Borderlands [PS3]

With under two months to go until the release date, you should know at this point that Gearbox's Borderlands could turn out to be one of the year's most unique and interesting titles. It's a game that combines first-person shooter gameplay with the loot-drop mechanics of action role-playing games like Diablo. You run around in a giant open world called Pandora, take on quests from non-player characters standing around in towns, earn experience by killing and questing to learn new skills and become a more durable and effective combatant, and can join with up to four others to participate in co-operative gameplay. As long as Borderlands manages to maintain the momentum of its gameplay beyond the first few hours, it could mean great things for anyone who picks up a copy.

A large chunk of the early game was included in a build I recently checked out, letting me play from the beginning for hours on end and experience quite a bit of the leveling and questing systems, and most of what I saw seems good so far. The game offers four classes to play around with, each of which has a primary skill. The soldier – my class of choice – gets a deployable turret that can be dropped on the ground. Once deployed, it automatically sets up and starts firing on its own as soon as it hits the ground, making it easier to wipe out groups of foes.

It's much more than just a temporary gun, however. There's a shield that extends to either side which you can hide behind, giving you a little bit of cover if you're under heavy fire from humanoid enemies or acid-spitting monsters. As you level up and are awarded skill points, its functionality can also be altered as you dump points into learning new skills. The Soldier's skill tree, like the other three classes, is divided into three segments. All Soldiers must learn the turret skill, but beyond that it's up to you. For the first tier of upgrades, you can make it so the turret regenerates the health or ammunition reserves of all allies nearby when it's active. Obviously this could be important when playing with others. For those who prefer higher damage and a more self-reliant style of play, the base turret damage can also be augmented.

Each skill can be boosted with up to five points to enhance its effectiveness. Once five are allotted to any combination of tier one skills in one of the three branches, the second tier opens up in that branch, and so on. In this manner, just like in plenty of action-RPGs out there, you're forced to choose in what manner you'd like to specialize your character class. Following the Medic skill branch gets you additional healing skills where your turret has a chance to revive allies and where your friendly fire can restore their hit points. It also allows you to strengthen your bullet resistance, bolster magazine capacity, and following a successful kill gives you and any allies the chance to get a bonus to health regeneration.

In the Support branch, you'll find more general purpose skills that increase how effectively your shields recharge, boost the number of shots your turret can spit out, reduce the time you need to wait before again deploying the turret, and even alter turret functionality to make it shoot out supply drops at timed intervals. The Infantry branch is about offensive power, giving you the option to boost your effectiveness with combat rifles and shotguns, and even modifying your turret so it can blast out guided missiles as it shoots.

In terms of your character's equipment, you'll find four slots for weapons, one for a shield tool, one for grenades, and another I didn't manage to equip anything to. The shield tool determines how much damage your Halo-like shields can absorb, how fast they recharge, and special shield tools come with added bonuses like a boost to your health rating. All sorts of grenade types can be fitted in the appropriate slot, including an interesting one we found called MIRV grenades. In addition to causing fire damage, these grenades exploded into even more grenades, which then, naturally, exploded. Pretty satisfying.

Considering it's been said by Gearbox that there are anywhere from a few hundred thousand to over one million guns in the game, it's no surprise I've come across quite the variety so far. Plenty are trash that fall from weaker foes, and the ones I've managed to pull from the corpses of bosses and "badass" enemies (elite, or more powerful versions of a base enemy type) are the ones I've stuck with, which is pretty much standard operating procedure for loot-based games like this. Higher quality weapons carry different color associations with their names, like in Diablo. I'm currently using a purple rifle called Bone Shredder with a 2.4x zoom that's proven to be quite effective as a primary weapon. For backup, I've got a green BLR Static Repeater – it's a pistol with a 4.1x zoom that does electrical damage and happens to be highly effective against shields. I also keep equipped The Clipper, another pistol associated with fire that can periodically ignite its targets, which does damage over time until the flames go out.