Borderlands rant: good but not game of the year

Okay so I’ve been hearing a lot about how great this game is, and that it could end up with game of the year. Not even close. It’s good and all that but it ain’t great. There are a few things that keep it from being anywhere near game of the year. It’s fun and I did enjoy myself but game of the year?? Come on. Not even close. Killzone 2 and Uncharted 2 beat it up on side and down the other.

The game does do a fairly good job of mixing the FPS and RPG aspects together. It is a very cool concept, but it’s not quite perfect. Until you level up a bit killing anything is a total pain. And even once you start leveling up, it can still be a bit of a pain to kill anything. Mostly your just emptying your guns clip over and over again. And that’s on one enemy.

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The 87 bazillion guns. Well there’s a lot, kinda. It’s really just a bunch of variations of the same 7 weapons. Revolver’s that shoot rockets and SMG’s that set enemies on fire, that sorta thing. And sometimes you can find yourself very frustrated with some of them. For example I had a rocket launcher, that did electric shock damage at 853 damage points, and I have to shoot a guy in amour 15 times with it for him to die? That’s some damn good amour. It just feels a little unbalanced. Like your just looking for the weapon that takes the least amount of bullets to get the job done. Problem is that as you get better guns and level up, the enemies just get harder along with you. It starts to feel easier to get a kill, but at the end of the day it can still be an overwhelming amount of work to kill something. And I don’t know about you, but when I shoot something point blank in the face with a rocket launcher and it almost kills me and they are still standing it tends to bug me. I don’t care how good their shields are it’s a rocket launcher to the face. Your dead. And I’m not talking about enemies that are the size of tall buildings I’m talking about dudes the same size as you with body armor. But still a ROCKET LAUNCHER TO THE FACE!!! and they ain’t dead or even about to die? And I am?? Balance.

And one of my biggest complaints is about one of the smallest things. A first person shooter pretty much always has one basic item, a flashlight. It’s there in pretty much every FPS, except this one. There is no flashlight, and in some places not ambient light. And your gonna be trekking thru some dark spaces. And your gonna need/want a flashlight. But it ain’t there. And it’s annoying.

The in game day and night cycle got annoying really quickly as well. With no flashlight sometimes the night cycle felt like it lasted forever and the day felt entirely too short. This is also a problem during the day as you will be entering some very heavily shaded areas during the day. Very large objects casting some very imposing shadows thru some dark passageways. A simple flashlight to find my way could have saved me from noticing a few things like how much I hated how quickly it went from night to day. Or how much I hated the system they devolved for picking things up off the ground.

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I would have preferred if I could have just walked over the top of items to pick them up but I adapted to the system of having to get right on top of them and aim almost directly at them, and then push a button to pick them up. But In the burning daylight it got hard to see my loot scattered on the ground. Nighttime was better for this because at least you could see the glowing light that came off the items. Also the system will allow you to pick up every thing off the ground at once, but if your not very careful you could end up equipping all the weapons in that spot as well. Which sucks if everything on the ground is nowhere near as good as what you have in your hand, and there are enemies chasing after you and you really just wanted the ammo in that spot.

Also the waypoint marker during the scavenger hunts is just a general area kinda idea of where to look for the items needed to complete the quest. Yeah okay that would be okay but sometimes the waypoint and the actual location are so far apart from each other that it’s madding. I’m the type of guy who doesn’t mind looking for a hidden item, but if it takes more then 10 or 15 minutes to find it I’m bored. I had a couple of items that took me so long to find that all the enemies that I had to kill to gain access to that spot re-spawned, and I have to go thru killing them all over again so that I could get back to looking for the damn piece. Very frustrating at times. Especially on the higher levels when some enemies are really tough.

Also I would have liked for more vehicles. There’s just the one car and it’s really not that cool. Also I hated the driving controls. You use the left stick for the gas and reverse and the right stick for steering. It took me forever to get used to. They could have mapped the gas and reverse to the buttons no problem and it would have saved a lot of the driving experience for me. And you are gonna spend a whole very lot of time driving that one car around. I mean a lot of time. The areas are huge. And walking them on foot gives you ample opportunity to level up thru combat as there are more enemies then you can count. It gets old quick. Especially when enemies re-spawn at a phenomenal rate. If you kill everybody in an area on your way to a mission point, they have all re-spawned on your way back. It gets a tad tedious. Unless you have the car and you can travel from point A to point B a lot faster. Speaking of Traveling. The game does have a fast travel feature. A great RPG element. However it takes way too long to unlock it and get to using it. And even then you have to find specific locations to do it from, you can’t just do it from the pause menu. Which gets old quick when there is no car available and the nearest location for fast travel is a very long walk.

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The characters and how you interact with them is also kinda lame. They don’t really talk too much. You walk up to them, and they deliver one of a few canned lines and you push a button to interact with them. Fine but my least favorite aspect of RPG’s. It makes the person I’m looking at on screen very one dimensional. Also the lines that each character has, get very repetitive very quickly. Things you thought were clever or funny or even witty the first couple of times you heard them, can grind on your nerves the 8000th time you hear it. The claptrap robot calling out “Check me out, I’m dancing! I’m dancing!” all the time can get obnoxious quickly. I tried to shoot him several times but it’s just a waist of bullets.

And the final boss battle is kinda lame. The fight up to it was brutal and fun but the final fight itself was a bit weak. Just hide behind a rock and shoot it’s tentacles over and over and over and over and over…….

And last but not least the gag at the end of the credits?? WTF?? It leads you to believe you have one last enemy to deal with and you really really want to kill this thing by this time and it’s not there. At all.

So why did I play a game that had all these problems until the very end? Well despite all these things it is a fun game. I would have rated it a four star game, but honestly all the hype over it keeps me from doing so. If this thing is in game of the year territory then we have all let our standards drop. Not saying it isn’t fun or totally worth playing thru it is. It’s different and does a lot of things right. I wrote this review because I don’t really hear too many people talking about what it got wrong. The things I hope they fix for the sequel.

Now that being said I must also admit that I have never and probably never will played online with other people. I am a single player gamer. I only play multiplayer with people who are actually in my living room. Just not my thing. But then again I also don’t own a cell phone either. So if your an online player you may find something here that you really like. But I wouldn’t know.