2025-11-19

Borderlands

I’ve only ever played Borderlands 2, back when it was new, but I always heard the first game was unironically good. Forgetting to disregard the opinions of Borderlands fans, I kept it on my backlog ever since. It’s not a bad game, but there’s not really much good about it. The AAA pseudo-RPG trend hadn’t really started in 2009, and what we now call “dark patterns” don’t feel maliciously designed here.

It doesn’t make for a very compelling singleplayer game anyways. A lot of main story missions have you find a list of things in an area, which destroys the pacing. I had a side mission where one of the things just didn’t spawn, even after restarting the game. Collision frequently got me stuck in level geometry, especially with vehicles. On top of all that, backtracking was just a constant slog, and usually through lower level areas with trash mobs. Enemy variety was underwhelming but fine, they could’ve done more with AI behavior, but the game doesn’t need more than a bunch of health bars that run at you or shoot back. Late game enemies stepped it up a bit, but they really weren’t impressive.

It’s nice to bash the sequel for its obnoxious humor, but the stuff in 1 is still annoying and unfunny. I gave the story about 1 hour before turning the voice volume way down and delegating the game to my “while falling asleep watching youtube” timeslot. And it’s fine for that, there’s usually not a lot to pay attention to. If you struggle with games that require more than one brain cell, then yeah this game is pretty sweet.

There’s not much more I have to say about Borderlands 1. It’s not terrible but I never want to play it again.

Score: 1/3. I don’t regret playing it, but I can’t really call it “good” unless comparing it to something that is worse in every way. That’s probably what people were doing in 2012.