Borderlands is a well-known “looter shooter”, an FPS with RPG elements and plenty of guns to pick up. However, the story is fairly minimal. It’s an interesting decision to choose it as a Telltale game - which are almost pure story and it plays more like an interactive TV series.
Tales From The Borderlands does a great job with what it has. There’s some recognisable enemies, and characters from Borderlands 2, and The Pre-Sequel. The visual style is a perfect match for Telltale and Borderlands.
The game is mainly told through a series of flashbacks, with main protagonists Rhys and Fiona captured and currently interrogated by an unknown masked man. Fiona is angry at Rhys for something, and as the story plays out, you see their friendship blossom, and it takes a while to see how their relationship (temporarily at least) fell apart. The twist on who the masked man is – is very surprising, and I only had 1 suspect.
Some of your choices makes you an “unreliable narrator”, and the masked man declares “that didn’t happen”. Some sequences can be Rhys imagining how a plan would play out. There is a weird sequence where Rhys is battling Hyperion employees using “finger guns” imagining a gun battle - did this actually happen?
Rhys is a Hyperion corporate employee and Fiona is a Pandorian con-artist. Rhys seems a very well meaning, but naive character like Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood. After Rhys gets screwed over by Vasquez and loses his chance of promotion, Rhys aims to get revenge by intercepting Vasquez’s deal for a Vault Key, using his friend Vaughn’s accounting role to borrow some of Hyperion’s cash. Unknown to Rhys, the deal is a scam by Fiona’s crew, and when the deal goes wrong, they team up to reclaim the money. They then team up to find the “Vault of the Traveller”. The game often switches between Rhys and Fiona as leads because they are often in different areas.
Rhys has some cybernetics; a mechanical arm, and an Echo Eye. This allows him to scan objects and perform some hacking.
The robots are overly comedic. Loader Bot is more animated and has more personality than the ones you battle in Borderlands 2. Whereas Gortys is extremely childlike and is probably supposed to be more annoying than Claptrap.
There’s the usual illusion of choice where you can choose to be nice or more mean, choose to fire your only bullet etc, but the story is often written to play out a particular way despite your choice. The story branching involved to actually make your choices matter would be a serious challenge. So regardless if you choose to forgive Vaughn, he is gonna disappear for a long time to avoid branching scripts. The feeling that you are making a choice is what makes these games so effective though.
Tonally it is all over the place. It’s cartoony with slapstick elements such as falling from a high speed vehicle and surviving without being hurt. There’s loads of jokes and quirkiness because it's a Borderlands game, but then when it tries to be serious – it’s a massive contrast. It can also go for shock value too like spooning out an eyeball, or peeling off the skin of a corpse.
Rhys is apparently Handsome Jack obsessed but you don't find that out until Handsome Jack shows up in hologram form. He seems very frightened rather than in awe though which didn’t seem to match this statement. For some reason, Rhys only tells Vaughn he has seen Handsome Jack and not a hologram of him. There's a weird conversation where Rhys says he can see him and Vaughan tests him by holding fingers behind his back. Only 1 test is enough to convince him that Rhys is telling the truth. It didn’t seem like a believable conversation. When most people think Jack is a maniac, it seems weird that someone like Rhys would idolise him.
There was a mention that Valerie is August's mother. This is another element that didn’t seem like it was supposed to be a reveal, so it’s like some narrative has been cut, unless I simply didn't pay enough attention.
Despite these Telltale games not containing much gameplay, I felt like this was even more minimal than their other games. There are the usual quick-time-event action sequences, dialogue choices, and walking to find an appropriate object, but you can go long sequences without doing anything, and even the walking segments are often very brief.
The walking is quite jarring as the movement doesn’t feel that smooth and some areas are severely limited with invisible walls. It would be much better just replacing these with a cutscene.
Some action sequences don’t even have interaction, but others do. This is usually a simple button press to dodge, hammer a button, or move the mouse to target and click. I thought it was very clunky to interact with objects; I seemed to misclick the prompts as if the buttons were smaller than the graphic, or sometimes it was due to the camera panning as you moved your mouse.
The inventory is very limited and the items that characters carry are often important key plot devices. So it’s not like a traditional point-and-click with inventory puzzles. As far as Borderlands loot goes, there are a few crates to open which contain cash for Fiona. At a few points in the game you are given some cosmetic choices of clothes, and paint jobs for a vehicle but it has no bearing on gameplay.
The game froze a few times, but I'm not sure if this was the game or my PC. There are a few sections where you are supposed to hold a button to move until a cutscene triggers, but if you release the button early, everything on screen is completely static like the game is frozen, but it’s just waiting for more input. It seems strange that the characters aren’t programmed to have a breathing animation or similar.
The final episode is a bit disappointing. It seemed a bit silly; influenced by Power Rangers, a tiny robot somehow transforming into a giant. An important character throws herself out of a moving vehicle and (even if she survived) there’s no way she would get to her intended destination in time anyway. Then when she is about to die, there is a Deus Ex Machina to save her. It’s like they decided to just run riot with the stupidity, fully ignoring the idea of occasional serious tone.
If you have played these games before, then you generally know what to expect. If you want an interactive 10 hour TV show, then it’s worth a go, but those looking for gameplay need to look elsewhere. It has comedy, action, and drama for a great adventure, but is delivered in an inconsistent tone which could annoy some. It definitely made it interesting.