Borderlands

Every year the shelves fill with identikit first-person shooters, many of which seem happy to blithely recycle the same tired old ideas without the slightest attempt at innovation.

Borderlands bravely endeavours to buck this trend by applying a number of twists to the genre, most notably with its distinctive art style and a variety of gameplay elements that you might normally associate with role-playing games (RPGs).

The game's sci-fi storyline takes place on far-flung planet Pandora; a once prosperous colony that has descended into an anarchic wasteland full of monsters and mercenaries. Your character is a fortune hunter who arrives on Pandora in search of a fabled vault of treasure.

At its core, Borderlands is an action-led shooting game not unlike, say, Fear 2. Rather than blasting your way through linear levels, however, Borderlands offers you an open world to explore – first on foot and later in vehicles – with quest-like missions to complete. You can choose between four characters, each with their own upgradeable skills. An RPG-style levelling system allows you to earn experience and skill points by completing missions and defeating enemies.

Similarly to many dungeon-crawlers, Borderlands also offers plenty of opportunity to loot crates, piles of rubbish and even toilets for cash, ammunition and other items that you can either use yourself or sell. A clever random weapon generator means that there are literally millions of different rifles, pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers, grenades and so on to uncover, all with their own set of vital statistics.

Borderlands certainly looks different, thanks to its unusual cartoony visuals. But, despite all its interesting ideas, the game isn't quite as revolutionary as its makers would like to think. Like many other action games, it fails to provide anything resembling a decent plot, for example.

However, if you're bored of World War II or alien shooters, this Mad Max-inspired mix of genres offers something a little more original, especially when played online in co-operative mode with up to three other players.