Recent reviews by <Frosty>

Ah Borderlands, in a nutshell: The hit comically over-the-top Co-Op FPS Action RPG | Co-op Looter-Shooter with built-in "Your Mom's girl parts" jokes.

There are 4 Character Classes customised through 3 Skill Trees providing a good range for practically all play styles. Each class has one unique Action ability which can be further modified via class skills. As this is a shooter your arsenal of a bazillion dynamically generated guns with unique abilities play a larger role in the game so you don't miss the hotbar full of abilities you might have in other RPGs much. And you'll be using those guns to blast through a variety of enemies ranging from zany midget bandits to epic sized wild game creatures and beyond.

Borderlands is chaotic fun no matter the problems it has BUT it's definitely despite a couple of main issues which revolve around Over-leveling(*) and Damage Scaling(**) when co-oping with characters more than a few levels apart:

(*) ~ Because of the way the designers set mission difficulty (and the lack of difficulty scaling for missions & enemies) in PlayThrough 1 & 2 of the game, it's very easy to completely over-level your character making the majority of the game a cake walk even into the DLCs.
Basically you will become over-leveled relative to Borderlands' mission content if:
-You do a few too many sidequests - You'll over-level.
-You join another person's campaign, gain a few levels and return to your campaign - You're over-leveled.
-You always kill respawned enemies in the way to your next objectives - You'll probably over-level.

(**) ~ Your damage is scaled based on your level vs. your target's level. So if for example you have a good gun with a damage stat capable of killing the target in a few shots but you are 5 levels lower than your target - Your damage will be scaled down so that the shots will barely hurt the enemy, any lower level and it gets even more unplayable very fast. If you are higher level you'll cut the enemy down in extra quick time because you'll get a damage boost.
That becomes super annoying when trying to get friends of different levels together in a game or if you end up joining a host/campaign which is +|- more than a few levels from your char's.

The issue with over-leveling/no-difficulty-scaling was kind-of addressed with the last DLC release which, after PlayThrough2 of the original Borderlands campaign, makes the content scale to your char's level .. but again, that only happens at the end of Borderlands' campaign PT2 when you have practically completed the original campaign twice and it is flat scaling.

(Note: Dead Island (think of it as Borderlands' younger zombie brother title) already addressed many of the difficulty issues that Borderlands had using Challenge/Difficulty Rating based Scaled missions to prevent things like over-leveling while still allowing the campaign design to have easy sections and harder challenges. On top of that a later DI patch introduced per-player enemy scaling option which allows wildy different level characters to play together - higher level chars still benefit from their skill bonuses and probably having rarer weapons while lower level chars can still contribute to the fight effectively instead of being squishy zombie fodder.)

To wrap up: Borderlands is great for some chaotic co-op looting & shooting with a light sense of humour, it has a few issues left in here and there from it's long prototyping & development phase over at Gear Box but it's still great fun to play.

Bring on Borderlands 2 which is looking great and has already shown that it's addressed many of the first's issues, but I really hope Gear Box have used some sort of Challenge Rating based scaling to prevent over-leveling and make it easier for people to freely play in any number of different matchs of different player levels using the same character.

Do you like Co-op or Borderlands*?
How about First-Person Melee, Zombies, Direct Action RPGs, Loot, Recipes, Targetable Dismemberment, Head Stomping, and more!!1!?

Then I've got just the deal for you!

• 
  
  The interface and skill trees are a bit lacking though.
  
  When Riptide** released it seems hating on the DI franchise as repetitive and sucky was the fashionable thing to do again, that's gonna be true for some people... But playing DI at launch (even with the bugs back then) with like minded friends who actually play it as a group (no Rambos or rushers) was great fun for me, the difficulty & resource availability kept tension at a nice level through most of the game.
  [** Haven't played Riptide]

In a sentence: The Indie-Isometric-Co_Op-DynamicSpellSlinging-FFHilarityInducing-Quirky-InsideJoking-ActionRPG Darling of my Heart is Magicka !