First Impressions: Borderlands

Crash! The opening scene sees the unfortunate end to a Skag (a dog-like creature) as you ram into it at full speed. The next sequence introduces the cast of characters you can play as: Roland the Soldier, Mordecai the Hunter, Lilith the Siren, or Brick the Berserker. I chose Lilith because of her magical capabilities.
The two things you notice straight away is the art style, which is awesome with its colourful, cartoony graphics and small details like the thick borders and the numbers coming out of enemies when you shoot them, and the humour. I've laughed out loud quite a few times at this game, with its over the top characters and tongue in cheek humour.

However, some of the story is not voice acted, namely the quest info, so you do lose some of the funny bits as you do not have there voices saying the objectives. Also some of the speech gets repeated and due to you staying in one place for quite a long time it can get repetitive. Anyway, once you choose your character and get some backstory on why your here, a disembodied voice tells you to get out of the car at the next stop. You follow the voice without doubt because um... reasons and then you meet Claptrap.

Claptrap is a yellow machine and your guide to the mysterious world of Borderlands. He gives you a heads-up device which serves as your HUD and then tells you to use the new-u station. Here you can customize your characters looks and name. This is a co-op game so this helps you to distinguish characters (however you can, like me, play it singleplayer). Claptrap then guides you through the tutorial. Through this you kill bandits and collect loot.

You can collect loot from pretty much anywhere and very soon you will pick up some new weapons. Now, there are quite a lot of weapons (well into the millions due to the random loot generator), so each playthrough will be slightly different. Of course there are a few weapons which are placed specifically in places as they are rewards for quests but most weapons you can find randomly.

To progress in the story you have to accept quests from either NPC's or the quest board. I suggest taking the time to level up and unlock some skills as the enemies get quite hard, quite quickly. I've so far killed my first bandit leader and unlocked more weapons than I can carry.

So far, I've really enjoyed playing through this game and due to getting it through a Steam sale, I also got the sequel and all the DLC, so I can't wait to play more!

Thanks for reading, Satamer.