I picked up Borderlands over the weekend (due to an irresistible Steam deal once again) and I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised for the most part. Other than many shortcomings due to the PC version being a mediocre port that is.

Visually, the game can be described as an eyegasm (that's right, I said it). Although the game was originally advertised as a 'realistic dirty and gritty post-apocalyptic themed diabloesque first person shooter', massive changes were made to the visuals which resulted in the totally different 'comic book dirty and gritty post-apocalyptic themed diabloesque first person shooter'. These changes to the graphics postponed the release of the game by approximately a year and the new style disappointed many. Those who were disappointed... suck. The new style sets the game apart from the generic realistic graphics of most sci-fi games and fits with the humourous and often crude and rude dialogue of the game. For example, one of the playable classes is the "Berserker" class. His signature move is to rush into the fray screaming and laughing as he punches enemies to death and beyond. If the graphics had been realistic looking, he would just come off as a freak; with the comic-booky graphics, he comes off as a hilariously badass freak. Furthermore, when a new character with some importance is introduced, players are greeted by an exciting almost Tarantino-like fly-in close-up of the character's face subtitled by the character's name that makes you say "badass".

Enough about the graphics, let's talk about storyline. You play as one of four individuals seeking treasure and glory on the planet Pandora. Your goal is to find the vault, which is essentially the aforementioned treasure and glory. That's it. The plot is clearly nothing spectacular or even remotely immersive, but hey this game isn't about immersion, it's about blowing up and shooting things.

The gameplay is simple at first glance, but it's obvious that skilled players can develop all sorts of strategies even though all they can really do is use their weapons and their single class specific skill. Players are also able to put points into different "passive skills" (if I may use the Diablo II terminology), these points affect your proficiencies and the effectiveness of your skill. Players also have access to a ridiculous amount of weapons with many different appearances, functionalities and degrees of usefulness. Although any character can wield any weapon, they are more adept with specific weapons corresponding to the passive abilities granted to their skills. For example, the Siren has some passives which grant a % chance to set enemies on fire. It's therefore reasonable to assume that the more hits she gets in, the more likely the enemy will burst into flames and so a SMG is her weapon of choice. Other bonuses offered by the classes are more obvious such as the Hunter's ability which grants him a chance to shoot two bullets instead of a single one from pistols.

In terms of the audio, the soundtrack for the game and sound effects are excellent and I haven't yet felt compelled to having my own music library play in the background while I play the game. The in-game voice-chat is horrible and should be turned off by default due to its lack of usefulness (no push-to talk, low volume, yadda yadda), but this is likely related to the game being a console port.

On to the bad stuff! The game does have its weaknesses. First of all, although installation through Steam is as easy as usual, customizing the settings of the game is difficult unless you're used to going through config files with the assistance of forum posts. I can imagine that many people must have been quite disappointed when the game was released for PC and they had to figure out how to enable vertical sync, remove the unskippable videos, disable voice-chat (it seems that at launch, this wasn't available as an option in-game), etc. Furthermore, although we're in 2009 and UPnP is included in most software, Borderlands doesn't include it. The user is therefore forced to forward 5 ports manually which is a hassle. Furthermore, if you're on Vista or Windows 7, you'll need to set Borderlands' network access to Public and Private in order to host games once the ports are forwarded. Although online play is one of the selling points of this game, it seems that the developers figured that the end-user should pass a test to see if they could figure things out on their own before logging on to play. Maybe this reduced the number of jerks in public games online (I doubt it).

It seems that the average play-through of the two difficulties should take about 60 hours total which will keep anyone busy for a while, not to mention the fact that there ARE four different characters with different play-styles if you still want more after playing through the normal game and the higher difficulty that is unlocked after the normal difficulty is beaten.

If you're willing to deal with the issues described above, Borderlands is definitely a great purchase, especially if you know three other people who want to buy the 4-player bundle. There's nothing funner than playing with some friends if only to listen to their characters exclaim smart-ass comments as you slay Midget Psycho Freaks and Badass Skags (just a few of the colourful names of enemies you'll explode in the game).

-Adje