As mentioned before, it’s the levelling, the looting and the gear that makes Borderlands so much fun. Chests do respawn when you reload the game from taking a break, so do bosses, so it never feels overly grindy. You can always gain some xp from going back and shooting up familiar but lower level enemies. You’ll also see that Borderlands features various elite monsters, these Badasses are true challenges and will take a lot of firepower to put down to begin with, they are worth the time and effort though since they often drop a lot of loot and give you a decent chunk of xp. Shooting things in the face has also never been so much fun, since a headshot in this game is a critical and you can get some massive damage numbers rolling up from that.

You can equip shields, grenade mods, elemental artifacts and COM’s on your character in Borderlands, and whilst you start out with a limited inventory space, you may earn more by helping various damaged smart-ass robots known as Claptraps, endearing little fellows that need your help. COM’s are class mods, they will alter the fundamental aspects of your character, boosting team shield capacity, or your SMG damage and so on. These are combined again, randomly.

One niggle I have is that inventory management could have been a little better, but the backpack does order things by rarity and gives you a decent feedback on what you have. Being able to compare things in the backpack and shops is also a much needed addition that Gearbox have thoughtfully included.

Gearbuilder

So I decided to give this little devil its own space in the review, since it’s worth expanding on. Gearbuilder combines a bewildering array of parts based on manufacturer lists, to create various weapons; COM’s, shields, grenade mods and you name it. This random element adds immensely to the fun-factor of the game and provides a huge draw to anyone who loved loot in Diablo 2. Not only does Gearbuilder make the weapons from a set of criteria, but it also builds them physically based on the manufacturer’s design and materials. Jakob’s guns offer a lot of power, often lack the accuracy of other brands and are made of wood, they look like they stepped right out of the Wild West in places.

Gearbuilder will add scopes, elemental effects, fire, caustic and so on through these lists and provide a nearly 17,750,000 viable weapon/item/gear combinations in game.

This is the game that always surprises us when we boot it; we often see something we’ve never seen before, usually in the arms of a Badass Raider or Bandit leader.

Gearbuilder also creates the monsters and enemies in the game too, so you never quite know if you’re going to be facing a Skag, an alien dog-like creature or a Badass acid-spewing massive corrosive Skag that can tear through your hide like paper in seconds.
You’re also rewarded for playing a second time, since everything has been upgraded and the loot is tonnes better on the 2nd playthrough.

Finally, loot is colour-coded rather like in an MMO.

You have white at one end of the spectrum, which is weak and common, with a dark orange at the other end providing the most jaw-dropping loot most of the time.

Graphics

Borderlands looked fairly generic way back at 2008 E3; it looked like just any other shooter out there. Along came Gearbox’s art team and pitched an idea to Randy, who initially wanted to shut them down. Then he saw it, and I’m glad he did, because I am a massive fan of this art style. It’s not and I repeat, NOT cel-shading. A similar graphical design was used in the new Prince of Persia and the game: Crackdown. However, Borderlands new style is based on their concept art and adds a touch of the over the top humour and quality into the game that I feel it needed.

It’s larger than life; everything is beautifully and extremely detailed texture wise. From the characters to the environments, it’s like being involved in a violent comic-book treasure hunt and the environments whilst initially bland and very frontier-like in terms of design, change, as you plough further into the story and unlock more of Pandora to explore. Gearbox has also implemented all the nice shading, dynamic lighting and other bells and whistles into their iteration of the Unreal Warfare engine.

There are a few niggles, textures take a little while to load sometimes, but no where nearly as bad as Mass Effect was for that. So they can be forgiven.

Pandora has a short but beautiful day/night cycle and it’s during these times you really get to see the dynamic lighting at work.

The game’s GUI is also pretty useful, sparse and giving you just enough information. Damage numbers roll off into the ether as you shoot enemies, giving you a great fun feedback in battles.