Gearbox took the trend of mashing together multiple genres and has put its cherry on top. The new shooter/RPG/MMO takes what others have done, refines it, throws in a slew of concepts and comes out smelling like a rose.
Set on the world of Pandora, four warriors (each a different character class you can choose from) set off to find a hidden vault that holds technologies while obeying the omniscient advice of a disembodied female head. Slim story, we know. Many times in Borderlands you'll stop, look through your quest log and attempt to piece together what's going on in the game, but for the most part, you just don't care.
Borderlands takes the World of Warcraft concept of questing and brings it into the shooter genre. You'll meet someone, accept a quest from them, complete it and come back for your experience points. Wash, rinse, repeat. There's a greater "grind" to Borderlands than Fallout 3 and other shooters/RPG mashups. You'll find yourself running off to kill a specific number of enemies, collect a specific number of items more than a few times, but the game mixes it up by giving you vast new environments and things to check out.
If it gets a touch routine or boring, there's always the option for multiplayer: up to four people can fight and quest together, which elevates Borderlands from a typical shooter. When three of your friends are using their special powers and shooting like crazy to take out enemies it just feels right, epic and better than anything I've played this year.
Experimenting is the key concept when it comes to the game's guns. Borderlands's arsenal is all randomly generated, so every shotgun, sniper rifle or pistol you come across has its own unique benefits and detriments. Choosing which guns you want to use or carry becomes a Sophie's Choice. There's only enough space in your backpack and either the rocket launcher with 25% electrical damage or the rocket launcher with a 3.5x zoom scope is coming with you, but not both.
Borderlands isn't without some nagging flaws, including cumbersome menus, suspect A.I aiming and confusing navigation systems. It's not perfect. And it's going to have some aspects that really annoy players, but everything else feels so good and right that they're easily forgiven. I'm hopeful that Gearbox will patch in a few fixes to party loot management and item exchanging between players to correct some issues and imagine they will refine Borderlands further based on player feedback over the next few months.
All the developer interviews, all of the hype and conversation around Borderlands has been right. It's a shooter meets Diablo meets World of Warcraft, and while on face value it sounds like a horrible concoction of "buzz" gameplay systems and ideas, it works. Borderlands is a game that players are going to latch onto, it's got sleeper hit written all over it. This is the Crackdown of 2009 and we're all better off for it.
