GEEK – Let’s get this straight: Gamers are huge hypocrites. We don’t accept the overabundance of QTE’s (Quick Time Events, for all you noobs) in games like Ryse, Halo 4, Beyond: Two Souls, or even the otherwise awfully delightful Tomb Raider; but, as an industry, we’ll go right around and give the Game of the Year award to a something with NOTHING BUT QTE’s, The Walking Dead.
Ahem.
Thing is, Telltale just gets it. They’re telling you right off the bat that they are here to tell a story. It’s in the name. What these developers time and time again bring to the table are games rife with awesomeness. Much like Bioware’s epic journeys of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, your decisions affect the outcome. And unlike Telltale’s previous ventures, this one’s got pace. It’s fast. If you fall asleep one night, the game might end. There’s no stalling. There’s also more to it than a mere spamming of the Y button, or an anti-ADD swipe of the right control stick. YOU are in control of the situation. Well, at least most of the time.
Now, if you haven’t played a Gearbox Borderlands game before… OK, I’ll be nice (*whispered voice* although I really really feel bad for you), don’t worry. The first installment of Tales From the Borderlands is a 2.5-hour episodic adventure full of laughs, outstanding voice work and incredible graphics. It’s the perfect comic book for someone who hates to fucking read. You know, read stuff in their hand. And despite how awfully easy it can be just pressing a singular button from time to time — as the majority of the game you’ll just be chillin’ and breathing in the spectacle — just watching protaganists Rhys (Troy Baker; but who else would play an employee of Hyperion?) and Fiona (Laura Bailey) snake and charm their way through the rough and tumble post-apocalyptic western backwoods of Pandora made it all worth it. Familiar Borderlands vets will embrace the familiar signature sounds and easter eggs (hello! The name of the first ep is called Zer0 Sum!); newbies will just love the shit out of mangling through every mysterious situation, and playing with all of the nifty, cybernetic tech.
The pacing takes a hint of Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, as scenes exchange from different POV’s and all the nonlinearity eventually comes together. The ending is especially great, and the preview of Episode 2 plays like a perfect teaser you’d see on weekly episodic television. The only issues I had with the game were that there wasn’t enough to do during many of the bigger battles scenes (most of these are much longer than other Telltale games), and almost too much to do out of them. Some of the quieter moments of Tales stall. Since Borderlands and Borderlands 2 — and the Pre-Sequel, I’m guessing — were all about loot, you can bet that money is the prime reason for all this catatrophe in the first place. As Fiona, you’ll also come across your share of loot, but how important the currency you choose and use to bribe and buy weapons with (or hold onto) in the near future is anyone’s guess.
Look. Tales from the Borderlands is a game where you watch cool shit happen, fall in love with quirky characters, laugh out loud a few fucking times, and revel in the mystery of the future. If that’s not enough because you want your thumbs to get numb, then stay away. Oh, and shout-out to the host of Talking Dead and The Nerdist himself, Chris Hardwick, who does quite the bang-up job (literally) as Rhys’ accountant/funny dork sidekick, Vaughn.
NERD – By now, gamers have either played through Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and are on to Telltale Games’ Tales from the Borderlands or were distracted by the fifty other AAA games that have come out in the past few months. There certainly aren’t going to be a lot of people lining up to get the new installment of Gearbox’s franchise at GameStop this holiday season, so why talk about this game now? Well, after you’re done creating nemeses in Mordor, running around the country of Kryat in Far Cry 4, or slaying dragons in Dragon Age: Inquisition, you’ll probably just want to have some laughs with some old friends while grinding for experience and loot in a much smaller scale and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel will be the answer for that – as long as you get it at an after-holiday sale price point.
Here’s my top four reasons why you should be looking to get Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! on December 26th:
1) You Can Be Naughty and Nice: That small, DLC-feeling scale of The Pre-Sequel that countless reviews have gone on about actually has an upside. Sure, gone is the feeling of being on the giant planet of Pandora (you’re on the moon now, kid), exploring it Mad Max style for all the secret loot that can be found, only to eventually save that whole world. But it’s replaced with a very tight anti-hero narrative unique to the other Borderlands games that runs on the rails of the quippy, meta-humor that Anthony Burch set up in Borderlands 2 (he also helped out with the writing of The Pre-Sequel). For the first time in this dystopian space future you get to see what it’d be like to be the bad guy, and you can hear your characters say all the nasty thing you’d say to annoying NPCs that are so helpless to your rare grenade-shooting assault rifle. The villainous Handsome Jack of BL2 is quite charming at the beginning of this origin story and it’s fun witnessing his Portal-esque voice over descent into evil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze7BrRNaBSM
2) Be Captain America on Pandora: Two of the character types in The Pre-Sequel are alone worth the cost of admission (er, the inevitable 80% off the cost of admission that Steam, and surely Amazon, will get you). My first playthrough of the Pre-Sequel was as Athena “The Goddess”, mainly because her character is telling the story through flashbacks and I love continuity, but eventually I fell in love with her Vibranium, I mean Eridium shield. Okay it’s not made out of Eridium, but it definitely felt like I was going Steve Rogers on the Dahl Corporation every time I threw it out and it flew back to me. One perk even allows you to instantly revive players by hitting them with the shield. Athena wasn’t alone in her unique perk. One of the most hyped selling point to Borderlands fans was the ability to play as Claptrap “The Fragtrap”, who was always the most divisive, but defining character in the franchise. You either loved him or hated him; but he always embodied the anarchic, snarky comedy of the game and 2K Australia really brought that into his gameplay. His randomized perk, which randomizes an effect to cast on the team, always keeps you on your toes and can heighten a situation, or make it annoyingly desperate in a fun way.
3) Low-Gravity Sniping Will Your Breath Away: From how the story resolves in The Pre-Sequel to where it goes in Borderlands 2 makes it seem like this will be the only chance players will get to utilize the new setting-specific gameplay mechanics that 2K Australia brought to the table. Since most of your time will be either on a space station or Pandora’s moon, players will experience low-gravity throughout TPS which makes for some awesome Ender’s Game-type action movie moments. You’ll constantly find yourself making an insane jump from one cliff to the next, firing away at the baddies before you land. One of the major boss battles had me throwing shield mid-air at enemies that were leaping right at me, like I was Xena: Warrior Space Pirate. More often than not I was also leaping desperately towards oxygen bubbles. The new addition of the oxygen bar only intensifies the pace of ever battle – and is really good mechanic to really concentrate the action on an otherwise sprawling landscape.
4) Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good: …that may have sounded wrong without hearing it sung by Ray Parker, Jr. Yes, I mean that Ray Parker, Jr. – of Ghostbusters fame. Along with the return of Anthony Burch come all the nods to geek culture. This time Burch found a way to one-up his Splinter Group side mission that led you through rooms full of rats, through a sewer, to a table with a pizza on it (if you don’t get the reference by now, I don’t know why you’re on this site). The new geek-reference laden mission in The Pre-Sequel temporarily puts you in the shoes of Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore but in space. What makes this better than a mere TMNT reference is the loot you get at the end (if you do it right). In The Pre-Sequel it’s called an E-Gun, but really – let’s just say if two of you have it equipped, you don’t want to cross the streams. As soon as I got the E-Gun, I was a Ghostbusting Captain America for the rest of the game.
It may not yet add up to the package that Borderlands 1 and 2 brought to the table, but The Pre-Sequel already has a new DLC out, and judging by how Gearbox treated the last two titles, I’m sure there will be a lot more where that came from. For now, keep an eye out during the Holiday Steam Sale or wherever you buy your videogames for this under-the-radar title.
