The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Through Kale’s way-too-niceness, I have had a copy of Borderlands on the PC for awhile now. Sunday, instead of doing my homework, for instance, I played Borderlands for like four hours. This has been happening for awhile! The reason is because the game is fantastic.

Now, this isn’t fantastic like, I dunno, Red Faction: Guerrilla is fantastic. It’s not a one-player game in any sense of the word. (Brer will try to tell you otherwise, but I think he’s a little crazy in the head. I’m sure it’s passable as a single player game, but that’s not the appeal.) No, this game is awesome like how, say, L4D2 is awesome. (Which I guess I need to write up, too. But I’d like to beat the last campaign before I do that!) This is just a fantastic multiplayer game. It is action-based, so you’re always doing something, but it’s slow-enough paced to facilitate talking, if you’re into that, and with its RPG mechanics, you are always making some progress, even if you’re failing, so you never feel like you’re wasting effort. It’s just really great.

The center of the game revolves around Diablo-style loot. This mechanic is just as addictive as ever. They’ve done a pretty good job of making every individual gun you pick up look slightly different, even though they fall into 7 or so categories. (Shotgun, Repeater Pistol, Revolver, Sniper Rifle, Combat Rifle, Submachine Gun, Rocket Lawnchair.) Even within these categories, though, you have sort of… subclasses. For example, in Combat Rifles, you can find burst fire weapons, assault rifles, and even some actual machine guns. In Repeater Pistols, you can find Automatic Pistols as well as normal ones. In any case, even though you’re probably never going to keep a weapon based on looks, it’s nice that when you get a new gun, it does look different from the one you currently have.
At the same time, many weapons have special, unlisted abilities. These are shown through cryptic messages. These actually work really well, as you just HAVE to equip them to figure out what’s up. I had a sniper rifle with the message on it “FOR THE MOTHERLAND!” It turned out that ability made pulling out the weapon and reloading it lighting fast. I could reload faster than I could fire the gun. It’s neat.

There is also plenty of customization of the characters and character classes. There are only 4 classes, and each one has three skill trees, which, over the course of the game, you will probably master one and dip into a second one. This gives you a decent amount of build customization, but the genius thing they did was to have items called “Class Mods” that you can find in the world. These actually change your class title and give you very specific attributes. They really change how you play. For example, Kale and I are both playing Soldier class characters, but our characters play completely differently. I focused on the healing and support tree of skills, and he focused on the damage tree. He is using the “Support Gunner” class mod, which lets us all regenerate ammo, while I’m using the “Leader” class mod, which gives us all extra experience and lets our abilities recharge a little faster. As such, even though we are technically the same, we play differently enough to be distinct, which is awesome. There are plenty of other class mods for Soldier we’ve found that we could be using as well, such as “Shock Trooper,” which makes us a Shock-element attacker, or “Tactician,” which helps the team’s shields recharge much faster, but we’re pretty happy with what we picked. Still, even an entire party full of Soldiers could have a lot of variety, and that’s pretty awesome. Of course, each other class has their own set of different class mods to choose from, so each other class is just as customizable. And since class mods are simply an equippable item, if you need to “respec” to be a better member of a different team, you just have to change your equipment. It’s well thought out.

Basically the only thing I don’t like about the game is the vehicle stuff. That kind of sucks. Luckily, the game forces you to only use the vehicles to get to the next “dungeon” or arena of combat, and will block off places with barriers so you have to get out. It’s not that big a deal. It is kind of annoying, though. Still, one minor complaint in a great game.

Yeah, Borderlands is pretty much completely awesome. It’s certainly one of the best Co-op experiences of the year. If you like Co-op, there’s no reason for you not to own it at this point. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest the PC version? It’s pretty clearly a 360 port, though it plays just fine on PC. (The water effects, for some reason, are totally glitched. Most of the time I can’t see water when I play. This is a minor annoyance and doesn’t really affect fun at all.) It’s just, you know… split screen is awesome, and the 360 version has it. If you have gamer friends, you should play the game. You really should.