For those of you who have been listening to our show for a long time now probably know that I am not an RPG fan.  I can’t stand RPG games despite wanting to.  I think it really comes down to the fact that I just want to kill stuff.  I don’t want to spend time reading story lines, dialog, or walking all over the place.  I just want to jump in a game and get to some sweet killing with some awesome new weapons, in some exotic locations, and if the developer throws in some new features, all the better.  I am a shooter fan.
So Borderlands was the game that I was really interested in because it looked pretty sweet in regards to its combat, but it had the RPG name in the advertisement which gave me reason to feel that this game is something I should skip.  I tried to give Mass Effect and Fallout 3 a chance and did not like either game.  So would Borderlands be more of the same, or was I about to find the sleeper hit of the year?
Game Summary: Lock, load, and face the madness! Get ready for mind-blowing insanity in Borderlands, as one of four trigger-happy mercenaries, taking out everything that stands in your way.
With its addictive action, frantic first-person shooter combat, massive arsenal of weaponry, role-playing game elements and four-player co-op, Borderlands is the breakthrough experience that challenges all the conventions of modern shooters. Borderlands places you in the role of a mercenary on the lawless and desolate planet of Pandora, hell bent on finding a legendary stockpile of powerful alien technology known as The Vault.
Audio: The audio is pretty darn good in this title.  With a bazillion weapons, you may think that the guns would end up sounding all the same, but that is not the case.  There are some amazing sounding weapons in this game.  They even have guns that sound like thunder clapping in the distance.  Great stuff.
The best audio comes from the little robots known as Claptraps.  They are hysterically funny and you can’t help but to smile when you see the little guy dancing.  The voice is something that will stick with you and will be very memorable. I also recommend you watch the following webisode when you have a moment.  Please note that it does contain foul language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK4SJHK6eXE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL4QNsaqnz4
The four characters all have their lines in the game.  I think they were done very well, but I do wish there were more lines recorded because you will get tired of the same lines such as “give them hell bloodwing”, or “it’s like having another soldier on the field” will get old fast.
Visuals: There was a lot of questions about how the visuals would look in this game.  Afterall, originally this game was going for a realistic look.  In the middle of development, the artists actually convinced Gearbox to let them change the complete look of the game and go with a cell-shaded style.  Was it a smart move?  Was it worth the cost it had to be to redo every single asset in the game?  I say YES.  The look is great and I feel that it really sets this game apart from all the other shooters out there.
The gameplay alone sets the game apart, but with this visual style, anytime you see a video or screenshot, you will know immedietly that the game you are seeing is Borderlands.  So no more wonder “what game is this?”  You know right away what you are looking at.  I like the look of the game and am really pleased with this change.
Gameplay: This is what its all about.  So the game looks and sounds good, but how does it play?  Is it the RPG I feared?  Is it the Shooter I hoped for?  Happily this game is better than the shooter I hoped for.  The gunplay is fast and furious.
You will get a short tutorial to give you some quick lessons on how to control your character and how to read your HUD, then its into the action.  You get introduced to the land, missions, weapons, etc. pretty quick which is great.  You won’t get bogged down in story with Borderlands.  There is a story, but the point is to just shoot everything that moves (except your coop buddies of course).
You can customize your character only with weapons loadout, shields, mods, and how you spend skill points for your characters special skill (turret, bloodwing, phasewalk, or berserk) which you unlock at Level 5 which you get fairly quick.  You can’t actually change the look of your character but you won’t really care in the heat of battle which you will spend just about every waking moment.
The claim of the game having a bazillions weapons is pretty accurate, however what that actually means is that there are a crazy amount of combinations of eight basic weapon types (revolver, repeater, rifle, shotgun, machine gun, SMG, sniper, and rocket launcher).  So each gun will have something different such as damage done, reload speed, mag size, special powers, and if it contains elemental powers and if so, how often it will be available and how powerful it makes the weapon.  There are tons of different variations which comprise the huge amount of weapons possible.  But you will still only really have eight weapon types.
Loot is found all over the place.  Every person or creature you kill will drop loot, you can look in Skag puke piles for loot that Skag’s tried to eat but ended up throwing up.  The beauty is that you can sell off what you don’t want.  So if you have open inventory slots, grab that junk rifle because you can sell it at the local vending machine.
The game is an open semi open world.  You start out in the Arid Badlands and help the people of Frystone fight of some bandits.  You get a lot of side missions that you can do and I recommend that you do them all to help level you up.  You will need to level a lot before you hit some of the bosses in the game.
One beautiful part of the game is that you can actually jump into another persons game if they are a higher level then you and you will level up very fast.  You will die a lot, but trust me, the payoff of leveling fast is worth the cost of regenerating.  Plus your buddies will most likely be able to keep you alive so give it a shot.
If you are skipping the coop and staying with the single player experiance, then you do not want to take on missions that exceed your level or you will do nothing but die.  So kill tons of skags, do side quests and level up before moving on.
As you progress in the game, you will unlock new areas to play in which will give you all sorts of scenarios of combat.  You will have fight in open areas, arenas, close quarters, urban, and even some strange alien areas.  Its awesome because just as you start to tire of the open areas, you get put into some urban fighting that will really test your skills.
COOP has never been done better.  This game was designed for you and your buddies to jump in and kick butt.  That is it.  They designed the game so that you could jump into any game and carry all your loot, weapons, skills, and money with you.  When you leave that game, everything you earned goes with you.  And you earn Experiance Points (XP) when your buddies kill baddies as well.  So again, coop is the way to play for fast XP.
You will get the opportunity to use what is called Action Skills.  I played up to level 50 as a Soldier and his Action Skill is a deployable turret.  Once you get your turret, you will gain one point to customize the turret and make it more powerful and useful depending on your style of play.
You can set it to be a medic or supply turret, or just beef it up so that it is an unimaginalbe killing machine.  I set mine more towards medic so that it kept healing my team mates who stood near it.  The options are nice and varied and will give you opportunities to change the play style of your character.
As you can see, this is a shooter game with RPG elements added on.  I love what Gearbox did with Borderlands and I am already wanting the DLC to arrive today so I can play on in new areas. They have focued on making an awesome shooter and gave us lots of loot and leveling to play with.  In my opinion, this is the perfect shooter.
The game has 50 achievements and you may figure that they would be hard to get or take a long time to get the full 50 achievements.  After all, RPG games usually require up to 100 hours to see everything and shooters usually have some stupid requirement of playing a bazillion online ranked matches.  But Gearbox knows what they are doing and they did not disappoint in the achievement department.  You can get about 42 achievements simply by playing the game.  You can get another 5 in coop that are very easy, and the remaining are for playing as the other three characters and getting a set amount of kills with their action skills.
For once, I played a game and did not pay attention to the achievements.  I got all 50 of them and loved the game the entire time.  Nothing was a grind or chore to attain.  This is the way achievements should be done.  All other developers could learn from Gearbox (especial Epic Games).
Replay Value:  The replay value on this game in insanly high.  This is a game that you will probably want to play until you have two of the characters up to level 50.  You will want to play in your friends games to help them level up.  You will want to play to see what new guns you can find.  There is no end to the replay of this title.  This disc will find well over a hundred hours of play time in your console.  How many games can give you that kind of value?
Final Score: A+
-Wingman709

