Completed: Borderlands (on 6/22/13)

System: PC
Status: Completed (on 6/22/13)

Borderlands is certainly a well reviewed and looked at franchise, so I doubt anything I say will be too new to people looking into it. On the surface, it certainly fills a niche that feels like it needs to be filled, an FPS RPG with randomly generated/dropped guns and equipment. The game fills that niche very well, and the game has a very unique sense of humor to it. It does an extremely good job at characterization of the world of Pandora, and I tended to mostly play through just to see what the next crazy thing to happen was.

Where the game does tend to slow down is the combat itself is very samey for most of the game. No matter what upgrades or new skills you get, they tend to not change the basic game mechanics very  much. You'll run up to an area of huts and houses, enemies will spawn from doors or be standing around, and you'll find cover, trying to get headshots for criticals or using your class skill to do extra damage, and the enemies will die. The strategies the enemies use change a bit, mostly when you get to the Crimson Lance enemies, or in the expansions, but most of the time you're fighting bandits, and everything tends to go the same way. You're not relying on your own skills too much though, as a huge factor is what gear you get in random drops, and sometimes you'll be scraping by on a too-low level gun, or find one that is so much better than your others that you'll only be using that gun for a long damn time.

Still, that was a long paragraph that basically boiled down to me as "I needed to take breaks from the game at times." It is still an amazingly fun game, it just tends to wear on you a bit when you go from place to place shooting the same guys. The personality of the game goes a long way to alleviating the annoyances.

The game and all of its expansions are completed, finished on second run. Don't have all the achievements, but many of them require multiplayer on the old Gamespy network, so...no dice there.