Being one of those gamers who regularly reacts to games by saying “Wouldn’t It be Cool If…” I responded to Grin’s last original game, Bandits, by saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were some more ambitious sci-fi MadMax vehicular action games out there”. (My mum would be so proud, okay.) Bandits, you see, wasn’t particularly good, but it was good enough for me to want more racing across scorched alien desert and blasting other vehicles into tumbling shreds of wreckage. There was the potent kernel of an idea in there, and a pretty solid mouse/keyboard control method for speeding death-buggies too. And so I dreamed of high-speed action games. Then, all of a sudden there there was Rage, and Borderlands. Now, assuming that Rage is a very long way off, and doesn’t quite fit the Bandits template that inspired my gleeful pipe-dreaming (we’ll see why in a bit), then that leaves me with one focus of interest: Borderlands.
It’s a science fiction desert-world FPS with vehicles, randomised missions and ubiquitous co-op. It also features bizarre alien fauna – possibly a bad thing, given Auto Aborto Assault’s mutant debacle – and lots of motorised fighting with desperate bandits. What it does do is try to create a thriving world, with lots of unexpected encounters – a little like that other open ended shooter I can’t stop talking about: Stalker.
