PotatoLegs's Profile

I've spat my tacks about this game enough, but I thought it'd be more relevant to write about a game that at least evokes some sort of emotional response from me even though its a negative one (big surprise).

And hey, it was one of the bigger titles to be released last year so why not do my civic duty in attempting to topple the gargantuan marketing monoliths on our shop shelves.

I mean, what can I say? Borderlands at first glance looked like my cup of tea; post-apocalyptic setting, running around acquiring sweet gears whilst shooting apart a range of vicious enough enemies and working with a character that you develop as the game progresses. the initial screen shots looked appetizing enough as well, and while I'm not the biggest fan of cell-shading, it hardly irks me either.

The day of release came and went, and one evening I saw my flatmate play this on his xbox. I sat through the intro sequence and something chimed. Ten minutes into it the chimes turned to ringing and became more consistent. Half an hour later it wasn't so much a ringing, but an all-out flat line. I was bored.

Now, I know watching someone playing a game should never be indicative of the quality of the game. So I acquired a copy for the PC. After-all WoW isn't fun to watch, but I had played that for a year relatively enjoying myself and acquiring 'phat loots' (hacked servers ftw).

What I got was a story-less, characterless, shooter that wasn't even a good shooter, with horrible dialogue, an average visual aesthetic, and emotionally-bereft goals. The whole was just so horribly insipid. The premise of the newly settled out-world planet, dotted with beleaguered settlers and raging bandits is a solid one, but with nothing new to add to the genre, the story was just a washed out cliche. The choice of four characters was unnecessary dressing, their abilities only marginally changing the game play tactics, and otherwise just offering some voice actors a little work.

Visually, the whole thing worked well enough. Animations were smooth enough, no funky rag-doll physics, just dude's getting pummeled and falling down convincingly enough. But the modeling and aesthetic choices, again, only came off as cliched, plagiarising instead of being influenced by the source material.

The missions were pointless endeavours, but with the lack of an actual narrative driving the whole thing, that is no surprise. It did mean all you were left with was to shoot a bunch of stuff. The point of the game, I know, but hard to make interesting without a realised context built around WHY you're shooting the guy.

But nah.

And hey even one of the devs largest selling points, the hundreds of THOUSANDS of guns available, was a load of boo-kaka. You get THOUSANDS of subtle variations on the same handful of weapons. When the devs were selling this schlock, it came off as weak hype, and they don't seem to realise the appeal of different weaponary in an FPS is that it dramatically changes the gameplay. Players have to employ different tactics built around RoF, reload times, range effectiveness, etc. If you're going to sell hundreds of THOUSANDS of different guns they damn well better be different. Instead your variations on the same set of guns are differentiated only by the colour coding of their name, ala WoW. With that mechanic alongside the levelling system, you never feel like you've actually progressed at all. All the missions and enemies you face are tiered to your current level so tightly, that fighting a bruiser at lvl 5 feels almost exactly the same at lvl 22.

And the enemies... egads, the sheer monotony of facing the same flipping bandit , scag and flying thingy for the thousandth time... Again, only seperated by variation in colour (woo) and maybe a slight height increase if you're lucky.

At the end of the day I realise the hypocrisy of being so stained about this game; I only played it single player, ignoring the other big selling point which was its multi-player. I even finished the damned thing, so it can't possibly be that bad can it?

Well it at least plays well enough and the incentives for progression, though weak, are still enough of a carrot dangling in front of your face. There's enough there for you to want to peek over that next ridge or check out that cluster of huts over there.

But at the end of the day the experience left me empty - I could have attempted it on multiplayer, but the idea of having to go through the badlands agains to kill the same gormless enemy sprites left me so dispirited I couldn't bare the thought.

Not even in hopes of getting the purple gun