March Assassination #2

My Steam Review - Consider leaving a thumbs up, it means a lot to me :)

Borderlands …. is a series that took me so long to get into, probably because I played it solo. So take everything I'll write here with a grain of salt, as it's the solo experience.

Now, let's start with the good. It's a game that looks as good today as it looked back in the day. The ultra-stylized cel-shaded visuals are refreshing and always good to look at. It has this rhythm where you're always close to achieving something new, be it getting a new level, starting a new quest, or turning in a recently finished one. Once the ball gets rolling, you're always getting more powerful, getting closer to your objectives, and it has that looter beat really well done. Reminds me of the last time I booted Torchlight 2, just to play it for close to 30 hours just because the gameplay loop is so addictive. That's all really well done here. Boss fights are typically pretty good - not always challenging, but always thrilling.

Now, the bad and the ugly. If there's a plot here, it's bad and hard to follow. Mostly because exposition is made via quest logs, but those are super easy to skip and miss, and even hard to read since they require Page Up and Page Down, two keys that are hard to access on my laptop and that are used nowhere else in the game. Like, they could have used W and S to move the text. Why use Page Up and Page Down?

Exploration takes a huge hit here, since everything you must do is always present on your map and on your bearings. It's impossible to get lost at the game, for good and for ill. I never had the urge to go and explore corners, because I knew that if they were important, a mission marker would eventually send me there.

Also, for all that the visuals are good, they are super repetitive. You'll be fighting five generic guys all throughout the game. In rusted deserts that are inspired by Mad Max, and some generic shanty towns and caves. You'll also find some critters, but they usually look the same with minor variations between them. It's so boring to see the same enemies and settings after 30 hours of play, and it kind of defeats the beauty brought by the stylized visuals. Quests are also super repetitive - maybe because they all consist of going somewhere, shooting some monsters, sometimes a prop, sometimes getting an item, and then traveling back. It's kind of old.

The shooting itself is also not so good. Enemies are sponges, and sometimes you pummel them with bullets and they barely finch. It doesn't feel good to be honest. I don't like games where damage is a number popping up from the enemy, regardless of where you hit them or with what, and Borderlands relies heavily on the former. I was also very sick of the voice lines and taunts from my character by the end, as well as from aimlessly driving from Point A to Point B to start or turn in a quest.

Let me also say - it's a buggy mess. I had so many crashes and got stuck in geometry so many times during my playthrough. Enemies are highly cheeseable.

With all that said, would I still recommend it? Yes. Because the freaking basic gameplay loop is so fun, you can overlook most of the flaws and just have fun with this. If you have a buddy for co-op, I can imagine that being 10x better.