Even from a distance bandits will take potshots while skags, evil devil dogs, routinely bite at your heels, begging for a shotgun blast. And you won’t need to look for trouble, it’ll come to you. Outside of the archaic quest design you’ll be waltzing across Pandora, doing battle with anything that moves. You quickly fall into a routine, and with Borderlands yet to find a cadence with its goofy characters, much of it feels quietly muted. It feels akin to MMORPGS, right down to the minuscule amounts of EXP and optional rewards. I spent hours running from one quest giver to another, handing in assorted items to complete objectives. After picking your Vault Hunter, each of which has its own distinct abilities, you’re thrown into a small town and funnelled through unimaginative tutorial quests. Thankfully, what matters most here is the shooting and looting, two elements that hold up wonderfully in a gaming landscape that has grown to adopt the loot shooter formula to a massive degree. Claptrap is still an annoying piece of trash, though – a high-pitched robot spewing lewd innuendoes that are desperately out of touch, like a friend who keeps repeating a once classic joke hoping for the same laughs. On the flipside, it also makes everything feel bland and disengaging to a degree, characters mere spectres compared to the enthusiastic personalities they’d become in future instalments. It’s almost freeing in a way, stepping off the bus and hanging with Claptrap before stakes were upped and the fate of the entire world hung in the balance. This is before the days of Handsome Jack, Sanctuary and the greater staples of Borderlands lore, and so it feels lightweight in retrospect. Every vault hunter can be kitted out with a quirky selection of hatsĪ quick recap – you are a Vault Hunter, one of four ambitious mercenaries making themselves known on the hostile planet of Pandora.
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