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Borderlands: Xbox 360 Features

Platform: Xbox 360

• Borderlands supports 2-4 players via Xbox LIVE.
• Borderlands is built from the ground up to be an intuitive co-operative experience for up to four players that rewards players who work together and invest in co-op skills. Split screen is also supported.
• In this rpg shooter, choose one of four distinct characters, each with their own individual skill sets. As your character grows throughout this fast-paced FPS, you choose and customize your abilities to suit your style of play.
• Jump behind the wheel and engage in high-speed vehicle-to-vehicle combat, complete with spectacular explosions and road-killed enemies.
• Choose from literally hundreds of thousands of weapons, each with their own manufacturers, specifications, and advantages via a revolutionary content generation system.

Description of Borderlands: Xbox 360

Platform: Xbox 360

Amazon.com

A sci-fi/action RPG from acclaimed developer Gearbox, Borderlands combines the best in first-person action gaming with elements of a traditional role-playing game (RPG). The excitement of this hybridization is further magnified by the game’s groundbreaking content generation system which allows for a near-endless variety in missions, environments, enemies, weapons, item drops and character customization, making the game’s single player, multiplayer and online campaigns not to be missed.

Story
In a distant future, the planets at the outer edges of the galaxy have become a beacon to fortune seekers and those yearning for a better life off world. But there are no guarantees in deep space. Pandora, one of these distant planets, was reported to be rich in untapped mineral wealth, and so drew many hoping to get rich quick, but in the end little was found beyond the scattered ruins of a past alien civilization. With nothing to gain, any who could soon abandoned Pandora, leaving those who remained to deal with the lawlessness of a world gone bust, and the mystery of the long-dead alien civilization. But as chaotic as these times were, there were worse days yet to come. After several years the planet’s huge orbit slowly brought it near to its sun and once unknown and horrifying creatures sprang from their long hibernation to terrify the stranded colonists. The only hope of the colonists seems to be a vault discovered in the side of a mountainside, rumored to contain alien technology and secrets about Pandora. Will this discovery be the colonist’s salvation or their end? Discover their fate in Borderlands.

Gameplay
As in a traditional RPG, Borderlands is built around the continual leveling of characters as they delve into quests. These quests include both story-driven adventures and side quests that offer players rewards such as items exclusive to quest completion and/or forward movement of the story. Players can look forward to action set in both single player and multiplayer modes–including co-op play–as well as vehicular combat, literally thousands of different types of weapons that change each time you play and randomly generated maps and map features.

Playable Characters
Borderlands features several playable characters, each with its own unique backstory, abilities and skills. Skills can be leveled up, allowing for improvement of things like health, accuracy with weapons and capacity for items. In addition to this, characters possess unique skill tree development, ensuring that each will develop differently regardless of time spend leveling them up.

Key Game Features

• Co-op Design – Borderlands is built from the ground up to be an exciting, intuitive co-operative experience for up to four players simultaneously that rewards players who work together and invest in co-op skills. Split screen is also supported.
• FPS Gameplay – In this role-playing shooter, choose one of four distinct characters, each with their own individual skill sets. As your character grows throughout this fast-paced FPS, you choose and customize your abilities to suit your style of play.
• Art Style – The game’s distinctive art style combines traditional rendering techniques with hand-drawn textures to paint a bold and eye-catching spin on the FPS genre.
• Vehicular Combat – Jump behind the wheel and engage in high-speed vehicle-to-vehicle combat, complete with spectacular explosions and road-killed Skags.
• Frontier Planet – Search the wasteland planet of Pandora for the legendary alien vault. Fight your way through bandits, discover nine native (and aggressive) creatures, and help the few settlers on the planet in your search for a Vault rumored to contain a great prize – if it even exists.
• Gun Lust – Choose from literally hundreds of thousands of weapons, each with their own manufacturers, specifications, and advantages. The revolutionary content generation system guarantees that you’ll find almost infinite tools of destruction to suit your play style.
• Online Multiplayer Support – Borderlands supports 2-4 players via Xbox LIVE.

Product Description

Gearbox Software has developed revolutionary new technology to create Borderlands

Review by Real Player

Borderlands (Video Game)

Borderlands has so far proved to be an immensely enjoyable game delivering in many ways where Gearbox promised. I feel it will be equally appealing to fans of shooters and dungeon crawlers alike.

You start the game going through a little story intro and a bit of a bus ride. Shortly after a bit of introduction you’ll be asked to select one of the characters and exit the bus to start your adventures. The game doesn’t come right out and tell you these are your “classes” but for the interests of the RPG elements of the game that’s what they are. Your choices are basically between stealth/special weapons, sniper, support/healing, and tank/melee. There unfortunately isn’t a vast amount of customization in their looks available but you can alter a 3 color scheme for their outfit and customize your name almost immediately after stepping off the bus.

From here you do a short and sweet tutorial which throws you right in to the action relatively quickly. The controls are tight and will be very familiar to fans of popular FPS games such as Halo, Resistance, Gears, Unreal, and many others. You have the ability to jump, duck, melee, shoot, toss grenades, and eventually use a class specific special ability such as placing turrets. Aside from the general control of your character menus are easy to navigate for all of your weapons, the map is easy to read, and the HUD is simple and informative.

