I was excited to try out Borderlands after reading a lot of the reviews on many gaming sites. Needless to say after about ten hours of playing this bore-fest it was on its way back to GameFly.
Perhaps my expectations for it were too high, expecting things like plot and decent graphics…. you know things games aren’t expected to deliver (apparently).
My qualms with Borderlands are simple…
1. There is no plot, or at least none to the point I played. You’re a character, on a planet, in a town… all of which you know nothing about or the history of it. Because of this, the endless list of “quests” turns into a laundry, or “todo” list. It almost feels like work after a while.
2. The graphics, although stylized, were designed almost to compensate for the game engine’s terribly slow loading time. It’s a feature of the Unreal engine to load low-res textures as a place holder while the full res textures are loaded and rendered. Because of this if you venture through the world too quickly, your screen is awash in murky, flat textures. Some people see it as part of the style; I see it as a lame compensation for a poor game engine.
3. The AI is stupid. Do yourself a favor and play as a sniper. If you’re far enough away, even standing in the wide open, you can pick people off without them even moving! As a low level character it took me 60 shots, but I was able to kill a higher level character because he just stood in place while I was lighting him up.
I can see how this game strokes people’s egos in the sense that you continuously build up your character and find newer weapons (which I’ll admit, there are plenty of). The game lacks substance though, which to me is paramount when committing a large slice of my time to playing a game.
So I’ll follow the trend many user reviews are following and create an equation to describe borderlands:
(((Fallout 3 – Plot) – Graphics) – Production Value) + Weapons = Borderlands
Borderlands SUCKS!
#1 by Raymond Stevens on August 13, 2010 - 3:50 AM
I couldn’t agree more. After about 10 hours I said, “This is a chore and a bore, buh, bye.” (DELETE)
Life is too short.
#2 by Kenneth on September 8, 2010 - 4:19 PM
I agree, so far I don’t like it. I’m, sad I bought this boring game D:
#3 by Riku A. on September 8, 2010 - 6:05 PM
I couldn’t agree more.
I read all the countless reviews of the game, and decided to try it.
I create a game, and a level 61 joins my game.
He drops this modded assault rifle that does over 20,000 x 5 damage, and it has no required level.
So I use it, and it does 99,999 damage to everything I shoot.
I go around, one-shotting everything (bosses die in one hit too).
I beat the game in a few hours.
People 15 levels higher than me keep melee’ing me (all the little children keep challenging me to duel)
and i still whoop their asses in one shot.
Next thing I know my shields are as high as 214203947 or some crazy ass number like that after picking up a shield another player dropped.
OVERALL:
The game deserves an 5/10 because of items like that.
There was no challenge to the game.
Besides the fact that quests help you “beat” the game..they don’t reward you at all. Experience-wise, you can just join a game with level 61′s and have them kill high level creatures for you (making you jump 10 to 20 levels higher in mere minutes.)
Items are extremely unbalanced, and the ability to mod items to extreme perfection (one-shotting bosses and level 61 creatures when you’re LEVEL 1) ruins the game.
And in every single game, you will have to deal with the high-pitched voices of little children saying pointless things through voice chat, and their constant melee-spamming in your face (that’s right…people are bored as fuck in the game and so all they do is melee other players countlessly because that’s how you PVP). <-so much for a rated M game. The game should be rated F for Fail.
NO STORY.
NO GAMEPLAY.
NO REPLAY VALUE.
NO ROLE-PLAY (because everything fucking dies in one hit, there is no need to even put any points in the talent tree)
So much for BORING-AS-FUCK-LANDS.
#4 by Adam on September 30, 2010 - 9:14 PM
I totally agree. The problem I had was that I had just finished playing Fallout 3 and was looking for something similar. Thanks to some reviews that said the two were similar I chose to buy the game. No plot… well at least a very lame one. Once you get to the Vault you are met by a monster. After you kill this monster the news is that the vault cannot be opened for another 200 years. WHAT?! Hows that for a sense of accomplishment?
Boss: “OK guys we need to design what the end is going to be like and we need to develop what treasures are in the vault. Keep in mind the player just dealt with a army of stupid enemies and different locations that looked very much the same, so much that it was hard to tell were they were at times, for this endeavor we need the treasure to be kick ass. I know it will probably eat into our holiday coming up, but that is the price we pay to make a kick ass game.” Johnson: “I have an idea” Boss: ” what is it Johnson?” Johnson: “Because it will cost so much more time and money to design and program a desirable ending lets just put a big blob of a monster there and once the player beats it thinking now they will gaze upon the vault we can say oops please come back in 200 years. Then knowing the player will be pissed off and want to kill everything in sight we can make it to where NPCs cannot be killed. We can also put NPCs standing around in the game that look like they will give new missions, but they will not. This will surely piss them off even more.” Boss: “I love it Johnson! now lets get the PR department onto hyping this game up and we are done.”
Also, the need to travel through different maps to get to one location was a pain in the ass. How about some text by each transition point that tells you where it leads. How about the vehicles? there were two different ones, but how were you to tell the difference? The main selling point of this game was that it was both a shooter and a RPG. The problem was that the character progression was so lame that it made me not even care about it. The funny part is that you decide what color clothes your character has, but you do not see it except for the brief instant where it is climbing in or out of a vehicle. This is a great example of a game that does not live up to its own hype.
#5 by Bad_Bud on November 5, 2010 - 6:09 AM
But Fallout 3 was not very good. Its engine was laggy and buggy, crashed, and as far as production value is concerned, most content was just copied from one area to the next.
Not that it really matters, but for the same reasons you disliked Borderlands, I disliked Fallout 3.
#6 by psycsteevns on December 22, 2010 - 8:37 PM
I totally agree. I went through the same exact thing, 10 hours and no satisfaction. I even beat a character named Bonehead. This is when the game is supposed to pick up. I killed him and the next day I turn on the XBOX and somehow the game did not save from the last point.
Even if the quirks did not exist there is no respect for solid action in this game. They tried to mix and match genres: WRONG MOVE. The whole point of a shooter is action and coordination. In this game you can blast the holy hell out of someone get shot just a few times and it doesn’t matter cause you aren’t leveled up or some shit. RPG’s and shooters should not breed together in this way. Shooters are meant for fast nonstop action. Originality isn’t worth shit if the game has no continuance, and this game just sucks. The open atmosphere caught my eye but the hell with this one.
#7 by Bordeies on January 3, 2011 - 9:10 PM
This game is good. In short bursts.
#8 by Penne Noodle on March 18, 2011 - 5:52 PM
I just finished Fallout 3 too, I was looking for a new game cause I wanted a break before New Vegas. So This game looked perfect a little action, rpg, comedy.. etc. At first I like the FPS a lot…. then it started to feel like world of warcraft. Chores kill this, level up, find me this… no freedom and interesting connecting stories like FO3 had. I even don’t mind the cheap graphics but this game is just not fun too me. I made it to level 12 before I searched for “borderlands sucks” to confirm my decision. On to Mass Effect 2.
#9 by Rhadaze on November 12, 2011 - 9:52 PM
COULD NOT AGREE MORE!
I took a look at IGN’s review, 8.8, and all the comments were all hyped about how this game is awesomme..
Right now I’m lvl 17 in the game, about 10h played and I dont know if I’ll have the patience to finish it. It’s so fucking boring.
exactly like you said.