Dusting off Pandora - Borderlands Review

The scorching sun shines over the arid landscape. The great cliffs in the background stands defiantly against the elements and on a weathered road sign the text "Welcome to Pandora!"is shown. From behind it an alien dog-like creature hops out and lets out a ferocious shriek. It runs away onto the road and looks back just in time to see the bus running it over. Welcome to Gearbox's Borderlands.

Borderlands is a RPG/FPS in a postapocalyptic sci-fi setting that in many way are reminiscent of Mad Max. But less serious and with more aliens and robots. The type called "Claptrap" will especially leave no one without an opinion about them, as most will either love or hate these spunky little bit characters.

You play as one out of four different treasure hunters in search of riches on the next to abandoned planet Pandora, each of them with their own class set of abilities. There's the hunter, a sniper based class with the ability to send out a bird of prey to attack it's enemies, and the soldier, a class centered around assault rifles and shotguns with a portable turret. Then there's also Brick which is the big beefy guy you want to pick if you want to pound someone to dust with your knuckles or use big explosions, and the more lithe class the siren who can temporarily make themselves invisible and specialises in elemental damage.

Why no test drive?

Some games I can spend waiting for years to come, the expectation of some sweet deliverance of exuberant proportions digital joy being part of the appeal. Other games I merely stumble upon and for some reason decide to buy.

Fortunately I seem to have a lucky track record of buying games I know little of with only one of them being a disappointment. A few of the games I bought on a whim are Super Smash Bros. and Banjo Kazooie for the Nintendo 64, as well as a small game called Fallout, the latter of which I recently re-bought soundtrack alone. More on that later.

Then there's the middle child of these categories. The games I kinda know of but isn't sure if it's something for me. I've read some reviews and seen some footage, but is still not convince. Usually a great demo will be enough to sway me to buy it, but unfortunately that kind of software becoming something of a rarity these days. If I'm lucky I will be able to try them out some other way, maybe trying it on a platform at a friends or something of the like. There are still titles where I feel I'm flinging myself into them, not really sure if I'll like the game or not. Again, I'm usually in luck here as Prototype, a game which I had tons of fun with, and Borderlands are both fairly recent purchases which I've enjoyed. I plan on writing a bit more about Borderlands a bit later.