Gearbox has pumped out a work of art, with some flaws, however, and I tip my hat to them. Heyoo!
The gameplay of Borderlands is, as the gameplay trailer says, as if FPS and RPG made a baby. It's got the shooting mechanics, sprinting, and aiming of a first-person shooter, however, the world and loot are like that of a role-playing game, like collecting loot and weapons, leveling up, upgrading your skills, and so on. One of the main taglines for this game that most people have heard is that it has 17,000,000 guns. There are a *very* large number of weapons in this game, however, a large number of them are junk just to toss to the vendor, but when you find a gun whose accuracy and damage are higher than your current one, but the rate of fire dramatically lower, the game puts you in a moral struggle. Do you go with rate-of-fire over damage and accuracy, or vice-versa? I played as the Siren class, which mostly uses SMGs, where I usually pride rate-of-fire over damage and accuracy, depending on the situation, of course. This is probably the most challenging decision you make in the game. Speaking of decisions, let's move on to the story.
The story is not as good as it could have been. It's not terrible, but it's not great. At first, I was really pissed off when I finished the game, mostly because...well, I can't say that...d@mn spoilers. After my initial hatred, I started thinking about the story, and realized that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Anyway, the story is that you're a treasure hunter who traveled to the planet Pandora to find a mystical Vault that is supposedly filled with riches and alien weapons and the like. It's NOT Fallout 3! I have heard far too many people compare this story to Fallout 3's story to not bring this up in my review. Now that that's out of the way, let's move on.
The comedy. I usually don't bring this up unless a game really makes me flat-out laugh out loud. Upon beating the game, there is a cut-scene involving CL4P-TP (Claptrap) that almost made me cry, it was so funny. Had I not been so openly angered about the ending, I probably would have. Plus, Gearbox Software has sneaked in little jokes and homages to games, movies, and the like. One of the trophies is to kill an enemy plumber-style. Guess what you have to do? One of the bosses' names is Mad Mel (Mad Max, anyone?). One of the trohies is 1.21 Gigawatts!, and so on and so forth.
The atmosphere of Borderlands is one not of a wasteland that has been completely ravaged to bits like Fallout 3, but one of a desolate world that has been slowly left to rot and consume itself. It has been abandoned for a long time, and it shows. That being said, the scenery does sort of look the same after a while. It's mostly the background. Mountains, dirt, and grass. While it's not a big deal, it can sort of take a little out of the gameplay. The art style is amazing. It is colorful, bold, imaginative, and one of the things that caught my eye about this game. Upon seeing the original art style, I thought that it looked really color-bleached and bland, I love the cartoony, concept art-ish look of it, and it adds spice to the world.
The coop mode for Borderlands could be better. The splitscreen is good, except for the fact that it's vertical splitscreen, and your menus are the same size as fullscreen, so you have to move it to see things. The splitscreen also lags a little sometimes. The PS3 online had a few issues at first (not being able to invite friends, random freezes online, etc.), but they are mostly fixed at this point. One of the more annoying weird happenings for me is that for the first three days, none of my friends could hear me speak online. My mic was totally fine, connected and everything, and I could hear them, but they couldn't hear me...strange. But it either fixed itself, or the Gearbox people fixed it, or some gift from the higher powers that be made it work, because it's fine now. One of the most notorious glitches on the Gearbox Borderlands forums is the random 'I was exited from the online game and got X amount of extra skill points!' This one actually happened to me. I was playing an online coop game with some friends, randomly was exited from the game, it said that I leveled down to level 1, and I leveled back up when I started my single player game, and I had 20 extra skill points...not that I'm complaining. Once you get to some of the later stuff, you need all the help you can get.
So, all-in-all, Borderlands is a good choice if you love RPGs and FPSs and wish that they would just have a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup moment. If you do get Borderlands and are looking for a little coop or weapons trading, feel free to shoot me a friend invite and I'll be happy to play. My ID is LampshadeWarrior.