Borderlands

When you’re the latest slab of fresh meat to arrive in a brutal alien wasteland, you need a little time to get oriented, and that’s definitely true with Borderlands. It looks vaguely like Fallout 3 and it brims with BioShock’s black humor, but it doesn’t play anything like those two famous shooters. But if you add Diablo’s level-grinding and loot-collecting into the mix, you’ll have a great mental picture of the intensely frantic combat in this gigantic and often impressive game.

Just make no mistake: Borderlands is a hardcore-gamer’s game. It won’t be fun to those dudes whose two major purchases this year were Transformers and Madden 10. For starters, there’s no difficulty setting whatsoever, so when you’re getting pummeled — and you will get pummeled — you can’t bop down to Easy and race ahead through the story missions. That thrashing you’re getting is Borderlands’ way of telling you to take your time and properly level your character. Side quests are usually optional in games, but the only optional part of them here is which ones you do. The story missions won’t level your character enough to let you survive, so you’ll need to linger in each location until you’ve built yourself up appropriately. (Thankfully, the missions have tags that clearly display this info.)

Case in point: We took a Level 19 Hunter out into Rust Commons to fight some Level 22 beasties and were instantly devoured…20 times in a row, until we surrendered to what the game was telling us. And that message was clear: Take your time, enjoy the incredibly rich landscape that Gearbox has created, and don’t fight enemies who are more than two levels higher than you or we’ll cut your head off.

With that word of caution out of the way, let’s rewind to the beginning. Borderlands is gorgeous! Gearbox’s decision to delay the game to layer in a cel-shaded art style was a stroke of genius. While it initially looks like the cartoon version of Fallout 3, that surface impression is quickly scrubbed away by the edgy beauty of everything from the vast landscapes to the ferocious monsters to the lethal armored vehicles.

The game’s humor never loses its edge, either. We always got a laugh out of fighting enemies with labels like Mutant Midget Psycho or Badass Brute, and so much of the dialogue drips with dark, dark humor. Our favorite was the stranded, deranged scientist who pretended that the vomiting death throes of her last surviving companion were a lovely conversation because she wouldn’t have another one for a while. But when she tired of it, she simply killed her friend and fed her to the alien wolf-like skags. Yee-ouch!

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