Borderlands Game of the Year Enhanced

The game were it all begung

Overall very good and definitely satisfies that urge to grind a game.

Still haven't fixed the memory leak and at this point I doubt they ever will. Drop to 30fps in some areas after too many save-quits. Otherwise, it's just good ol' BL1.

系列开山之作，像原味薯片，经典

good game gun shoot

GOTYEnhanced

very fun game shows its age tho

Die Performance ist nicht das gelbe vom Ei, trotzdem eines der besten looter Shooter :)

gostei

Borderlands is the franchise that really put Gearbox, and by extension Randy Pitchford, a place in the AAA gaming industry. On the basis on giving that man a career, I really dislike it, but as a game itself? It's pretty good, much better then you would think for the first entry in this series. It's got good bones in its general gameplay loop and really impressive art-style, but it still has some growing pains in its structure and quest design. The improvements from Borderlands 2 are so stark that it makes this game feel like a tech demo, so you have to go in understanding that this is the footstep to a fun series. Guns. Guns. Guns As the progenitor of the looter shooter genre, it definitely accomplishes that genre's staples. There are plenty of guns to choose from, each with standard green, blue, purple, gold rarity system you see in many games. It's exciting to get those Legendary weapons but it can get a little disappointing when finding a chest only to get some common weapons. It can make finding secret chests feel a bit anticlimactic. Thankfully, the game gives you plenty of good guns to keep you satisfied, and the bosses even drop their pretty powerful weapons which help mitigate these issues. All the guns feel great even amongst its variations. It helps that the game gives a whopping four slots for your standard gun rotation, so it gave me plenty of time to experiment with different loadouts. SMGs, Rifles, Rocket Launchers, all the staple weapon types are here. There are also a significant amount of status effects some gun manufacturers provide like burning or corrosive. They are fun modifiers that can help break up the standard gameplay. Though, there are always guns that are significantly more useful than others. For most of the game, I felt like the Sniper Rifle felt kinda worthless because enemies loved to bum rush you once you start and normal encounter, so it was hard to find that weapon type useful. However, the ending segment provided enough flying enemies that the sniper finally became useful. The Car The vehicle in this game absolutely sucks. Apparently the vehicle was a reminent of an older build of the game; a version where it was significantly more focused as a Mad Max-type game. That really shows here as it's probably the worst controls in the entire game. The turning feels super stiff and feels miserable to move around in. Trying to shoot anything small with either the machine gun or rocket launcher feels like a crapshoot. Only times its useful is when you have to deal with other enemy vehicles, but even then it feels terrible as you have have to stop the car to aim, leaving you vulnerable to enemy fire. The fact that it's the only reliable way to get around before you unlock fast travel doesn't help it at all. The vehicle doesn't even move around the environment all that well, as it will stop to a halt if anything at all is in its path, even a small rock. It's a terrible feature and I'm glad they don't try to bring this back in future titles. Story and Quests Yeah... so the structure of this game is pretty mediocre. There is just a lot of busy work for very little reward. The story is a nothing-burger with it being told primarily with quests. And it's not like any of these quests are presented with any voiced dialogue, no no no, most of it is told via text on the screen when you accept and turn in each quest. If you're impatient like me, you're going to be skipping through a LOT of this text, so many of the actual set up and world-building went right past me. It was really only the final parts of the game that had me intrigued at all, and that's because the story actually started to present itself in spoken dialogue, keeping me more invested. Outside of that, there was very little to keep me invested. Level Progression You might be asking why I keep doing all these side-quests if I seemingly dislike how they're structured. Well, it's because its probably the most reliable way to level-up in this game. Props to this game for actually having a level progression that actually feels worth it from point-to-point. Even just one level-up feels impactful in how you can manage through enemies. It's nice for a western studio to understand that. Environments Essentially, none of Borderlands' setting is all that interesting because there is little to no importance placed on any of these characters. Most NPCs in the world have very little to say to you outside of quests, in fact most NPC just give you the cold shoulder if you try to interact with them. Additionally, there just isn't enough enemy variety here. The game is way too reliant on placing the same bandits and psychos you see in nearly every environment. They just feels so overused. There are maybe 5 enemy type native to the planet of Pandora, but everything else is just a regular human, which is just kinda disappointing. At least the bosses stand out. The setting of Pandora feels less like a lived-in world and more just an empty point A to point B setting. I don't care about these areas because there aren't cool-enough characters to care about. Pandora is just not that interesting of a setting for this first installment. Additionally, all these environments kinda look the same. Sure, there are some distinctions, but the color palette largely doesn't shift between area to area. In fairness, the cel-shaded artstyle is definitely a big highlight and helps this game age graphically like fine wine. Even so, seeing the same environmental pieces over-and-over again tends to get boring after a while. It doesn't help that these areas are pretty big thanks to vehicle. There are large empty spaces between each and every area, and since quests require you to go back to the original quest giver to turn them in, you constantly have to backtrack over-and-over again. Fast travel does unlock later in the game which somewhat band-aids that issue, but the fact there's no way to tell where you spawn from each fast travel point is somewhat annoying. Borderlands 1 is a game that does have fundamental problems due it being the first entry in the series. It's got good game feel and a good artstyle, but it's just plagued with so much repetition and budget constraints that hold it back from being truly great. At least it's not a particular long game as I beat it in about 19 hours. It's really not a bad game, just one that feels like it needs to be refined, which Borderlands 2 seems to rectify.