Satisfying combat and tons of loot makes this cooperative take on the role-playing shooting formula a blast.
Set on the desolate yet hostile planet of Pandora you fresh of the bus as one four treasure hunters looking for a strange entity known as "The Vault". Rumored to be containing great fortune and power, this immediately sets the stage for alot of loot grabbing and wildlife confrontations as you attempt to seek out its rich belongings. However finding the Vault isnt a simple task so in order to even odds of finding it, you are gonna need some help. Anywhere that is not being over watched by the local dangers is usually populated by some friendly faces. If walk up to them and tap a button you will most likely receive one of the hundreds of different missions found in the game, and this is how you progress.
Borderlands starts of fairly easy with you being, guided by a smart mouthed Claptrap that teaches you the ropes of shooting and looting. And the first few levels will have you circling around the town of Fyrestone accomplishing light hearted tasks and battling simple enemies. Once you do break free from the redundant starting areas, things become much more interesting.
Borderlands is at its core a first person shooter. You are very capable in combat as you can fling your melee attack or weapon bayonet, lunge grenades, look down your scope and pull off flashy combat abilites that are otherwise known as "Action skills". On the roleplaying front there are four character classes to choose from. You can assume the role of the Soldier, Hunter, Siren or Berserker each wielding different weapon proficiencies and abilities.
The Soldier deploys a turret mounted on a shield that is very versatile, the Hunter summons his pet to do most of the bidding in terms of damage, the Siren enters an invisible walk and flanks enemies and the Berserker can go rage with his fists to dish out alot pain. Like in some many games of its kind, damage numbers pop up as you decrease the lifespan of an enemy and killing them will result in experience points and loot.
Leveling up will grant you a skillpoint to spend on one of the 22 different skills your character has available, all of which are broken down into separate trees of skills that defines your characters role. But since the game caps at level 50 unlocking and maxing out every single skill is impossible, so if you aren´t satisfyed with your character you can re distribute each skill accordingly via a respec.
Grabbing loot is also a huge part of the experience. Trust me when i say that there are literally thousands, even close to millions of different weapons in the game all of which posses different stats, length of barrels, rate of fire, reload times and clip capacity to even crazy augmentations. Expect to find anything from Combat rifles firing incendiary bullets to shotguns unloading shock rounds. These are usually stored in red shiny loot cases and the color coded level of rarity and stats makes it easy to identify whenever these guns are worth equipping or not.
However you wont just find guns. Loot also comes in the form of shield, class and grenade modifications. Class mods can boost your skills with a great deal of percentage while the shield mods can drastically effect how your rebounding shield fares in combat. Lastly, instead of giving you hundreds of different grenades, the mods can instead alter the effect of the grenades you throw to give them cluster, teleporting or lifestealing effects to name a few.
As fore mentioned, the rarity of a loot drop is easy to acknowledge by looking at the color of the text and difficult quests and bosses will result in better loot.