Borderlands

Hasn't aged the best but you can appreciate the pioneering of a genre

Game is fun if you've got someone to play it with, on your own it's a little bit grindy.

Gunplay feels good and the game structure is great to just chill with friends. Enemy variety is pretty limited and the story being told only via mission breefings and audio logs doesn't really work

Borderlands was genre defining for the looter shooter when it was first released and it’s held up surprisingly well given it’s age. The art style is timeless and the gunplay is still okay.Definitely worth your time if you’ve never played a borderlands and fancy giving the series a shot or if you’ve played later games and wish to learn more about the series roots.

Best Looter Shooter I have played. Borderlands is a fantastic game. It combines high paced action with good mechanics, a fun story, upbeat dub step music, humour, filthy jokes and does not take itself seriously. The story is a little cliché in my opinion but works well for the concept of a looter shooter like Borderlands. Just hunt for a lost treasure which is exceedingly difficult to find. Borderlands is a massive game with many, huge, open world maps. There are tons and tons of side quests you can complete for a nice new weapon, some cold hard cash, or a new skin (colour for your outfit actually). Each side quest is more ridiculous than the previous one and the use of every inch of the map makes this game worth every penny you spend on it. The cell shading animations are nicely done, and this is the first game that I saw that used this unique technique. It gives a cartoon feeling, while still playing a fully rendered 3D game. The progression feels rewarding and the game is well balanced. Enemies get stronger with you but are still beatable. If you stray to far from the main story line and enter certain areas beyond your level, enemies will wipe the floor with you, so you know what to avoid and come back to later. The main concept of this game are the guns, finding legendary shields, weapons and relics for your character and develop yourself into a well-rounded killer. It is really fun to play with friends and makes for a good evening of fun. The different elemental weapons you can find is a good concept and makes you think, and plan which gun is best for what situation. I enjoyed every minute of the game, it is story and the collecting of loot, cash and special items. And then I played the DLC’s. My god, they were even better. The DLC’s are all over the place and add a fresh new mini campaign in each one of them with a completely different idea and style.

I wanted to love this game more than I did, but it’s just so bland and boring in some areas. The cell-shading is beautiful, but the whole game takes place in a Mad Max style desert, which gets very old very quickly. The combat and gameplay is fun at its core, but the slog that is leveling up and the unfair difficulty of the enemies near the beginning make it so brutal to get through. To make matters worse, the character teased as the main villain is replaced last minute with a boring monster as the final boss. The Borderlands games get better from here, but this is still so hard to tolerate.