Borderlands is first person shooter which has a levelling up mechanism of an RPG, just imagine fighting enemies in a non-turn-based environment but still has the behaviour in terms of levelling up of a Final Fantasy title, yet you’re in first person perspective. It’s hard to explain but you really have to play the game to see what I’m trying to say. Set on the post-apocalyptic world of Pandora, you play one of four character class bounty hunter-esque characters searching for “The Vault”.

The first thing you notice about the game is the art style. For any of you who read my review of Eternal Sonata, this game takes cel-shading to the new level. Don’t get me wrong Eternal Sonata was beautiful and artistic but this game has the same effect yet it packs one hell of punch as the beginning scene just demonstrates that realistic graphics don’t necessarily have to be an arbitrary factor to make a game marketable. The landscapes are breath-taking and intricate and provides a fantastic backdrop to a very immersive game.

The character classes are delightfully varied and gives a lot of lastability to the game as it’s easily as satisfying playing through the entire game with all four. The Hunter was my first choice as he had a Tuskan Raider look about him as well as having a rather aggressive pet bird which was handy for rather sticky firefights. The Siren is the mystic of the group who’s special ability was to “phase walk”, which essentially is going invisible so you can flank your enemy and twat them with a shockwave of energy. The Soldier seems to be the most popular one online and is essentially as you’d expect, a mobile gun cabinet with gun placements aplenty. And finally there is the Berserker, basicalyl the tank of the group with a penchant for punching enemies in the face a la Condemned style. Each of these characters has their own individual strengths and weaknesses and having a mixture in a 4 player co-op campaign is most beneficial.

And then there’s the guns. Holy fuck there’s a lot of guns! The box art states there’s a “bazillion” combinations and they’re not wrong! There are literally thousands of permutations for guns which you pick up throughout the tenure of the game (and you can carry shitloads too!) and each has varying strengths, elemental uses, rates of fire and magazine sizes. The elemental aspect of the game gives the guns so much delightful choice of choosing your instruments of death. Personally I was a big fan of the acidic shotguns myself. There’s something satisfyingly sick about blastic a buckshot of Hydrochloric death in someone’s face.

The vehicles in the game is more where it lets itself slip slightly. They handle so badly and you end up flipping your vehicle more time than an offal burger in a county fayre. It doesn’t help that the controls are solely with the analog stick like in games like Halo and The Outfit find your cart oscillating up and down the sides of the ravines like a tampax in an overflow pipe.

The enemies in the game aren’t very varied as the paradigm for 90% of the game are hockey mask wearing nutjobs with heavy artillery…some of them midgets on steroids. The rest are ominous flora and fauna, later on in the game with elemental sways designed for you to carry a carefully selected versatile cornucopia of weaponary so that you don’t accidently heal them! The enemies however do suffer from the instantaneous detection ability but at least this game is largely manageable when they do spot you from about 87 hectares as this game (thankfully) doesn’t have the insufferable infinite enemy spamming that Just Cause 2 has.

This is game is tailored for the RPG player more than the FPS pro. It is highly beneficial to scavenge a lot and while it may seem time consuming scouring through gypsy toilets and sifting through mound of pterodactyl shite looking for rounds of ammo, there are treasures galore to be discovered throughout the vast junkyards of Pandora.

I personally really enjoyed playing through Borderlands was while the missions could get rather samey, the general play of the game was entertaining and really good in co-operative gameplay.