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After months of waiting for some, Borderlands was finally released last week.  This is a snazzy FPS game that seems to have one main focus: guns!  Lots and lots and lots of guns.  You start the game selecting your preset character each with a unique ability.  You’ve got your ranged DPS, tank mage and support class, nothing new here.
The game starts out promising with a funky intro showing off Borderlands unique graphical style and giving you a brief introduction to the characters.  It’s then time to follow a robot around and start a mini tutorial.  This robot reminds me of  Wall-E and is equally annoying.

One of the things that stands out about this game for me is the excellent LAN co-op.  Up to 4 players can play on a LAN (or online) and journey through the world trying to ninja the loot!  One of the problems with co-op was that there didn’t seem to be any sort of rolling system for loot, it was just a case about being the first one to grab it (unless you’re playing with nice people!).    There was also the issue when one person handed in a quest and got to see a dialog or cut scene for a follow up quest whilst the rest of the players just see that they have gained XP, this makes following the limited story harder and makes the game seem like it needed more polishing.

After playing the game for a couple of hours it was quite apparent that it was rushed and lacking any real story.  The creators were quotes as saying that this game wouldn’t be boring like Fallout 3, since Fallout 3 has to be one of my favourite games to date Borderlands had a lot to live up to.  Sadly this statement was not true, at least for me.  I found myself bored and didn’t have the will to go on to complete the game!

Once I reached level 12 I noticed a bug which was really annoying, all the talent points which I’d got each time I levelled up had disappeared and were not available for spending again.  After doing some research it seemed that the only way to fix this problem was to start a new character or hack the save game file.  It turns out that the saved game file was unencrypted and took just minutes to modify with a hex editor, I was able to restore my talent points and have a play with some other parameters.

For those interested in modifying their existing characters who can’t be bothered to manually edit the file, there exists a lovely GUI tool for the job, you’ll find it by following this link.