I'm going to kick off my first review with a title by 2KGames and Gearbox called Borderlands. I wanted to play this game because I had been told it has a Diablo II-esque feel to it.
Synopsis:
Borderlands is one of few emerging FPS/RPG hybrid games with a higher focus on RPG elements like random items and character progression trees. The most notable difference with these type of games and other conventional shooters is that we feature a progressing health bar and damage is displayed numerically.
Borderlands gives a post apocalyptic backdrop with an unique world filled with crazy bandits and strange creatures.
I played through the first playthrough as a Hunter playing solo. The second playthrough was done with a Beserker companion
The Pros and Cons:
From the very beginning of being kicked off a bus by a greedy merchant to meeting a lovable dancing robot it's clear this game has style. Although the game runs off the Unreal Engine it is made to look similar to cell shading though it does not share the same annoyances that cell shading does. Without seemingly complex textures the game had a slightly cartoonish feel that disassociated it from reality. Though I'm not sure if I liked it visually speaking, it did further add to the style of the game. The Tarintino like entrances of certain characters sealed the deal.
Borderlands was also quite humorous. Many weapons had funny inscriptions and the characters were all larger than life and kinda wacky. I really could go on about dancing robots..
I had no problems with the physics engine and movement seemed quite fluid. Being able to forever run was quite refreshing though it did make me wonder why I ever had a walk function. Nothing took too long to get used to.
The voice acting in Borderlands seemed spot on, but other than that the sound in borderlands was lackluster. The music didn't reach me and sound effects seemed generic. Generally in a FPS I think you can get away with that but when you are going for re-playability I think could be improved upon.
The GUIs in the game were clean and well structured. I was pleased with that aspect.
The gameplay has its share of ups and downs. My experiences and feelings of the game seemed to go on a rollercoaster with high exciting parts and low slow-grinding parts. The heart pounding moments of watching the death meter slide down as you grasp for a second wind or some of the games larger than life bosses to the endless sidequests that seemed too low level and made you revisit maps over and over again.
One of the highlights of any game with character progression is the feeling of, well, progressing. I found that borderlands truly did not offer a lot of that. When you feel like you are no longer building your character you relize you are just.. shooting things. I love shooting things, but it's a short lived fling of fun.
Break Down of Gameplay:
Character progression happens in many ways throughout this game. There is item progression, skill progression and level progression.
One of the biggest issues I had with this game was the power of the level progression. I do not know the formula used, but it is quite apparent that simply being higher level than something was more important than what your skills were or what weapon you were using. The damage that you do to your opponents and the damage they did to you would be effected majorly with the addition of a single level. This ended up completely dwarfing other types of progression making them all but inconsequential. This to me encouraged a steady pace of going through the game, doing all sidequests and constant grinding and disallowed straying from that variant. The fact that your health goes up by a few percent doesn't seem to match the fact that damage is reduced by seemingly 10% or more for every level you have on someone. My personal opinion is that this entire mechanic should be removed and that it ruined a large portion of the RPG aspect. Who cares if someone is higher level than you and you want to fight them? Let your skill and ability to find good items and tweak your character depict if you can or cannot.
The second issue, which ends up compounding with the first was the unimaginative skill trees. All characters trees are built the same way, employing 3 paths that were somewhat themed into a type of character. All 3 paths are built on a tier system stating you must spend 5 points in a tier to access the next. There is 4 tiers in total. I actually had no issue with this system at all. It was simple to understand and allowed for a feeling of choosing a path. I personally think it was good design. My beef was with the skills themselves.
