Borderlands Reviews

We'll no doubt being seeing a slew of Borderlands reviews this week, but at the moment there only appears to be a couple to report about.

First we have Kotaku, who stick to their traditional method of not tagging any score to the article:
Borderlands' reward system, granting you big bonuses in cash and experience for completing quests, kept me coming back for more, even when I had planned to take a break. Just one more quest, I'd say, in search of new loot, new levels and new areas to explore. This quick addiction to the game's frequent pay-offs was made more intense during co-op, when the rewards come much more frequently thanks to cash and experience sharing. (Warning: while the money and XP are shared, the rest of the loot is first come first served. That, and the lack of a secure player-to-player item trading option, means you should play with trusted friends.)

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You're going to spend a lot of time in Borderlands going from point A to point B. And for the most part, all that hoofing it around is going to suck. Here's a long list of reasons why. The game's map is sometimes confusing, meaning I too often had to check and recheck and recheck my location via the menu screen. There is no mini-map overlay, unfortunately. Maps are lacking in key information, things like the locations of main characters, where town-to-town "transitions" actually go, and the ability to place your own waypoints. One of the faster travel concessions, the teleportation between "New-U" respawn points, is made less useful, because most missions don't tell the player where to go to collect rewards, so teleporting can be kind of a crapshoot unless you're taking good mental notes. Finally, vehicles, while much faster than walking, can sometimes get stuck on world geometry, resulting in a very long jog to your destination.

And then there's