I was dropped into the beginning of the game as a soldier class character. The game opens with a series of basic missions designed to get you into the game and used to its different systems. At the outset, you won't even have a weapon. That, of course, changes pretty quickly. As you get the feel for the action, you'll run out to collect items and repair shop machines that let you purchase your first defensive item, an auto-recharging, Halo-like shield. Eventually you'll get some grenades. Along the way, you'll be heading in and out of the game's first somewhat-civilized area, a makeshift town surrounded by bandits and skags, which are four-legged creatures that charge at you when you anger them. The game's enemies seem to behave in an MMO-like fashion, meaning if you get close enough to them (or shoot at them from a distance), they'll activate and come after you.
Speaking of shooting, the game's guns have a good feel to them, with a basic level of control that recalls the Call of Duty series by devoting the left trigger to a small and quick zoom that lets you sort of aim down the sights. Later, you'll also find scoped weapons that zoom in more effectively. You'll also have to continually pick up ammo, which is found around the world and frequently dropped by the enemies you kill. While the guns generally feel like you're playing a regular first-person shooter, the game still has plenty of RPG hooks in it, too. So where and how you aim your shots won't always correspond to hits in those locations. But moments of aiming right at an enemy's head only to pull the trigger and see a miss seemed few and far between. Also, you'll earn weapon proficiencies as play with specific types of guns, which seems like the sort of thing that would help make you more deadly with the weapon types you're loyal to, like pistols versus rifles. When you land hits on your foes, numbers of hit points bounce off of them in the traditional RPG style, with a life bar also giving you a rough indicator of how much more damage you'll need to inflict. When getting up close to enemies, I seemed to be landing critical hits more frequently. As I leveled up through the first five levels of experience, those crits became enough to take the head off of a skag in one shot.
Borderlands obviously has a lot going on on the gameplay side, but there's more to it than shooting bandits in the face. The game's story puts you on a planet called Pandora, where one of the many weapon-manufacturing corporations has gotten an edge over the others by reverse engineering some alien technology. Now there are rumors of a vault hidden somewhere on Pandora that's full of even more crazy future alien tech. You play as a vault hunter, someone who believes in the legends and actively seeks out the vault. So you'll root around the planet in search of clues that will hopefully lead you to the vault while plenty of other fortune seekers (and a certain corporation with an interest in keeping its edge) attempt the same task.
In addition to the procedurally generated gun system, the other big thing people keep talking about with Borderlands is its graphics. The "concept art" style used in the game looks great so far, giving the game a very distinctive look while still allowing for a clean, smooth frame rate. Also, the game will apparently offer more variety in its locales than has been shown so far. Most of the stuff that Gearbox has revealed shows the wasteland areas that you'll see at the beginning of the game. But in talking with Gearbox's Randy Pitchford, I learned that the game will apparently offer quite a bit of environmental variety, including snow. Personally, I was expecting it to be all Mad Max, all the time. So hearing that the game will offer some different looks sounds cool.
While it's a bit tempting to claim that Borderlands could be the big surprise release of 2009, I don't think I'd be surprised at all if this game turned out to be great. So far, it looks nice and seems really fun to play. Look for more on this one as we all inch closer to its October 20 release date.
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