Leveling Down

While this review may seem to have arrived somewhat late, cmfl3x and I recently agreed on an article writing system here at Leveling Down that differentiates between impressions and reviews. Going forward, please keep in mind that when we write “impressions” articles, it means we’ve played a bit into the game, and are therefore writing what our initial impressions are. Reviews, meanwhile, will only be named as such when we want to write about a game that we’ve completed already so we’ve fully realized what the game has to offer. Often times if we come out with impressions for a game first and do not put out a review later, it implies that our initial impressions carried through the rest of the game and it wasn’t necessary to “set the record straight” by writing a review of the game after completing it. Borderlands doesn’t quite fall into the category of being exactly the super awesome game I professed it to be in my initial impressions, and so I want to follow up on it with this review now that I’ve collected the 1000 Achievement points.

I pre-ordered Borderlands, canceled it, bought it on sale, convinced cmfl3x to buy it, barely played it with him, beat it for myself, and then stopped playing it altogether. That’s basically the order of events that occurred, and I’m trying to think back and see what went right and what went wrong with this game.

First, the positives. The game had a very enjoyable combat system. Borderlands is fast and could be played just like an FPS game without paying too much attention to RPG elements . It perfectly mixes of FPS and RPG, and it makes me wonder if this is what Hellgate: London was trying to achieve. While Hellgate: London failed with its combat engine, Borderlands succeeds. The guns are effective and it uses the Call of Duty control system so any FPS fan should be able to pick this up right away. At the same time, enemies all have life bars, levels, and provide experience points. It’s intuitive and enjoyable to play – which is one of the most important aspects of what makes a good game. Combined with varied enemies, excellent presentation, and speckled with humor, it’s a game that should be experienced.

The design for multiple players playing online together worked very well too. In online co-op console games in the past, often times players would have to join one player’s game and it would be off only one player’s save file so nothing except maybe money would be carried back to the other players’ games. This is not the case in Borderlands – if you complete quests in the host’s game, they will be marked complete for you when you return to your game as well, making the transition between single player and multiplayer pretty seamless (unless the host is completing quests that you don’t have the prerequisites for). So it plays well and the jump between solo and multiplayer play was designed expertly.

Now here are where several of my negatives come in and they revolve around the items, the actual ability to play together, and the re-playability. The items were disappointing to me in several ways. While Borderlands was advertised as having a ridiculous numbers of different guns, realistically, there were basically only a select number of functionally different weapons. You had combat rifles, SMGs, shotguns, magnums, etc. – clear weapon types that were different. And then the only real differentiation for each of those weapon types was whether it had one of four elemental attacks and whether it had a scope or not. There wasn’t much variety at all outside of the alien weapons, but for most of the game you end up just using traditional stuff with certain elemental artifacts (alien weaponry is rare and only shows up near the end of the game). These regular weapons were enough to get the job done and it was fun finding more, but the weapon variety just didn’t live up to the “over 17 million” weapon combinations or whatnot that were advertised for the game.

Weapons didn’t really ever drop from enemies or bosses either – at least not the random stuff. It was disappointing that they were practically only found in the weapons chests, and the lack of being able to trade or determine loot rules also made the item system more annoying than it had to be. Of course, now that I’ve played through the game, I can see why there wasn’t much of a desire by the developers to create a trading window or to set up loot rules – the loot just wasn’t that interesting nor did it have enough variety. On top of that, item duping was quite prevalent, as it was as easy as dropping whatever items you had in a host’s game, resetting your game, and coming back in so the host could have the items you dropped on the ground because you had them in your inventory again. The problem lays in the fact that the game only saves your inventory at checkpoints and when you quit the game the way you’re supposed to. It doesn’t save when you just reset the console or drop to dashboard since it has no time to save.

The “actual ability to play together” was another annoyance of mine with the game. While cmfl3x and I bought this along with a couple other friends, we were all playing at completely different paces so after a while, it just wasn’t possible to play together with our levels so far apart. This game has a heavy action component but the leveling makes a significant difference for people to play together. With the focus being on completing quests, if you’re too high or too low to complete the host’s quests, it’s just not as enjoyable. Even five levels apart is just too much. I tried to alleviate this situation by creating a low level alt character to play with cmfl3x, but that leads to my other big issue: replayability. The game just doesn’t have much of it. Sure, you can beat the game and go through it on a harder difficulty to fight leveled up monsters (if you want to hit the max level of 50), but to play through the game as a different character is not much fun. This is in part due to two problems: the first being that the characters are just not different enough because the game focuses on guns that are usable by all four characters, and the second being some characters are just not as well balanced as the others.

My main character was Brick, a Berserker that ended up specializing in all weapon types but could use Rage to melee enemies and gain life at an extraordinary rate at the same time. I tried an alt as a Soldier, and the Turret just didn’t compare at all to the Berserker’s Rage ability. I felt gimped. And I had a ridiculously tough time soloing as a Hunter. A sniper class with a special that just sends a bird to attack enemies but doesn’t help you snipe just doesn’t add much value for a Hunter. Eventually my Hunter had to start learning close range weapons, which is not what I wanted as a sniper rifle-based class. Both my Soldier and Hunter had trouble staying alive due to the lack of an ability to self-regenerate health as efficiently and as quickly as the Berserker. And even then, they were all basically using the same weapons anyway, so I didn’t feel like playing one class was an entirely different experience than another since my Beserker had basically the best special ability, and also leveled the sniper rifle to be quite proficient in it as well.

One other thing to note is that I actually felt the game was more enjoyable playing solo than multiplayer. The difficulty certainly ramped up considerably in multiplayer matches, as it seemed like the enemies’ damage and health bars multiplied by the number of players in a game. But the thing was, I didn’t really feel connected to other players when playing co-op. In World of Warcraft, you would have quests you could solo by yourself, and then there were instances/dungeons that you would take on with a party. Dragging around 2-3 other guys while running quests that you could solo yourself not only isn’t efficient, it’s not that fun (how enjoyable is going on errands and dragging your friends along in real life?). I’ll admit though that the “instances” in this game were enjoyable as a group, and I only wish there were more of them and more rewards for the players to share. But each of these instances was few and far between compared to the number non-instance quests where you’d drive somewhere, shoot some enemies or collect something, turn around and turn in the quest. Surprisingly, it not only ended up being more efficient to just go through the game myself, but more enjoyable for me as well.

So what am I trying to say with all this? Is the game good? Is it worth buying? Even after that flood of criticism, my answer is still yes. The game is good and worth buying. It does a remarkable job of combining the FPS and RPG genres together, with an intuitive combat system and a lengthy game (if you want to go through the game twice to level to 50, each playthrough lasts about 25 hours). While it lacks more replayability than most class-based online RPG games, it’s a very enjoyable solo game. As a co-op multiplayer game, it can’t quite beat stuff like Left 4 Dead, and therefore, falls short to me in that aspect. I bought this game hoping to play it with friends, and while the infrastructure is in place to do that, it netted out to become less enjoyable playing with others due to certain limitations of the game design. I whole-heartedly recommend it as a solo game, but as a multiplayer game, it depends if you can get your friends to play consistently together and at the same time throughout the game. Maybe it does sit somewhere between Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead, but that in itself makes for quite a decent game if you’re willing to take on certain tradeoffs that come with the mixing of the genres.

Be Sociable, Share!

•