It may be difficult to merge two genres together but Borderlands does it better than others, however some repetitive missions and a nonexistent story stands in the way of it reaching its full potential.

Borderlands is a mix of FPS and RPG that works out to be fun but it's not without its drags. With a poor story, dumb AI, boring side missions and annoying voice acting are just naming the big ones.


It's got a unique graphical art style which is quite refreshing. The story in the game is super weak, most of the time you'll barely know if you’re doing a story or side mission. The bigger picture from the very start is to find a mysterious vault that holds endless riches which will grant any man power and women. On the odd occasion like at the start you'll get a woman that's blurred out at the top of your screen, she’s the guardian angel who is there to help anyone trying to reach the vault.


Everyone has probably heard about the guns in Borderland, if you haven't then basically Borderlands has a kind of gun generator that can generate a billion guns. Every time you open a chest or kill and enemy and a gun drops out the game will generate a random gun so you could get anything. This can be really fun and exciting when you find a really good guns that has some elemental damage or some other variable, but can go the other way and be a little bit frustrating when you don't get anything good for ages. Like I mentions before guns can have small variables



There are four classes in the game, the Soldier, the Siren, the Hunter and the Berserker. All of them have their own play styles and their own action skills. The Soldier has a turret, the Siren has a phase walk (weird ghost walking that damages enemies when going in and out of it), the Hunter has a Bloodhawk that swoops down and attacks enemies and the Berserker which goes into a berserk state and punches stuff.


Something I love about this is the RPG element, there so many way you could go to improve your character or action skill. For example the Soldier can get rocket guided missiles on your turret and there are other things like a ring around your turret that heals or feeds you ammo. This element makes the game so much more interesting than any normal shooter and along with the inventive guns it makes a good combination.



It seem that the bulk of the missions in Borderlands seem to be really simple, things like go kill X amount of this enemy or go around collecting these in this area. This really starts to get boring after a while as you can imagine, especially when you’re levelling up slower which is also not helped when the story is off day dreaming. Most of these missions are side missions so you are not required to play them if you choose. One thing I will give the missions is that they can be addictive at times making you play just one more.


The game has a good life span; its got two playthroughs available as once you've completed the game as you can go through it again with the same character. So there's no problem with the amount of content it's just not all good content. The game has four player co-op which is a nice feature in a game like this that is weak on story as that's what normally suffers when coop is added.



Reviewed By Nick