With Borderlands, a game described as a “role-playing shooter”, developers Gearbox hope to capture the audience that spends many sleepless nights wandering through forgotten strongholds while pillaging corpses and undefended treasure chests. They want to make the grind of the modern Fantasy role-playing game appealing to those repulsed by the thought of more swords and sorcery and Siberian tiger mounts. Gearbox is going post-apocalyptic wasteland on this formula. They’re going to make this grind cool.

Borderlands is influenced by games that are second jobs thinly veiled as “entertainment.” There are enough trappings in most that the player does not immediately recognize it until they are separated from the system. Maybe the rewards are frequent enough; the increase in character abilities more steady and immediately gratifying. But Gearbox fails to dress up Borderlands to hide from the player the laborious byproduct of the genre. As a result, Borderlands merely resembles a mechanical facsimile of its influences.

If you watch the introduction of Borderlands, you can’t help but be absorbed into this new universe. Just like your favorite Guy Ritchie movie, the characters are introduced with so much flair, you can’t decide who you like more. The Hunter brandishes a sword with deadly confidence, his sniper rifle casually draped over his shoulder. The Soldier sits brooding and alone, ashamed of his past as a mercenary. The Siren seductively walks towards the camera, showing off her Phasewalk ability. Brick makes his presence known as the freight train that plows through entire mobs. All this to the tune of Cage the Elephant’s “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked”, where I imagine Gearbox screaming “WE ARE DOING THIS FOR YOU, PLEASE LOVE US” in the background. And you want to! You want to start playing immediately after the big white block letters of “Borderlands” stretch across the screen, your transport driving underneath them and kicking up clouds of dust behind it.

So begins Borderlands, a game that proceeds to eliminate any sort of intelligence that’s left in a horribly fractured genre and give players what they presumably want: the ability to shoot stuff with impunity, travel through “open” maps and gather a shitload of randomized equipment.

At first, Borderlands delivers on its promise of unbridled gunplay. There’s a lot of shooting, gun collecting, and medkit using. It even resembles a decent first person shooter most of the time. However, Borderlands takes more of its cues from another genre: the action role-playing game. A bastardization of a once-proud genre, where the soulless pursuit of more gear, more experience points and some arbitrary final confrontation are good enough to sustain the experience. Like the games in the genre before it, Borderlands tries so hard to capture the essence of Blizzard’s flagship titles that it succeeds at duplicating the mechanics without infusing it with any purpose or consequence.

Blizzard learned a lot from Diablo II, and revised their formula until it stood tall and shining like a golden money-making obelisk. With World of Warcraft, they managed to capture everything we loved about the current definition of role-playing game. The environments may have consisted of stretched-out textures over low-polygonal objects, and the characters no more than cartoons – but the overall appearance of the game was so cohesive, so varied and captivating to look at, none of these technical issues mattered. World of Warcraft was a place we didn’t mind looting and grinding in. The simplest of tasks were kept entertaining. The entire experience had been calculated with precision, because Blizzard knows what they are doing.

Borderlands clearly understands the formula – it copies the basic tenets of it all too well. Kill, loot, equip. Repeat. Repeat until your bags are bulging with junk that has to be sold at vending machines, until you don’t need money any more because it is overflowing out of your backpack and lying around everywhere. Watch in horror as you feel compelled to search abandoned fire pits and the guts of wild animals for more.

Where Borderlands lost me is in its unflinching repetition. This isn’t pleasant repetition as in World of Warcraft. The game expects you to grind through these bland, desolate environments without question, but it is never made exciting or interesting. This is grueling work, in the hopes that a character can be built to survive the wilderness just to advance into a new area for more gear and more quests.

A first-person shooter is conducive to fast paced combat, and Borderlands ensures this pacing is established early on. Even in the first few missions I was doing more backpedalling than I had ever done in all the shooters I’ve ever played. And I’ll admit that the feeling of running away from overwhelming hordes of monsters in Diablo II was revisited during my first hours with Borderlands. But this defensive strategy creates a rather large problem in a first-person game: you can’t see where you’re going. So backpedaling with reckless abandon will occasionally put you off the edge of a cliff, or worse: back you into a corner that can’t be jumped out of as you are mauled to death.

The most notable aspect of the combat in Borderlands is the “Second Wind” ability, which is a nice way of the game giving you one last chance to escape. This becomes apparent when you find yourself drifting into areas that are clearly above your level and you start dying more often just to add some variety to the process. If your health is reduced to zero, instead of dying (respawning) you get a chance to keep fighting. It easily compares to being incapacitated in Left 4 Dead. You can keep shooting and switch weapons, but you can’t move and your health is depleted a lot faster. Instead of getting rescued by a teammate, you simply have to kill something – anything – to put you back on your feet. It’s actually the most fun I had with the game, because if there was a boss character or particularly tough monster I had to kill that I dropped to 10% health before being dropped myself, I could finish the job in a completely fitting act of revenge. As a break from the rest of the game’s monotony, these tense moments probably seemed more exciting than they should have been. But even they grow tiresome, as you have no choice but to plow on through areas more appropriate to your level to get better weapons, upgrade skills and then face more difficult encounters.

