If you’re a gamer, by now I hope at some point you’ve picked up Borderlands. Whether you played it once because someone lent it to you, or you got the Handsome Collection one of the many times it has been on sale. I have some very great memories playing this game with friends, and hundreds of hours solo. I likely match this hourly total playing cooperatively. When the game first came out, I was living with a friend and his mother in California. We spent every hour not spent working, or in my case, looking for work, for countless hours. After moving back to Cedar Rapids, failing to find gainful employment, I fell out with a friend of a friend. Us both addicts in our own right, but Borderlands between us became a drug whose insatiability knows no bounds. The learned skills of how to cooperate with someone different than you. Adapting to their strengths and weaknesses. Through downloadable content, it remained a part of our lives through our separate recoveries. He even got a full leg tattoo sleeve of art from the game which meant so much to us. I merely have a small Borderlands tattoo, but it matches part of his. He apparently had his own endgame-level character from a coop session with an older friend as well. Indeed, my Borderlands experience spanned several playthroughs, with several people. This is before the sequels, which I don’t know if I have put in the raw time I did on the first game, solo hours are at least equal.
The algorithms powering the game are very sophisticated, and make repeat playthroughs unique. There are a number of characters to sample. It flawlessly blends a RPG experience with the gameplay mechanics of a first-person shooter. The art style is unique, and engaging. One of the characters in the first game has an ability in which you can kill enemies simply by running next to them. Nobody in the second or third games has a power quite this impressive, but they are almost all enjoyable to me.
Borderlands is about a “vault hunter,” (you,) in search of a fabled ancient alien vault. Supposedly filled with untold riches, the fables of the vault have torn apart the planet of Pandora with bandits, and vicious creatures. Up to four players can play together, and the game gets harder the more players there are playing.
HereticDerek 