None of the skills save the very first one which you are forced to buy gave a sense of personalization and changed how you played the game. To give a good example, I go back to Diablo II. If you played a Sorceress you had a plethora of spells to choose from as attacks. I can take 3 skills (albeit maybe not the most powerful, but good at illustrating the point) and show how they changed how you played the game. Inferno, Meteor and Fireball. Inferno was a mechanic where you stood still and made a stream of fire damaging all within the cone. It was high damage but also made you vunerable. You had to get in close and be quick about getting out when you had to. Getting enemies in a long straight line becomes beneficial. Fireball is a long range explosive. Ideally you want enemies bunched together tightly and shoot and run strategies are highly effective. Meteor decent a meteor from the sky on a few second delay, meaning you have to predict where the enemies are going and lead them to that location as they chase you around. The point is that your positioning and playstyle changed based on what skills you chose. Borderlands does not offer this.
I played as the hunter and my first skill was a Bird called Bloodwing. I could throw him out and he would attack an enemy for me and deal some damage. I really liked the mechanic but the fact that you HAVE to get this skill means it is a given perk for the class. You then have a multitude of skills that further increase what he does. The skills include giving him the ability to stun, leech health, deal extra damage and attack multiple enemies. You could also make it so he came out more and more often by reducing the cooldown on the skill or making it so when you shoot something, more cooldown is removed. The issue is that there is no choice for these abilities, you just choose them all and they all stack. That means its all or nothing. Do you want this forced ability to suck or be good? If you want it to be useful, you will have to devote about half your points you will ever get to it too.
Mechanics like this do not work. You have to scale the base skill so much so that if someone DID get everything it wouldn't be overpowered. And what happens when they don't get anything? It's underpowered. You get one choice, good or bad.
I think the proper design for these abilities would not to make the base skill 1/1. Let it progress and let it include damage/speed and any other obvious base ability. And finally, don't force me to get it and have the option to ignore it. The health leech, multiple attack and stun abilities were good ideas but they should have been choices. What kind of bird do I want? If I had to choose between those, suddenly I have 3 different types of characters I could make. A Bird-leecher. A Bird-stunner. A bird-DPSer. Instead I was able to be all of them, making one type of character. A bird-user. Every other character's tree suffers from the same issue.
The other skills are mostly lackluster. One skill for me increased my Sniper Rifle damage by 4% per skill point I put in, which is outclassed by level bonuses. The max is 20% extra sniper damage. I don't find that that is a huge bonus and really makes me a "Sniper". Small bonuses to damage and reload rate and things like that I can understand but they don't offer a playstyle and only make the character slightly better than just anyone using a sniper rifle. Although that could have been intended, making it possible for other classes to use sniper rifles or other specific weapon types and not having to dramatically nerf the base items. Still, if being slightly better at something makes me a certain class, I see very little in terms of customization. The worst was Deadly, giving an extremely minor 6% critical hit extra damage. Sniper rifles came with a base of 150% critical hit damage. Spending 5 of the 50 points I get to get it to 180 is a minuscule difference.
A few abilities from the Hunter are interesting. One has a bypass shield ability, another makes enemies drop more loot. There's another that makes you fire faster and deal a decent amount of more damage when you get a kill. Unfortunately none of them change your play style.
A seperate issue befell my Beserker companion in that his special ability, which is to go crazy and punch things became useless as he didn't deal the damage and more importantly, lost all survivability in the later levels. This was due to a fact that his health regeneration was not based on % of health but rather a set number and simply diminished in usefulness as levels went on until it simply had no chance.
Lastly was items. Items prospects in this game were decent but to standards of an RPG they fell a bit short. A good list of base properties existed. Damage, accuracy, magazine size, fire rate, elemental ability and you could argue reload speed although it showed up as special text. With these numbers being randomized it made for interesting possible combinations of guns.
Though that this was slightly being hindered by grouping certain qualities together. The guns had manufacturer's and they were known for certain qualities like high damage but low magazine size and another with an exact opposite. This prevented the possibilities of just finding an all around perfect gun or one that was complete junk, which, to me, kind of defeats the purpose of item hunting. There was variations within the manufacturer's themselves that held interest and made some better than others, but I don't think the system helped. As substitute I'd suggest manufacturer's bestowing completely random guns with a certain bonus. For instance a sniper rifle can have a magazine size of 2-5 but a certain manufacturer is known for large magazine sizes and gives a 20% bonus. Only a random gun with the highest roll and this manufacturer could have 6. That way it still means something but doesn't form fit every gun of it's type.
