Borderlands Preview
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Playing as Rolland, the game's jack-of-all-trades character, I spawned in a ramshackle settlement that looked like an Old West town built out of spaceship debris. A nearby bounty board offered me a list of RPG missions: poison skag dens, kill 10 skags, collect skag pearls... folks 'round these parts really don't much care for skags. That might have something to do with the fact that they eat people. There were also a few missions for collecting parts, but my trigger finger was too itchy for that type of work.
My first skag kill was spectacular. Just outside the town gates a skag pup lunged at me; I fired my pistol five times, and the fourth shot caught him in his gaping mouth, mid-leap, for a critical-hit kill. Despite Borderlands' RPG influences, there's no behind-the-scenes dice-rolling going on here - your bullets go where you aim them regardless of your character's level. In a pile of regurgitated bones (skags, like owls, swallow their prey whole and then cough up indigestibles like bones and guns), I found a couple of grenades and a handy new scoped pistol that inflicted fire damage. I almost felt sorry for the skag pups as I levelled up twice from massacring them. In the final game, levelling up would let me improve skills such as Rolland's deployable turret, but for now it just made me generally more powerful.
