Review by: Brandon "Girl Power" Cackowski-Schnell

While the various missions Borderlands may change and the assorted objectives may all differ from one another, here's the basic structure of what you can expect during your 20+ hour journey to Pandora's mythical Vault: shoot things and kill them, get experience, money and new class abilities, get cool new weapons, go out and do it all over again. While that may not seem like a lot, it is just enough to stoke the fires of hoarding that burn within all of us.

Pandora is, simply put, a garbage dump. Stuck in some backwater section of the universe the planet is home to treasure seekers looking for the alien technologies buried deep within the storied Vault. You are one of those treasure seekers and upon arriving to the desolate shanty town of Fyrestone you'll be greeted by a strange woman's visage as she basically tells you to do whatever you're asked to do, kill whoever the residents ask you to kill and basically play nice. It's an interesting hook to get you involved in the story, however the narrative doesn't really expand much past that. If you're looking for a deep story, this isn't the game for you.

Thankfully you'll be too concerned with staying alive to worry about it, as this game is relentless in its mission to destroy you. If a quest has you working your way through a system of caves to an objective at the end of the caves, there's no easy walk back as you leisurely step over the corpses of your fallen foes. Oh no. You'll fight your way in, fight at your objective and then fight your way back out. Thankfully spawn points are liberally sprinkled throughout the maps and as long as you've activated one of them by walking near it, you'll reappear at the nearest spawn point with only a small hit to your wallet as penalty. Those that can't stand to part with even the slightest amount cash can try and kill an enemy, any enemy, as they bleed out thereby securing a second wind, basically a revival with a small portion of hit points. Teammates can also revive other teammates, one of many aspects of the game's co-op experience.

It's easy to tell that this game was designed to be played with other people. Sure killing scags and bandits is fun by yourself but even with the steady supply of missions and enemies the game seems strangely empty when you play by yourself. Throw another person, or another three people into the mix and it's a totally different story. Here the right mix of classes, elemental artifacts, weapon proficiencies and class modifications all work together to make your team an unstoppable force of destruction.