The damage was a single number rather than the varied ones commonly seen in RPGs. I find that is a loss of item mechanics that takes away player decision. If you have a gun that does 1-10 damage or 5-6 which do you take? If you have one gun that does 5 and the other does 6 you don't think about it.
The elemental effects were also a tad too streamlined. There was Fire, Lightning, Acid and Explosion. For some reason they went up by multiples from X1 to X4. I never learned the meaning behind that. I just assumed that more was better. It would also state as special text what the chance of the effect happening was. However, it was also not a number, just "a chance" or "high chance" or "very high chance". If it was a % that had variation, again, there would be more variation and decision making for the players. The fire damage could have been listed, the amount of shields knocked off by lightning could have been listed and the amount of shield reduction from acid could have been listed and varied further. I don't understand why they were not. It makes many guns similar to many other guns.
I definitely liked the unique items, despite many of them being too weak. Many of them fired strange and interesting thing. A shotgun that shot out a wave of energy fluctuating up and down and spiral flying bullets that bounce around after hitting something for examples. I ended up setting on a sniper rifle that just plainly did explosive damage and seemed to outclass every gun I ever got from level 29-50. I'm not sure if that gun was particularly made correctly.
The best of the items were definitely the class items. This is how the rest of the items in the game should have been like. They gave bonuses to random skills or have effects that can benefit you in powerful or interesting ways. Included in that was team abilities making certain items much more interesting in large player games. The bonuses that came from them could be quite large making defining character statements thus giving the players a sense of development.
My conclusion on character progression in borderlands is that an overbearing level based damage system, streamlined weapons and a skill system lacking a bit of creativity and character defining abilities made the feel of progression diminished compared to other RPGs.
Another issue to bring up was the car. When you first get it, you can basically kill anything by driving over it. You made less xp, but you were invincible so it made up for it. I really don't think that made sense, but it actually wasn't a big deal since most XP was made up for in quests so no serious farming I think would occur. Then, during the later levels, you learn that the car takes damage for hitting enemies with a lot of health. Then, even later, you learn your car will explode by touching near everything. Imagine driving around and a spider ant pops out of the ground where you are driving. Due to momentum, you hit it, causing your car to explode and you to have to fight wave after wave of spiderant just to move on. Of course, when you are done, you are forced to walk. I just don't think the numbers were balanced on this one. Why couldn't it just have been a % of the car's total life? That way levels could have scaled better.
I would also say there was a small lack in the types of enemies in the game. You end up fighting a LOT of the same thing. The lack of variety in this ends up taking it's toll later when you are just sick to death of humans and spiderants. It takes time to animate and create these creatures, but even adding 3 more would have greatly improved the scenery and interest of the game. Diablo II has many types and I think Borderlands employs somewhere around 6-7 types of monsters. (This isn't counting subtle variations on the same type).
The last thing I want to touch upon was the PVP. I can't say I have play tested all the scenario's, but the results of Hunter vs Beserker was both of us being able to 1 shot each other. With a heatseeking bird that stuns it really made things rather unfair. The defensive capabities of characters no where matched the offensive and made it somewhat pointless. I don't want to even imagine having to fight a soldier with an instant killing turret or a character that can go invisible. I think the damage would have had to be scaled back a bit or health increased. If you ever want to make PVP be a part of you game, make sure to balance it end game or simply don't include it.
Conclusion
Borderlands is a fun game to run through but doesn't have the re-playability of other action RPGs as it wont be too different each time. The multiplayer co-op was definitely the best part and I highly suggest people who have not played the game to run through it for first time with a friend.
