I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Borderlands

As was foretold in the Dead Sea Scrolls, this week I want to talk a little bit about Borderlands. Not too much, because truth be told I spent most of the week playing Sunset Overdrive, but at least enough to fulfill the prophecies, right?

I actually started playing Borderlands on the Xbox 360, because I found a pretty cheap copy of it at the local gamesmonger; I got on the Borderlands train late enough that it’s the GotY edition, I think (I don’t care enough to check). It plays pretty well on the 360, and certainly benefitted from the glorious infrastructure of Xbox Live. I only have 1 TV in the house, though, and my wife gets motion sick watching me play FPS games in particular, so my opportunities to play it were somewhat less than I would have liked. Luckily enough, Steam put the same GotY edition on deep discount a few months later, and I picked up a copy. Visually, the improvement cannot be understated. Control-wise, I have always been more comfortable with the KB+M combination than the dual-stick setup on most consoles, although I enjoy both.

From a co-op standpoint, unfortunately, there was no Steam integration. There was Gamespy. Gamespy is horrible, and I’m glad it’s gone, because I literally stopped playing Borderlands because Gamespy was awful. It is much easier to play on Steamworks now.

So in contrast to Rage, the graphics are much more stylized, and the gameplay follows suit. The guns are super weird and fun to experiment with, although the nature of randomly generated guns means that sometimes the guns you pick up are pretty useless. The gunplay itself can be pretty satisfying at times, but at other times, I definitely wished the guns felt a bit more like Rage.

One of the really weird things that I thought I would have enjoyed in Borderlands more than Rage was the driving. Borderlands uses what I refer to as “Warthog” controls, where the mouse steers and the keyboard is just for forward and reverse. Usually this means that you can pull off some pretty precise driving, but I found the Borderlands vehicles to feel pretty floaty. The driving in Rage has a much more solid feel to it, but for the most part Borderlands is the more interesting, more competent game.

The co-op of Borderlands is really where the game shines. It’s been said that if a game is only good when playing co-op, it isn’t actually a good game, and I kinda agree with that sentiment. Borderlands is boring as hell played alone, at least for me, kinda like Destiny is boring played alone - gunplay in Destiny is much more satisfying, though, but the frequency of loot drops in Borderlands is much higher, making it feel a bit more rewarding. Somewhere between the two of these games is a really excellent loot shooter.

I’m sure I had a point when I started all this but I’ve quite forgotten it now. Borderlands is pretty all right, which seems like I’m damning with faint praise, but it is a great game to play if you’ve got some buddies. It is one of many flawed games that I have in my Steam library, staring at me disapprovingly. Don’t judge me, Borderlands.