Borderlands: Most Multiplayer Fun Since Left4Dead

29Oct/090

Borderlands: Most Multiplayer Fun Since Left4Dead

The Windows release for Borderlands finally dropped on October 26th for those of us the United States. I managed to convince 3 friends to go in on the Steam 4 pack with me. That brought the price down to $33 and change for each copy. It's an amazing deal.

This game deserves a full review but I'm going to be as concise as I possibly can here.

None of my friends had initially expressed any interest in the game. With no base of friends playing on xbox live, that made my platform choice really simple. Borderlands being a First Person Shooter just called for mouse and keyboard controls. And since the game is pretty much co-op instead of competitive multiplayer, I didn't need the easy matchmaking that xbox live would normally provide.

First let me get the bad out of the way. There's a little bit of annoyance that's unavoidable in the online world of PC gaming and then there's just some bad game design.

Yes, you need ports forwarded to the computer you're playing on if you want people to join the game you've hosted. What is bad is that the supplied list of ports seems to be incomplete and my group hasn't been able to successfully host without delving in to the realm of the DMZ.

Some of the aspects of the actual multiplayer implementation just seem dumb. Quest progression is tied to the host's saved game. This isn't too much of a problem except when it comes to the main storyline quests. If player 2 is on main quest 2 and player 1 is on main quest 3, then player 2 can't get any progress on the main quest line until he plays in his own saved game file. Annoying sure, but that would be just a minor inconvenience if it weren't for the fact that key mechanics of the 'character' are tied to main storyline progression. Stuff like inventory maximum increases and the number of weapons you can wield at a time are tied to completing some of those missions.

There's been a lot of noise on the Internet forums about the interface being very console-like. Again, that wouldn't be too much of a problem if Gearbox hadn't promised some sort of PC optimized menus and interface. There's some wonkyness involved with the scroll wheel and clicking, but I've definitely gotten used to it.

Gearbox also promised exclusive features to the PC version and they're there. You can right click on an item in your inventory and export a screenshot. That way you can brag about the drops you've gotten and share your gun porn with your friends. Unfortunately they export as BMP images around 4 MB in size and they're padded with this huge gray border. A little bit of copy and paste in MS Paint and you're all set to go. By default, the images are saved in your My Documents/My Games/Borderlands/WillowGames/Screenshots, or something very close to that. The other feature is a time demo. This requires some command line option voodoo in order to get it to run. My log file unfortunately reported null times after running. It did present me with a minute of a fancy little time-demo map though.

Okay, now the good. And it is very good. This is a First Person Shooter with some very light Role Playing Game elements. A FPSliteRPG if you will, or maybe a FPSRPGlite, or FPRlRPG? The world geography is static, which in this case is key in creating a world you can explore. A lot of comparisons are made between this game and Diablo and Hellgate London. Both those other games feature randomly generated world geography. That's not the case here. Instead you have a series of hub towns surrounded by wild areas that feel medium in size. They're just large enough to feel too big to run across and provide you just enough room to speed your vehicles around in comfortably. It actually feels like you have a reason to use the cars besides the fun of driving. These areas are linked together with travel points but are otherwise separated. Unlike Diablo II or Hellgate, you can not venture away from your fellow players in to these other areas. If you decide to travel to the next area, everyone must.

In this static world, you'll find wildlife and bad people. The wildlife tends to appear near their spawns. Skags come from little caves. Usually there'll be a little one hanging out. You shoot it and more come pouring out. The bandits that I've seen look like they don't respawn. Besides running around and just killing monster and bandit spawns for fun and profit, there are also missions. So far the missions seem to consist of some basic fetch quests as well as kill x number of y kinds of stuff. Something about them seems fresh and new though.

Okay, I just realized I don't feel like writing much more about this. The game is fun. It scratches that RPG itch just enough and the gameplay is just the right pace. Not too fast, not too slow of a shooter. The character classes and their possible builds are varied enough so that nobody feels redundant in a party of four players. You get to argue over weapon drops but it's not too bad since the items do not bind to a character. You can feel free to drop them back on the ground for someone else to pick up.

Shooting a gun type increases your competency with that gun type. There are pistols, revolvers, SMGs, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and an alien type. Oh yeah, the weapons are procedurally generated to combine in over 17 million ways. Some of these attributes are simple and obvious like "+100% crit damage" while others are tough to interpret like "Bring the HEAT!". You start off only being able to wield 2 weapons at a time and that expands to 4 so there are some decisions to make as the game implements elemental resistance and damage type.

You can also modify some of your skills with items as well as a class modification unit.

The game is fun, buy it.

Borderlands for PC earns a rating of Super Awesome!

Borderlands at Amazon