Sooo Borderlands is a game in the FPS RPG game, a genre which after Mass Effect I am starting to rather enjoy. Couple of differences I noticed right away is that there is a soft aim-assist where the game will semi-track a target you're shooting at provided you're sort of tracking it already, the art style is a tad interesting, every gun in the game is created randomly by the in-game engine from about nine different component types and is based sort of around the level you are at currently, and you can guarantee critical hits by shooting people in the head (which Mass Effect kind of failed to do).
You can choose from four pretty straightforward classes: Soldier, obviously focusing on guns and shooting lots of bullets and ammo and damage and stuff, although you have several good options in your support/medic branches, and which boasts a nasty little turret gun; Hunter, which, also obviously, is geared more towards long-range damage, snipers and pistols, and nasty spike damage in general, and which comes with a pet Bloodwing which can swoop down and strike fear and talons into your enemies hearts; Siren, which is the shooter version of a mage, able to shift in and out of reality via Phasewalk, avoiding damage for a short time and dealing damage to enemies in the area upon entering and exiting Phasewalk, and focused more on elemental effect damage and melee; and Brick.
Brick is his own class.
Technically it's the Berserker class, but Brick is funnier. Play as him and your focus is mainly on punching the hell out of people and blowing the shit out of everything. Lots of bonuses for punching people, killing people with your fists, killing people with things that go boom, better ways to make things go boom, stuff like that. The game developers don't recommend you start playing as Brick right away.
I picked Hunter first up, back when I started playing Borderlands with my friend at the beginning of break. I thought to myself "hey, easy way to stay at the rear, go shotty-sniper, have the bird for target spikes and what have you, lay back and have fun". Heh. Most of the time I'm up in people's faces spraying them with submachine guns (which is the preferred gun of the Siren) and slashing them with my knife-sword thing that makes a bowie knife look like a toothpick because the enemies on the game are a little fracking nuts and sniping isn't always the best option. In fact, I have a higher proficiency with pistols and assault rifles than I do with snipers because I use them so much.
Which is a nice part of the game. Regardless of what weapon type your class leans more towards or gets more bonuses for, you get better with the type of weapon you use as you use it, so theoretically a support-gunner class could be a novice with assault rifles and have massive damage bonuses and reload speeds and accuracy with snipers. You get better with a certain type of weapon the more you use that type of weapon.
But anyway, I've had all four weapon slots unlocked for a while now (you start with two—up and down on the D-pad), and the two weapons that almost never leave my inventory are a really nasty sniper (up) provided the zoom is good enough (some only come with a 1.0x scope, which is dumb for people like me) and a situational revolver (down; I have an anti-shield and a bladed revolver, the latter of which adds +200% melee damage which at present brings my potential lethal strikes [which has a 35% chance] up to 700% damage), and the other two slots cycle between a nasty shotgun, rocket launcher that fires three rockets (for one ammo) that spiral around a central point and cause fire when they explode, some sort of elemental effect submachine gun, or a Glorious Machine Gun (exact name; I love that gun regardless of level) depending on what I need.
I also use grenades that throw out more grenades in a small area. It's very handy. =)
But anyway. So being a Hunter most of my bonuses at present are either for sniping/pistoleering, for melee (two, actually, only one of which I am using at present), or for my Bloodwing, and since sniping is really really situational the way we two play I tend to pimp out my Bloodwing. At the moment he can one-shot most equitable-or-lower-level enemies, returns 35% of damage dealt to me as health, and has a cooldown time between kill and relaunch of about thirteen seconds. And it's only going to get worse.
Very satisfying.
So today I decided that since most of the game so far had been up-close and personal, I wanted to test out the Siren class. And oh my goodness is it fun. Like, Hunter takes a while to get really good, but when you get it set up nicely it's awesome. Siren just seems to be awesome from the beginning.
First off, your melee attack, instead of a knife or a blade thing (or Brick) is a palm-thrust and a burst of energy, and then your enemy is dead and kind of frozen in space. Second, you favor the submachine gun straight up, so I already had a tad bit of an advantage towards the class (at least in this style of play), and when we played later today as our higher-levels I started keeping an eye out for good elemental guns she would make good use of (technically you play Lilith, as The Siren).
And third, Phasewalk is awesome.
Like, sure, I can use the Bloodwing to aid me well enough, but it's basically a fire and wait for the cooldown skill, whereas at lower levels with the Siren, when as a Hunter I was mostly reliant on guns, I was already feeling for the best times to use Phasewalk and within four or five uses had already developed a sort of rhythm to it: strafe/shoot, melee, backpedal, Phasewalk when in moderate danger, maneuver to advantageous position (you move really fracking fast in Phasewalk), melee to exit if you haven't timed out, improvise/restart cycle. The cooldown for Phasewalk is supposedly 36 seconds, which compared to 13 for my Hunter is ridiculous, but right now it feels like it takes longer for Bloodwing to regen than it does Phasewalk, and I think that with a maxed cooldown-reduction skill(s), Phasewalk will almost be as regular as breathing and I'll be in and out and in and out ever couple of seconds or so.
Which excites me.
Also, there's an entire section of her skill tree set aside for elemental damage stuff, such as increasing party weapon chance to do elemental damage (based on what the gun says: chance, high chance, higher chance, very high chance—which is every bullet just about), doing and increasing chance to do elemental damage with melee or with Phasewalk entrance/exit, etc., etc., health regen during Phasewalk, on and on.
The funny thing is that when I picked Hunter the first time I was having a quiet internal debate between Hunter and Siren and I went Hunter because it was the more familiar concept. =P
And so.
You can play Borderlands solo (which I imagine would be rather difficult), split-screen cooperatively with a friend (although you can still duel each other, which you initiate via meleeing each other to demand and accept), or online with a full party of four which I imagine would be loads of fun. And right about now, I'm pretty well sure I'm not going to get a PS3 until it's no longer current generation, just because there's a bunch more stuff on the 360 that I really like and know I'll enjoy.
I mean, I still want to play Folklore something awful. And Resistance was awesome and actually made me panic, which no shooter ever did before then. But, you know, there's just more stuff in general for the 360, and a good bit of it is pretty solid.
So I want a job.