Following the tutorial you progress the game from doing various quests. These quests can be found on mission boards, from NPCs, and occasionally from random stuff lying around. The quests themselves so far haven’t been anything particularly noteworthy in the grand scheme of RPGs. It’s still a lot of “kill XYZ” “collect a fistful of whozawhatits” or “go talk to random NPC” but they have streamlined them enough to where the don’t feel forced but rather serve as more of a beacon of where you should realistically be taking your character and scoring some nice exp and loot while you’re at it. Quest objectives can also be tracked and objectives are clearly marked on your compass.

Outside of questing there are a decent number of monsters to kill. I still don’t really have much of an idea as to what dictates when an enemy will respawn but it seems if you wander around enough you will likely run in to something to kill. It’s typically not a mindless slaughter either, I would highly recommend trying fighting tactically much like you would in a shooter. Until you out-gear or out-level your opponent you will find that the game can actually be quite challenging at times and reward clever use of your equipment and abilities. The game did a great job of encouraging this too by making your enemies respond to grenades logically, implementing cover well, and of course rewarding you with devastating critical with our beloved’ HEAD SHOT!

Sizable amounts of experience can also be earned through completing various challenges which are like in game achievements, some of which are actually tied to achievements/trophies. It’s mostly killing various things with various weapons but early on it’s a great source of experience and you can track your progress on them.

Starting at level 5 you will start to acquire skill points every level. These are used to boost various abilities of your character via a talent/skill tree. There aren’t a lot of choices and you can get quite a few of them with the number of points you wind up with but most of them are fundamentally decent options allowing for some individual diversity in how you build your character without having to over-think it. Aside from that each level your character will get a generic health, defense, and attack boost.

The weapons are pretty cool but I will state that some of the “87 Gazillion” claims were perhaps a bit exaggerated. While it is true that many of the weapons can do quite a bit of unique things, the vast majority of the weapons and gear you will find are going to be slight variations of each other much like any other similar dungeon crawler such as Sacred, Titan Quest, or Diablo. Perhaps later in the game the unique generation of weapons becomes more apparent but I could so far fairly compare this to the way the weapons were in Hellgate: London. As for the size of the actual database and possible combination of weapons, I’m sure their claims are accurate but I can only comment from a practical standpoint of what I’ve seen. In addition to weapons you also get shields which can do various things such as regen health or do elemental bursts when depleted and grenade modifications which allow your grenades to do all kinds of things such as teleport, stick to things, and bounce.

Looting is probably one of my few mild gripes with this game. You can’t simply auto-loot everything in your proximity. What the game has you doing is finding in item, hitting the loot button, and then holding it to pick up other relatively close items. It’s not game breaking annoying but the range on it isn’t very great and holding the loot button to pick up a weapon will auto-equip it which is something that can be frustrating at times.

The graphics will most likely be a love/hate thing for most players as they are highly stylized. I personally love them and think they’re quite well done but there are certainly realism junkies out there that won’t care for the cartoon approach at all. I will say that only decent videos of this game should be used to judge the graphics, still screenshots don’t do this game any justice at all. Graphics aside the environments are very interesting, the characters are well done albeit a bit generic, enemies are pretty decent (Tremors anybody?), and the animations are high quality.

Multiplayer can be done with 2 player split screen couch co-op and online with up to four players I believe. I haven’t gone online yet but the split screen was easy enough. Rather than scaling all of the menus down in split screen they opted to leave them full size and movable so that text wouldn’t get smushed together which I thought was a pretty clever move. What this means is both players don’t have to squint to read everything thing, simply centralize it in their field of view. Also as you do quests objectives/turn-ins will be shared meaning you don’t spend your time waiting for everyone to catch up all the time. In multiplayer you can also duel each other which I haven’t tried yet.

Vehicles haven’t really been much more than a way to get around for me yet. They can be customized in color and weapon outfit but my brother and I both agreed that they weren’t a very good way of killing anything aside from running them over which seemed to always been an automatic kill. For a giant vehicle mounted weapon they seem completely inferior to even the worst weapon you could collect at that relative level. The controls are very similar (identical?) to that of a Warthog in Halo. They’ll probably take some getting used to for new players but they’re relatively easy once you’ve figured them out. I personally find them to be a bit floaty and awkward but at the moment I don’t see myself needing clutch control out of the vehicles for combat so they are passable.

The story regards something involving finding a long lost vault of alien technology. While I’m sure it’s interesting I honestly haven’t paid much attention to it aside from parts of the story which I couldn’t avoid. This sort of game doesn’t really bank on the story for me.

That’s basically it. Quest, kill, loot, level, and become the destructive juggernaut that Pandora always needed while searching for the vault.

Pros:

Great implementation of shooter mechanics

Lots of fun loot

Good multiplayer

Straight forward and simple RPG elements

Graphics

Cons:

Graphics

Wonky loot controls

Maybe a little cliché at times

I love this game and would highly recommend it.

Tags for this game: Borderlands,2K Games,PLATFORM_FOR_DISPLAY