Ahhh Borderlands. I got some history with this game. I originally got the GoTY edition for the 360 way back when. Since then, I’ve started playing the game 10 times or so. It was always something, didn’t play for a while due to real life obligations and didn’t remember stuff from the beginning, save crashes and corruptions and finally my 360 hard drive died.
Finally I decided to play and finish the game so I got another GoTY copy on Steam and I finally finished it. Now that I’ve finally found the vault on Pandora and finished the main campaign it made me think what the heck took so long. I know I had to restart the game a couple of times due to technical issues but I also remember a couple of times just leaving the game for a while until all of a sudden an urge to play returned. I like the game’s theme, overall design and humor so I did want to play more but I think what put me off with this game were some basic gameplay and interface mechanics that just didn’t work for me.
First of all – the navigation system in this game sucked for me. The tiny compass on the bottom of the screen didn’t work for me due to the fact that a little of areas (especially rust commons where you spend a major part of the campaign) have a lot of canyon passages with dead ends and the navigation system does not work well for helping to navigate you to your quest objective. A small circular compass with a mini map in the top right section of the screen would have done wonders to help navigate a path to the quest objectives.
Speaking of quest objectives, with so many quests you can accept, tracking just ONE AT A TIME was a huge mistake! I often got frustrated because instead of playing and doing something fun I would have to go to my quests screen, choose tracking for each quest and keep switching to the main map back and forth to see where the quest objective in that zone is on the map! This is frustrating cause no one wants to waste time driving back and forth while one of the quests object is right along the way! If the game at least allowed me to track all the quests for the zone I was questing in (Rust Commons East for example) it would have made my life much easier, questing and moving between objectives more fun and less frustrating.
Now, one might argue that while getting lost you would encounter more trash mobs and collect more loot. Well, the trash mobs would just re-spawn after a short time anyway, meaning every time I got lost in an area I would have to fight the same group of bandits over and over again, second the loot was simply putting it – crap! Throughout the game I’ve had in my possession hundreds if not thousands of guns, gadgets, grenade upgrades, etc. and I have used MAYBE 20 of them throughout the main campaign. Usually the upgrades were so nominal I didn’t even bother swapping them out. The upgrade trees for the character talents were the only ones that I actually put any thought to and the choices seemed to affect how my character performed (I finished the game as the Siren named after my wife – JennyChan).
I’ve just recently started playing the DLCs and so far I seem to be enjoying the gameplay aspect of them much better then the main campaign. Again, remember that I enjoyed the theme, stories and humor of the game a lot, it was the gameplay and interface that bugged me. I am currently playing the Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot in which I completed part 1. Incredible adrenaline rush of fast paced challenging and surprising (you never know what upgrades or downgrades you or your enemies will get) gameplay. I’ve also started The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned (not to be confused with Dr. Zed ;p ) and I am really enjoying the overall theme of this expansion. I like all kinds of zombie stuff so I was looking forward to this DLC to begin with and the cool, creepy Halloween style graphic design of the level was just an icing on the cake. Due to simpler level design and amount of quests per zone I am not nearly as frustrated with this DLC as I was playing the main campaign (I had an epiphany here that I mostly got annoyed driving the fast vehicles in game while feeling kind of blind and being forced to switch to the map all the time).
Borderlands GoTY is worth the purchase when it’s on sale even if for just the DLCs because they are really fun. The game seems to be heavy on coop play but due to many features missing in a loot heavy game with strong coop play options like trading and possible auction house purchasing and selling the game fell short where it could have dominated. I own Borderlands 2 and I am looking forward to seeing if a lot of shortcomings and design errors that I’ve found with the original were addressed and corrected in the sequel.
