Borderlands

From gearbox software who back in the day did all those half life add ons blue shift etc. comes this so called Role Play Shooter. It features a class system with various class specific ability upgrade paths (3 separate paths you can put points into for each class) and a parametric weapon system making each gun fairly unique.

The graphics are sort of pseudo cell shaded with exaggerated lines mostly on the textures and fairly bright colours which makes the visual stand out and the world is populated by a variety of colourful characters (who want to kill you) and elaborately designed alien monsters (who want to eat you). All of which you blow away with an arsenal of weaponry and even use your car to run over. This is yet another unreal engine 3 game though it seems to have missed some of the newer tweaks that stop it doing that tell tale texture fade in thing that is a dead give away in UE3 games. Still it looks pretty good if a little stylised.

The story goes that you are on the planet pandora an alien world full of danger both from human scum and aggressive indigenous life forms. You are a treasure hunter and you are searching the wasteland for the mythical vault an alien strong hold said to contain riches, alien technology, and pretty much anything you might feasible want.

You pick from 4 classes each with their own special abilities focus and skill tree. There is Mordecai the Hunter whose special ability is that he has a bird that can go peck things. Rolland the Soldier who can summon turrets. Lilith the Siren who can enter phase walk allowing her to move invisibly about for a bit and then strike from behind or just escape. The there is Brick who is basically a melee tank character.

Supposedly the characters each have their own back story but I didn't notice that and I only know because it is mentioned on Wiki.

As you level your character you get points that can be added to 3 separate skill trees usually revolving around enhancing your special ability defensive buffs or just doing more damage with guns. So in my Siren character I have a load of points in shield capacity boosts and then some in making me regenerate health when I phase walk which comes in handy.

As a shooter the game is fairly standard you have a variety of weapons (pistols, revolvers ,shotguns ,smg, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, machine gun, grenades, and the alien weapons which I've not come across yet) you have two slots for carrying weapons (which as the game progresses gets added to up to a maximum of four active slots) and you can switch between weapons in game with the industry standard mouse wheel. You can also quickly swap stuff in and out from the backpack time is paused when you are in it. You have a shield which protects you from damage and it's a standard halo job where it regenerates when out of fire, it's another thing you can swap out for better fancier shields which have better capacity recharge faster or add elemental damage or resistance. My favourite is the health regenerating shield.

Left click to fire right click to zoom or just look down the sights, so far so standard. The game uses a location specific damage system with things like head shots or shots to vulnerable places (some of the aliens have armoured heads and the like but vulnerable torsos or some such) gives bonus damage and can cause a critical for extra damage. Weapons also have the option to have elemental damage which is effective against different things. Fire does a nice DOT effect as does corrosive but that also reduces armour. Shock reduces shield and explosive has a chance to detonate for massive damage.

Each weapon has various stats (damage, accuracy, rate of fire, magazine size) and the weapons drop fairly frequently or can be bought from vending machines. The parametric random weapon stats system means that what you find will be randomised to a certain degree with the usual text describing the weapon stipulating how rare it is White normal, green rare, blue extra rare, purple unique/special stuff you get off bosses etc. The game has a fairly effective comparison system that you can get to by right clicking a weapon allowing you to quickly see what is junk. It also pops up a comparison window in the world when you find a weapon comparing it to your currently active one which is a nice timesaver allowing you to evaluate if it's worth picking up.

As you use weapons you gain experience in that class of firearms so there is an incentive to stick with one weapon to gain the most upgrades in that class. I found I tended to have a few favourites and swap between them as ammo and targets dictated. You can carry a set amount of ammo but you can purchase upgrades to that as the game progresses.

Monsters and humans typically drop stuff on death sometimes ammo sometimes money more rarely weapons. You encounter new weapons often enough that I found the inventory often a bit small and was having to just leave stuff behind rather than take it.

The one final upgrade is the grenade mods which change the behaviour of your grenades making them do various elemental damage or act as land mines or bounce or stick to things or even transfuse health to you. It's yet another little thing to upgrade and swap out as the game progresses.

At some point you unlock the vehicle stations allowing you to spawn a sort of buggy thing which has a rocket booster and is armed with a machine gun and your choice of rocket launcher or secondary machine gun, it comes in a array of selectable colours. And has at least 2 seats for multiplayer. You can then use the car to run things down or shoot them but you get less xp for that so I tend to use it for getting about.

The game is based around quests that you pick up from either people or from bulletin boards scattered through the game world. Usually you will have a hub which is giving out missions in the surrounding area (occasionally you need to travel outside this area for a set of missions this becomes more likely as the game progresses and the areas become bigger) once you have finished all the missions in an area and usually defeated a boss character of some sort it unlocks the next hub area which has more missions. Missions are typically kill this or that or collect some item in the world (usually killing all the things guarding it) not a lot of variety but it stays interesting for the most part.

The difficulty level for each area rises as you progress and the mission difficult is listed. Usually you can take monsters your level and maybe one or two higher depending on what upgrades you posses and how lucky you've been at finding kick arse weaponry. Any enemy much beyond that will usually shred you into little pieces, you often won't even make a dent in their health. So it becomes a cycle of clearing out the lower level missions to level up then taking on the tougher stuff and then going back for more till it's time to meet the boss.

The game is fairly forgiving on death when you run out of health you have a chance to regain it if you kill something before the timer runs out. This is primarily for the multi player options to allow team mates the chance to come revive you but it can be effective in single player. If you do die you just re spawn at the last save post (they are scattered over the land like cell phone towers) and loose some money. It means if you are just on the edge or misjudge a fight it's not too crippling a mistake.

As to how it plays it's very much a FPS crossed with an action RPG like diablo. Having been playing torchlight recently there are a lot of similarities. Kill everything in sight collect all their crap compare any weapons with what you've got swap out for any better one flog the crap at the town and continue. The character progression system with it's simple small upgrades to the characters abilities is very action rpg like. It's a tried and tested formula it's just the package has changed from click fest hack and slash to fps head shot mania and it works pretty well.

At times I found myself at times wishing for the pet system in torchlight as the limited inventory space and relatively high percentage of weapon drops had me running out of room. You also occasionally find really good stuff you can't yet use due to it's level requirement then all you can do it hang on to it in you back pack, you could have done with a stash in town you could use to dump good stuff you still want but don't want to be carrying around taking up precious inventory space.

The story is fairly weak there is the thing about the vault but for the most part you are just doing random missions and then now and then there is the odd sniff of something to do with the vault then back to killing 10 of x for some guy who is offering a fancy sniper rifle as a result.

The one are that it really falls down in is controls, it was obviously designed for consoles and then hacked to work on a pc this means the GUI has a bizarre mix of controls that are fairly counter intuitive. Parts of it require the mouse others need the keyboard and you end up having to fiddle around to get it to work. They really should have fixed that before release as it is very shoddy work making any interaction with the GUI (like getting missions or buying stuff or even rearranging you inventory) awkward and frustrating. It also has a pretty poor default keymap with things like grenade too far off to hit with WASD positioning. It also has skills like crouch as toggles rather than momentary which means in the heat of a fight you can often find yourself crawling about the place, not so good if you are trying to run for cover.

There are various tweaks out there to fix some of these issues though I've not got them to work with the steam version of the game yet.

The game is designed to function in co-op with up to 4 players (with any character class so you could have 4 bricks if you wanted) I've not tired this out so am not sure how that works.

All in all it's a fairly compelling game the mix of action rpg collect-em up weaponry with fps mechanics and fun vehicles and I suspect a lot of fun to be had in multi player. Well worth a look see.