I just finished playing.
Ehhh, it was pretty good. I don't really play a lot of games. Well, certainly not a lot of games while they're new. As a result I tend to play mostly really good games. As a result of that my standards are pretty high.
There's nothing really wrong with Borderlands. Gameplay is where it should be for a modern game. The big picture is pretty good. There are lot of details that are really fun and allude to a lot of depth. However, there's something missing in the middle that fails to tie it all together and really make it into an immersive experience.
The game takes place on a alien planet that is pretty much the wild west with laser guns and dog aliens that shoot acid. There are all these allusions to this bigger story going on. You spend a lot of time at the beginning fighting said alien dogs, then you start to notice that some of the buildings are constructed within the skeletons of what were obviously giant versions of the alien dogs. However, you only fight one really big version and he's only about a quarter as big as these skeletons. That would have been cool if they had followed through on it. That's just an example. The game is full of all these cool setups that would have been fun if they followed through on them. The story itself is made to feel sandboxish, but it's pretty linear. People give you quests, you fulfill them, and that unlocks more. It's a narrow path in the beginning, branches out in the middle, and then narrows back down at the end. Nothing really matters, as long as you're alive the story will end the way it's supposed to.
It's one of those cool RPG/FPS that are all the rage these days. It does the job well enough and is only a letdown because others have done it so much better. There are four different "classes" to choose from each with multiple "development paths" and weapon specialization a la FFII. So in theory you have a big range of characters. In reality, a bullet from on kind of gun ultimately does the same thing as a bullet from another. You just pick one or two kind of weapons to concentrate on, pick up enough loot to keep buying the best guns, and you aren't going to have any problems.
Opponents are based on a set number of templates with pretty much no substantial variations. Alien dog, big alien dog, big acid alien dog, big fire alien dog... Alien bird, big alien bird, big acid alien bird... Machine gun bad guy, really mean machine gun bad guy... Rocket launcher bad guy, really mean rocket launcher bad guy...
I know I'm being a little critical, and I guess that's just because I've come to expect a lot more. There's a great idea here that got glossed over for the sake of development time. It's really too bad. In all honesty, I did have fun playing it, and I'm sure I'll come back to it eventually to give it another run through. It looks like Steam is still selling it for $50. I don't think I paid that much for it, must have been on special. Anyway, I'd wait for a couple months for it to drop down to $30 or so. That's about what it's worth.
*edit
Oh! Multiplayer. It's supposed to be the big selling point. You can play with three other people at the same time. I couldn't get it to work about 3/4 of the time. I'd say I was doing something wrong (firewalls, ports, DNS MAC IP subnet address mask number gateway), but then it'd just magically work every now and then with absolutely no change on my part. Whatever. I'm not sure it was that much more fun with other people though. It's something I'd like to try a few more times. It'd probably be tons of fun with people you know. Maybe?