The environments only show brief flashes of colour and accents in its washed out, sun faded locales. Fallout 3 was rightfully depressing, but Borderlands feels like a parody in the way it mocks the first-person shooter genre with some entertaining one-liners from each of the Player avatars. Yet at every turn I had to search for some kind of personality to draw from the game. It was like Borderlands was telling me I should be happy with just firing my gun. I was not.

Borderlands prides itself on the variety of weapons in the game. And to its credit, I don’t think I ever picked up the same gun twice. There are thousands of variations of pistols, automatic rifles, sniper rifles and shotguns to be obtained, each with their own unique attributes and elemental enhancements. And anything worth carrying can only be picked up from item drops. Mass Effect had a similar variety in weapons, but the game also provided modifications that could be added to the weapons, so that players could create their own builds. And this was on top of everything else! Borderlands needs this kind of complexity; for a game that’s entire focus is on collecting new and more powerful guns, not including some kind of modding system for the weapons in Borderlands feels like an obvious oversight. Furthermore, there is no money sink apart from the cost of respawning – providing weapon durability ratings would at least encourage players to balance the use of their weapons with the cost of repairs.

One of the selling features for Borderlands – like many contemporary video games – is co-operative play. There are four characters and associated class types to choose from. However, there are no limits on what classes can be selected for each party. What Gearbox has created is a slightly more complex Left 4 Dead. Borderlands is a game meant to be played in co-op, with minimal character development and customization. The available classes clearly complement each other, so when attempting the campaign solo it’s harder than it should be. Challenge is good, but when you’re playing a first person shooter that should only require skill at aiming, the game experience begins to break down.

This lack of depth is clearly at odds with the marketing of Borderlands, as it was heavily advertised as a “role-playing shooter.” Taking the game at face value, its definition of “role-playing” is the stat-bumping, item collecting and quest gathering from non-player characters who amount to nothing more than vending machines. As a shooter, it depends on a number of elements from the stat-bumping part: accuracy ratings, critical hit ratings, and proficiency with weapons. But as long as you can click a mouse button or pull the trigger on a gamepad, only the critical hit rating seems to make a difference. And yet aim-assist is available in the game’s options. It’s a feature that isn’t new to consoles, but for a game that’s reason for being is shooting a gun, this feels like direct sabotage of the game’s purpose. And without NPCs that serve to contribute to the game’s atmosphere, the Player is left with very little actual “role playing”, and the descriptor only serves to further dilute its meaning in yet another video game.

Borderlands has borrowed the fast paced first-person combat from a genre that’s made a comfortable home on the console, and the statistics and obsessive-compulsive need to collect loot from superficial role-playing games like World of Warcraft. With these influences Gearbox has created a morass of design elements that only serve to pollute both genres it borrows from. It ultimately offers nothing of value, because all it has done is combine these elements to create some vile video game Frankenstein that surely only appeals to those that like watching numbers fly around on the screen.^[1]

What becomes readily apparent after playing Borderlands only for a short while is its lack of a driving force behind the proceedings. A typical feature of both modern role playing games and the first-person shooter is some narrative to keep the player moving forward, and Borderlands has nothing worth mentioning. I was simply going where the job board in each zone told me. I was playing because the entirety of what the game offered was dropped in front of me at the start. There was nothing in the back of my mind that made me want to press on. And after eight hours of play, I should have a firm grasp of an overarching objective to make me keep playing.

There is also too much space in Borderlands: traveling between quest objectives, I was constantly staring at wide open areas with nothing to shoot but skag and midgets in masks. Even though the enemies may change from area to area, Gearbox didn’t bother to develop the small things: the reason people enjoy spending so much time doing basically nothing in places like Azeroth. Players will find things to do – and the simplest of tasks are made interesting by the game’s environment. Borderlands may riff on the post-apocalyptic theme, but with so much wasted opportunity for characterization between the players and the environment it amounts to nothing but an insipid interpretation of a setting that was ripe for exploitation. Borderlands‘ capacity for style is limited to the opening video.

Borderlands was a game I looked forward to this year, and I find it insulting that Gearbox was cynical enough to design a game that people would play to collect more junk and experience points to max out a meager skill tree. Its moderate success^[2] in the game review circuit all but guarantees that there will be imitators and sequels trying to improve on the formula only half-realized by Borderlands.

In this manner, the video game industry creates new genres instead of refining existing ones. Instead of perfecting existing control schemes, the industry insists on developing and promoting motion control to access previously untapped demographics. Video games as a medium barely have a chance to keep up, let alone the language to describe them. Instead of preserving history through genre refinements, the industry’s drive for revolution constantly overwrites the past, to the detriment of video games and support for their serious consideration.

Borderlands is genre blending for the sake of box copy. It is a classic example of cynical game design that hopes the players won’t notice, while they kill things over and over for more loot and more money that gets put towards outfitting a character that ultimately doesn’t matter. In fact, the same could be said of the game itself, as over the course of a few hours it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what this game will be remembered for. Falling apart on even a cursory examination, it prompts the debilitating question: why am I playing this? It will make you hate video games for being so unambitious. The offense of Borderlands is one far greater than simply being a bad game: it is genre pollution.