Borderlands Blend - Day 2: Vehicles You Won’t Find In Gran Turismo 5

By William Usher: 2008-09-24 09:28:43

Borderlands Blend - Day 2: Vehicles You Won’t Find In Gran Turismo 5

We’re already on Day 2 of our exclusive Borderlands Blend hype. Just in case you missed it, you can check out our Day 1 news, which focuses on the many weapons in the game. Today it’s all about the wheels, roadsters and horsepower. And as we all know, games like Forza Motorsport 2 and Gran Turismo 5 have hundreds of different cars and thousands of different parts to add to said cars. But neither game will have the kind of vehicles or extension of customizable parts that are featured in Borderlands.

The funny thing about this game is that if you’re not just an avid RPG fan, or a die-hard shooter, you can also be a complete gear-head and still find a niche in Borderlands. There are a number of different vehicles present within the game that vary from the standard dune buggy to truck-like war machines. No matter what vehicle players will drive, each one can be equipped with a turbo booster that can send the vehicle into a warp-speed like speed boost, or extra weaponry to fend off baddies. But that’s just the small stuff.

Borderlands vehicular combat is about as important as the vehicles themselves. Personally, this feature is absolutely one of the coolest in any game, ever! The reason for this is that while traveling from one place to the next, players will have to do battle with all kinds of while beasts that will run along side their ride and try to knock them off (or out) and kill the player. So while trying to get to a town players may find themselves battling a horde of wildlife, using the vehicle’s mounted turret gun or driver-side machine gun. The vehicles have been especially designed to support multiple people, since the game has been built from the ground up with four-players in mind. But that’s not the full extent of the vehicular combat in Borderlands.

Even though the wild-beasts will prove to be hazardous, there’s also desert bandits (i.e., like Mad Max) who will race up alongside the player’s vehicle to try to kill the driver or steer players off course. It gets pretty darn intense trying to fend off bandits and desert beasts while traveling full speed through a canyon. Players who manage to shoot the opposition into smithereens or ram them into a rock, will be rewarded with physics-based explosions, complete with rag-doll passengers flying like they’ve just been ejected from an exploding plane. This feature alone could have been its own game, and makes me question why games like Midway’s The Wheelman are still in production.

But if you’re still not convinced that Borderlands is a sweet game for its vehicles and weapons, you might be interested in knowing that the game sports more than 10,000 different vehicular parts. Honestly, that’s more parts than some of the most in-depth racing simulators out there. Players can drop by the garage to select from wheels, chassis, turrets and everything else in between. Hardcore gamers can mold and shape their play experience with lots of different customizable parts for their vehicle(s). I don’t think you can ask for much more out of a game that isn’t even a racing simulator.

You can be sure to stay tuned in with Blend Games for tomorrow’s Borderlands Blend. You can also drop by the Blend Games Forum to discuss and voice your opinion about Borderlands and other games.

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