With all the hype of Moder Warfare 2 coinciding with my paycheck :P I felt compelled to buy a new game. MW2 was the obvious choice, but I ultimately decided to pass on it for several reasons. 1) I generally don't like first person shooters, especially those focused on competitive online play. 2) My neighbour and hardcore gamer best friend is a huge COD4 fan, and because of this over the course of a year I probably ended up playing the equivalent of a prestige as well as finishing the campaign. I can assume that with the amount of time we spend gaming together I will probably end up experiencing MW2 just as thoroughly as I did COD4 without having to buy the game. 3) I would rather get a game with a longer single player experience 4) I am still loving Uncharted 2's online and don't really need a new competitive online game yet.

So I picked up Borderlands instead. I was unsure about it because I usually get bored of FPS games. I know now that its not FPS mechanics that bore me, its the restrictions. In your standard FPS you can replay missions or play online. I know that to some that is awesome. You can focus on one thing and get really good at it. And in the cause of games like the COD franchise often the missions are good enough that they can be replayed countless times without getting bored. Nevertheless, these confinements always bothered me, and before I played Borderlands I always just assumed I simply did not like FPS's. Well I was wrong. I absolutely love the FPS mechanics in Borderlands. And the open world gameplay and RPG ****quest system and XP make the game completely satisfying to me. Nothing against MW2 or other high quality shooters, but after playing Borderlands I now know what I want in a FPS. Games like MW2 or Resistance 2 (which I bought for 5 bucks the other day:D) seem to only be able to keep me entertained for maybe 10 hours tops, and thats a very generous estimate, whereas I've been playing Borderlands for maybe 20 hours so far and loving every minute of it.

But by far the best part of the game is the guns. The game claims to have millions of guns, and while this is actually true, there are many guns that are only slightly different. With that being said, there is still a tremendous variety of completely unique guns, and it is tons of fun trying them all out. Many have criticised the fighting for being repetitive, and although I can see why people might raise this issue, with the huge variety of guns you can always run into a fight a new way and this keeps the game fresh in my mind. Plus, the combat is really satisfying. Any good RPG has some amount of level grinding, and Borderlands grinding happens to consist of shotgunning psychos in the face:P It is completely satisfying and it is easy to spent an hour or so playing co-op online simply killing baddies.

Satisfying. I have said it a few times in this blog and that is the one word I would use to describe Borderlands. The RPG mechanics of leveling up with XP and building up a skill tree makes every kill seem like it is counting towards something. Enemies drop a large variety of interesting and valuable loot giving the player some instant gratification for killing a bad guy. The co-op element allows you to work together and support each other, which is very fulfilling in itself. Add on the fact the the game is tougher in co-op and you have to support each other and it just gets better. Even the art ****is very satisfying, it almost makes you feel like you are playing your own comic book.

Sorry for the lack of a solid conclusion, simply you should buy this game.

PS I am currently a level 28 Soldier