Borderlands Preview

The editors at Virgin Media have conjured up another preview, and this time it’s for 2K Games and Gearbox’s Borderlands.

2K’s recent hand-on event was divided into two halves. First I and my fellow hacks were given half an hour at the very start of the campaign, allowing us to get to grips with the basic action and feel of the game; after this we were warped forward in time to a later point in the story, giving us the chance to use some tooled-up level 20 characters. I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I found that both sessions seemed to rocket past. Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess.

Session one began during the early moments of the campaign, just minutes after character selection. For this first test I was playing as Roland the soldier character who appears to be something of an all-rounder. As you might imagine, the opening scenes are essentially there to ease you into the game and it concepts. You’ll enter the first settlement of the game a largely deserted shanty town, populated by an amateur medic and a hyper-chatty robotic unicycle and promptly run into a gang of Mad Max-style bandits. These chaps look pretty menacing, but they don’t put up too much of a fight, leaving you plenty of opportunity to practice your headshot skills. Combat controls are everything you’d expect from a game like this: you can free aim or aim down the sights of your gun using the left trigger, while a quick melee attack comes in handy for anyone who gets too close. Unlike Fallout 3, combat in Borderlands is driven purely by player skill so if someone’s in your crosshairs when you pull the trigger, they’ll definitely take a bullet; no invisible dice rolls here.