Borderlands

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Borderlands is an ongoing series of first person shooter videogames best known for their combination of high octane violence, black comedy, and gleeful irreverence: there's no pretense to a deep and gritty story here, players are just here to score kills, loot shit, and get better stuff to kill even more critters. It's the sci-fi murderhobo experience distilled to an art.

The series is set on Pandora, a frontier colony world that was intended to be settled, but it turned out to have one of those ridiculously long ecological cycles, and what they thought of as a harsh but manageable environment turned out to be its "Winter" season, with "Spring" occurring once the colonists had settled in. Which was when all the giant monsters and ridiculously lethal flora & fauna woke up. The place was basically abandoned and turned into a giant intergalactic corporate prison for humanity's dregs and refuse... sort of like Space Australia.

None of which matters much to your player, who is one of several different crazy mercenaries who has decided they can carve out great wealth on this lawless world, or just needs a place to lie low by finding the elusive "Vault", an mysterious location that supposedly holds a fuckton of riches and loot while thwarting some corporate assholes who's in your way ; a task not easy since 90% of Pandora is made of more-or-less crazed bandits and raiders who want at best to murder you, at worst to make a meat bicycle out of you OR murderous fauna who sees anything as their next brunch. Adding to that is the fact that the Vault is allegedly impossible to find without the guidance of an "Angel" of sorts.

The First Game

After getting off a bus in the little border town of Fyrestone, the player, controlling one of the four different characters, are contacted by the "Angel" mentionned above, who guides them towards the pieces of the Key to the Vault, which turns out to have been built by aliens. Against both bandit lords and later the Crimson Lance (a private megacorp army) hellbent on finding the Vault themselves, the player shoots his way through while helping the rare non-psychotic inhabitants of the planet such as Dr Zed, who is totally a doctor even without a license or Patricia Tannis, the resident Vault expert as knoledgable as she's crazy. The player eventually finds the Vault, only to realize it was used by anciens aliens as a prison to hold a huge-ass monster made of teeth and tentacles, beating the shit out of it.