Just finished Borderlands 1 and maaaaaan, I totally see why people prefer the later games.

If I could describe Borderlands 1 in one word it would be “potential.” Because basically everything about this game is improved in the 2nd game. It has all the elements of what makes Borderlands great, but they’re at the weakest stage. Which is great for a follow up to improve on, which there was. Now I wanna preface this, I did really enjoy the game but now that I finished it I’m probably never gonna go back to it again.

The biggest issue I think is with the guns, there’s not a lot of them. Now yes, on the surface level there are hundreds upon hundreds of guns to get. But there’s only about 5 variants of guns for each type. So you could essentially play endgame with the same gun you played the opening area with. Except later ones have better stat numbers. Borderlands 2, almost every gun is a breed of its own. And there’s actual benefits to using different ammo type guns over others. I got by pretty nicely in this game by just using the standard ones and ignoring shock, acid, fire etc. I picked Mordecai so I was sticking with the sniper mostly, with a shotgun, revolver, and Assault rifle/SMG all on standby for when I should use them.

And the story is… a very basic treasure hunt quest. Now it’s the first game so I’m not gonna harp too hard on it for this, but it did make the overall journey kind of dull later on. The environments however were pretty nice. I think something everyone agrees on is that atmospherically this is the best in the series, and yeah I agree. It has an overall leisurely vibe to it that I enjoyed. And the artstyle even today still holds up pretty well. Obviously it’s not as good as 3, generational jump and all, but visually it was a nice game to look at. Though I will say the overall color palette is severely lacking, lot of brown and grey. Unfortunately this game came out during that period of first person shooters on Xbox 360 that all had to look brown so it’s dated in that aspect.

But yeah, I enjoyed this game. But I’m unlikely to ever wanna play it again.