Uneven, but with a lot of good. It’s got some wonderful aesthetic sensibilities and an interesting art style that feels psychonauts inspired at times, but with its own bend.

All of the characters and levels are very interesting from at least a visual standpoint and sometimes from their characterization itself. The dialogue is borderline painful but the overall plot is pretty fun with some good moments.

The gameplay is also not totally perfect, feeling fairly clunky with some extraneous elements but largely feels good enough for its runtime.

Altogether while it has a lot of rough edges, it comes together pretty well, with enough variety to carry it home

a very high rating is a foregone conclusion, but i feel weird enough just Playing an incomplete game let alone putting a numeric score on it. still that foregone conclusion is impressive given that this is at least a little outside my wheelhouse...im not good at fps games, nor is the relatively minimalist arcadey level design what i look for in this kind of fps campaign...the game is defined by its setting of hell, but mostly has far more in common with the hyper abstract worlds of early id software games then the progressive locational satisfaction and internal logic built on by the likes of Dusk (a strong favorite of mine). still it is hard to argue that the game doesnt wrench as much moment to moment emotion as possible out of everything at its disposal...like quake, its abstraction allows for undiluted expressionism in its locations, which set the stage for its well-praised intensely focused and outrageously gratifying mechanics, which occasionally wrap around with perhaps the most inspired part of the games presentation, which is to pump the sparse plot full of Traumatic Lore and Operatic Melodrama...might be harder for people who arent me to swallow if the act of playing wasnt so involving, pulling u into the world before u know whats going on. i will say, its a little difficult for the game to keep a complete hold on me when im not actively playing it...i need a bit more then Very Very Very Fun and Very Very Very Cool for it to leave a deep impression in my heart. but perhaps this is just an arbitrary mental thing due to the games unfinished state, and when its finished and i look back on it, the impression will be clearer. and even if not, its hard to be too disappointed that its main aspiration is just Be The Best Designed FPS Of All Time, especially when as far as im concerned, it basically succeeds.

A movement shooter that sticks to the basics.
The gunplay is satisfying and the movement, while simple, has it's own style.
Level design is clean, arenas match the gameplay well.
Enemy designs work well by the end of the game, but for a long time they just don't provide enough of a challenge, partially due to the disappointing AI.
Overall it's just a decent game - think of those AA games you'd pick up at a store just because the cover looked cool.
The only major issues are micro stuttering (had to limit the fps to 100 instead of almost twice that to make the drops disappear) and some oddities with the controls - switching weapons is really slow and clunky without using hotkeys for the 7 guns, and sliding and slow motion can't be toggled, which could be pretty uncomfortable for some people considering how much you use them.

As the starting series for Borderlands that came out in 2009, I gotta give it due credit. It's a fun fps with interesting characters, cool and interesting weapons and bosses, and lots of side quests to partake in to take a break from following the main story. I will say I wish there was more dialogue from the characters you interact with, and sometimes the shooting and driving mechanics feel really janky. The leveling up system can feel harsh at times too but otherwise this was really fun, don't think I'd ever replay it though.