For those of you who have been listening to our show for a long time now probably know that I am not an RPG fan.  I can’t stand RPG games despite wanting to.  I think it really comes down to the fact that I just want to kill stuff.  I don’t want to spend time reading story lines, dialog, or walking all over the place.  I just want to jump in a game and get to some sweet killing with some awesome new weapons, in some exotic locations, and if the developer throws in some new features, all the better.  I am a shooter fan.

So Borderlands was the game that I was really interested in because it looked pretty sweet in regards to its combat, but it had the RPG name in the advertisement which gave me reason to feel that this game is something I should skip.  I tried to give Mass Effect and Fallout 3 a chance and did not like either game.  So would Borderlands be more of the same, or was I about to find the sleeper hit of the year?

Game Summary: Lock, load, and face the madness! Get ready for mind-blowing insanity in Borderlands, as one of four trigger-happy mercenaries, taking out everything that stands in your way.

With its addictive action, frantic first-person shooter combat, massive arsenal of weaponry, role-playing game elements and four-player co-op, Borderlands is the breakthrough experience that challenges all the conventions of modern shooters. Borderlands places you in the role of a mercenary on the lawless and desolate planet of Pandora, hell bent on finding a legendary stockpile of powerful alien technology known as The Vault.

Audio: The audio is pretty darn good in this title.  With a bazillion weapons, you may think that the guns would end up sounding all the same, but that is not the case.  There are some amazing sounding weapons in this game.  They even have guns that sound like thunder clapping in the distance.  Great stuff.

The best audio comes from the little robots known as Claptraps.  They are hysterically funny and you can’t help but to smile when you see the little guy dancing.  The voice is something that will stick with you and will be very memorable. I also recommend you watch the following webisode when you have a moment.  Please note that it does contain foul language.

The four characters all have their lines in the game.  I think they were done very well, but I do wish there were more lines recorded because you will get tired of the same lines such as “give them hell bloodwing”, or “it’s like having another soldier on the field” will get old fast.

Visuals: There was a lot of questions about how the visuals would look in this game.  After all, originally this game was going for a realistic look.  In the middle of development, the artists actually convinced Gearbox to let them change the complete look of the game and go with a cell-shaded style.  Was it a smart move?  Was it worth the cost it had to be to redo every single asset in the game?  I say YES.  The look is great and I feel that it really sets this game apart from all the other shooters out there.

