I adore FPS games and kind of enjoy comics, so an FPS game that looks like a comic should give me childlike glee, right? Let's fire up Borderlands GOTY and find out.
The game starts off with an unskippable bus ride a-la Half Life to a desert shanty town. You choose your class (I picked Siren), get off the buss and meet Clap Trap, your resident comic relief. I spent some 20 minutes here hunting for all the boxes with money, only to later realize they respawn, and I ended up with $50k+ after 20 or so hours of gameplay. Enemies respawn too and can do so while you're backtracking, which makes it very inconvenient when you just want to move on, and especially since gunplay is not that interesting.
Upon death, you lose some cash and respawn at the last pole you visited, and since they're strewn about the map, you'd be well-advised to not die at all. The first problem I noticed is that enemies tend to be bullet sponges. They all have levels and there's no way to outsmart or outgun a higher level enemy; it feels like shooting at a mountain. Conversely, doing missions that are below your level is a breeze, and I felt like I can melee my way through an infinite number of low-level enemies.
Borderlands GOTY feels very gamey, and it broke my immersion all the time. There are shops conveniently placed at the entrance to each map that look like vending machines where the player can buy medkits, ammo and guns. I never bought medkits or guns, rarely bought ammo, and only focused on ammo capacity upgrades. There is a variety of shield modules as well and some of them provide slow HP regeneration, which I found the best because they meant just hiding behind cover was enough to avoid dying. That felt interesting because it gave some tactical depth to gunfights.
There's all kinds of junk that you can loot and sell but your inventory is fairly limited. Some mission rewards do provide inventory expansion upgrades, but you'll still have to haul the junk back and forth to sell it off. Overall, I spent some 30% of my time in Borderlands GOTY staring at the inventory and shop menus, which I don't find particularly appealing and certainly not fitting for an FPS. The game seems like an inside joke, and considering how the later Borderlands games turned out, I feel that the purpose of Borderlands GOTY is to make kids waste their time with it while the devs laugh at and mock them for playing it.
I can best describe the gunplay in Borderlands GOTY as floaty: enemies move like they're floating and the guns feel like they're floating in my character's hands. There's little weight to anything, and I'd say the dialog reflects that as well — it's all just weightless gibberish. The recoil in Borderlands GOTY is really weird and does not reflect how I'd expect a gun to behave, which significantly changed the way I approached the game. This is best seen if shooting at an enemy when aiming down sights (ADS) compared to shooting at the same enemy zoomed in with a weapon that has optical zoom.
Recoil doesn't really affect precision if you're zoomed in but does when ADS, meaning that an optical zoom pistol that does 10 damage performs better than an ADS combat rifle that does 25 damage. On paper and in theory it should be the reverse, but what that means in practice is that you'll spend up to a minute trying to take down one guy if you're using an ADS weapon while his comrades chip away at your health.
Switch over to a much weaker weapon that has optical zoom and now you can take them all down within a minute and move on while spending less ammo and time and losing less health. Headshots produce a critical hit, which is typically 200% of normal weapon damage, so again you're rewarded for rapid-fire mid- and long-range sniping that spares your time and ammo. Elemental weapons have a chance of producing a burn/stun/etc. effect on each hit, and again the rapid fire weapons make it more likely to stunlock or just burn through enemy health compared to slower weapons.
I'd be using a combat rifle with iron sights and shoot at a low level enemy prancing in front of me, with my shots at his center of mass missing 90% of the time. When I switched to an optical zoom pistol, my shots hit 90% of the time, and I could consistently pull off criticals, which effectively negated the weaker weapon damage. So, snipers should be the strongest weapons in the game, right? Well, there's a catch there.
The enemies are fairly stupid and either charge you or get stuck behind cover. Some of them also have regenerating shields, like you do, and require a concentrated burst of damage to take them down before their shield recovers. Using a sniper that has only 3 bullets in the magazine means you can't afford to miss and must aim at the head to guarantee a kill but again you have to deal with a glacial fire rate. Snipers are useless against those enemies that charge you and nearly useless against those that are stuck behind cover, so their only use is in taking down exposed, unreachable enemies standing high above or high below.
I tried the slow, tacticool approach until I got bum rushed by enemies who hacked me to death, so I switched over to an SMG with optical zoom and just mowed them all down and continued sniping the living daylights out of everything that looked at me funny. So, you should look for rapid-fire weapons with a huge magazine, an elemental effect, and optical zoom. Snipers, shotguns, and revolvers are so underwhelming because of their small magazines, slow fire rates, slow reloads, and the bullet sponginess of enemies, so my advice is to go for SMGs, combat rifles, pistols, and rocket launchers, which will let you dish out mayhem, retreat to cover, exploit AI stupidity, and repeat without dying. Close quarters combat might work too, but I didn't find the game encouraging it that much, probably because I used Siren.
One huge problem with Borderlands GOTY is its save system. The game saves automatically and may produce corrupted saves for no apparent reason. At one point, I was about 25 hours into the game and had a level 20 Siren. I was quitting the game when the power went out for a couple minutes, and I could no longer launch the game due to a "failed to find file for package core" error. The save file somehow became corrupted and when I reinstalled Borderlands GOTY and tried to load the save, the game warned me "corrupted save detected, delete it Y/N?". The game overall appeared to be shittily made and some cursory searching showed mentions of a memory leak, with the suggested solution being to occasionally quit the game and restart it or to stabilize it by disabling in-game cutscenes (click the image to open the 820x593px, 529.27 KB version).
I found no way to resume the game with my Siren character, meaning that all that time went down the drain. I did have some fun, but the core gameplay loop just wasn't strong enough to make me go start it all over. What if it happens again when I'm level 50? Some forums did discuss solutions, but nothing they mentioned worked for me, so that was it. Maybe if I were underage and this was my first FPS, I'd be more willing to do it all over again? I don't know, man, it just seemed so lackluster.
Borderlands GOTY is way too undercooked for my taste and, while the graphics still look good even in 2020 due to their stylized appearance masking the lack of fidelity, there is just way too little meat in it for me. The RPG elements are barely present, save the elemental system and experience that lets me level up to choose a "2% more damage with a critical hit" skill. At one point, I got an item that said "Resilience skill +1", which sounded great, except that I had no idea what that did and the game made zero effort to explain it. According to the wiki, Resilience increases elemental damage resistance by 6% per level. Whoop-te-fucking-doo.
The entire world of Borderlands is utterly forgettable because everything in it is stripped down to its core. Buying items from vending machines is the most logical approach to implementing a shop, but it's just so forgettable and insulting to the player's intelligence, like a brash reminder, "Ha, you like microtransactions, don't you? You filthy capitalist paypig." It just seems shoehorned in for no good reason other than breaking the immersion, and that doesn't stop with shops: everything in Borderlands feels like a microtransaction, include combat (I microtransact two bullets to my enemy in exchange for him losing 20 HP). As soon as I uninstalled the game, I immediately forgot all quests, NPCs, and in-game events. Who was I killing and why? I swear, the game can induce amnesia, that's how bland it is.
The checkpoint/save system is a real problem and I found it gamebreaking. Luckily, I experienced it early enough so I didn't invest too much time in the game. Why are developers so obsessed with putting all their eggs in one basket? Just let me back up, copy, rename and otherwise fiddle with my save game files. Whatever, it's Borderlands GOTY, so take it or leave it, I guess. For me, it's quite clear — I'll leave it and move on to greener pastures.