely to play WOW as I am to try heroine; I’m sure it’s probably awesome, I really just don’t need another debilitating addiction in my life.