The gameplay alone sets the game apart, but with this visual style, anytime you see a video or screenshot, you will know immediately that the game you are seeing is Borderlands.  So no more wonder “what game is this?”  You know right away what you are looking at.  I like the look of the game and am really pleased with this change.

Gameplay: This is what its all about.  So the game looks and sounds good, but how does it play?  Is it the RPG I feared?  Is it the Shooter I hoped for?  Happily this game is better than the shooter I hoped for.  The gun-play is fast and furious.

You will get a short tutorial to give you some quick lessons on how to control your character and how to read your HUD, then its into the action.  You get introduced to the land, missions, weapons, etc. pretty quick which is great.  You won’t get bogged down in story with Borderlands.  There is a story, but the point is to just shoot everything that moves (except your coop buddies of course).

You can customize your character only with weapons load-out, shields, mods, and how you spend skill points for your characters special skill (turret, bloodwing, phasewalk, or berserk) which you unlock at Level 5 which you get fairly quick.  You can’t actually change the look of your character but you won’t really care in the heat of battle which you will spend just about every waking moment.

The claim of the game having a bazillions weapons is pretty accurate, however what that actually means is that there are a crazy amount of combinations of eight basic weapon types (revolver, repeater, rifle, shotgun, machine gun, SMG, sniper, and rocket launcher).  So each gun will have something different such as damage done, reload speed, mag size, special powers, and if it contains elemental powers and if so, how often it will be available and how powerful it makes the weapon.  There are tons of different variations which comprise the huge amount of weapons possible.  But you will still only really have eight weapon types.

Loot is found all over the place.  Every person or creature you kill will drop loot, you can look in Skag puke piles for loot that Skag’s tried to eat but ended up throwing up.  The beauty is that you can sell off what you don’t want.  So if you have open inventory slots, grab that junk rifle because you can sell it at the local vending machine.

The game is an open semi open world.  You start out in the Arid Badlands and help the people of Fyrstone fight of some bandits.  You get a lot of side missions that you can do and I recommend that you do them all to help level you up.  You will need to level a lot before you hit some of the bosses in the game.

One beautiful part of the game is that you can actually jump into another persons game if they are a higher level then you and you will level up very fast.  You will die a lot, but trust me, the payoff of leveling fast is worth the cost of regenerating.  Plus your buddies will most likely be able to keep you alive so give it a shot.

If you are skipping the coop and staying with the single player experience, then you do not want to take on missions that exceed your level or you will do nothing but die.  So kill tons of skags, do side quests and level up before moving on.

As you progress in the game, you will unlock new areas to play in which will give you all sorts of scenarios of combat.  You will have fight in open areas, arenas, close quarters, urban, and even some strange alien areas.  Its awesome because just as you start to tire of the open areas, you get put into some urban fighting that will really test your skills.

COOP has never been done better.  This game was designed for you and your buddies to jump in and kick butt.  That is it.  They designed the game so that you could jump into any game and carry all your loot, weapons, skills, and money with you.  When you leave that game, everything you earned goes with you.  And you earn Experiance Points (XP) when your buddies kill baddies as well.  So again, coop is the way to play for fast XP.

You will get the opportunity to use what is called Action Skills.  I played up to level 50 as a Soldier and his Action Skill is a deployable turret.  Once you get your turret, you will gain one point to customize the turret and make it more powerful and useful depending on your style of play.

You can set it to be a medic or supply turret, or just beef it up so that it is an unimaginalbe killing machine.  I set mine more towards medic so that it kept healing my team mates who stood near it.  The options are nice and varied and will give you opportunities to change the play style of your character.

As you can see, this is a shooter game with RPG elements added on.  I love what Gearbox did with Borderlands and I am already wanting the DLC to arrive today so I can play on in new areas. They have focued on making an awesome shooter and gave us lots of loot and leveling to play with.  In my opinion, this is the perfect shooter.

The game has 50 achievements and you may figure that they would be hard to get or take a long time to get the full 50 achievements.  After all, RPG games usually require up to 100 hours to see everything and shooters usually have some stupid requirement of playing a bazillion online ranked matches.  But Gearbox knows what they are doing and they did not disappoint in the achievement department.  You can get about 42 achievements simply by playing the game.  You can get another 5 in coop that are very easy, and the remaining are for playing as the other three characters and getting a set amount of kills with their action skills.

For once, I played a game and did not pay attention to the achievements.  I got all 50 of them and loved the game the entire time.  Nothing was a grind or chore to attain.  This is the way achievements should be done.  All other developers could learn from Gearbox (especial Epic Games).

Replay Value: The replay value on this game in insanly high.  This is a game that you will probably want to play until you have two of the characters up to level 50.  You will want to play in your friends games to help them level up.  You will want to play to see what new guns you can find.  There is no end to the replay of this title.  This disc will find well over a hundred hours of play time in your console.  How many games can give you that kind of value?

Final Score: A+

-Wingman709