Borderlands: Game of The Year Edition Review

With its distinctive hand-drawn cartoon art style, Borderlands is an odd candidate for a remaster because it’s look is frankly hard to improve upon. It looked great in 2009, and it still looks great nearly 10 years later as a slightly brighter experience with better, steadier framerate and a few minor tweaks. That’s both good and somewhat disappointing: On the one hand, it reconfirms that Borderlands still looks and plays the part a decade later. On the other, it means there’s little reason to return if you’ve already completed the first adventure on Pandora.

Those with keen eyes may be able to see a difference, but switching between Ultra and High settings on PC seemed like a wash to me. There’s unfortunately no HDR support here, but the console versions will have it (we haven’t gotten our hands on those yet), along with 4K on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. That might add vibrancy to the environments, structures, characters, and weapons, but the graphical style didn’t necessarily need a refresh anyway. Consoles do benefit from 60fps gameplay, though, and the PC version is a free upgrade for owners of the original.

As the cheeky Game of the Year Edition name suggests, this remaster package contains all of the DLC – including my personal favorite expansion of any Borderlands game, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. It also adds four-player split-screen co-op on consoles (still not for PC, sadly), up from the original’s two, at the cost of reduced framerate. And of course, the main campaign still holds up thanks to its solid variety of missions, engaging baddies, and a whole lot of still-very-funny Claptrap humor. I enjoyed tinkering with my build and trying out new loot as if I was playing it for the first time all over again.

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The addition of the Borderlands 2-style minimap is extremely welcome.

Other improvements have been made which help to modernize the original in some respects. First and foremost, the addition of the Borderlands 2-style minimap is extremely welcome. I remember having to constantly rely on the compass, only to realize that the road had forked and my destination was only reachable by zigzagging and backtracking. Not having to pull up the full map in the menu to ensure you’re heading the right way makes a positive difference in the general flow of the missions. Inventory management is also better because you can mark weapons as junk and sell them in bulk at vending machines, while locking them helps you avoid accidentally dropping or selling stored gear that you wanted to hold onto. It’s also really nice to not have to manually pick up ammunition and money on the ground, though you still have to manually grab both from chests and lockers. The remaster also adds six new legendary weapons, but none of them dropped during the 20 hours I played so far (which is normal, since high-end items usually show up later).

One big letdown is that while Gearbox promised the notoriously lame bullet-sponge final boss had been updated to be a cooler and more challenging fight, The Destroyer is still pretty lame. The massive creature with purple tentacles and a giant eye presented little challenge to begin with, but now even though I entered the mission at level 32 I single-handedly killed The Destroyer with an Eridian Rifle and SMG in just under a minute. Those were my weaker weapons, too, as I had run out of Combat Rifle ammo. The Destroyer died so quickly that I didn’t even have to worry about its tentacle attacks – I simply repeatedly shot its eye, and that was that. Perhaps The Destroyer is more challenging in playthrough 2, but the first is a disappointing pushover.

There are a couple of other perks, such as the addition of SHiFT code support, which gives anybody who’s played Borderlands 2 or The Pre-Sequel on current-gen consoles or PC get 75 Golden Keys and two of the new weapons for Game of the Year Edition. Plus, the four original Vault Hunters now have five different heads each to choose from. Even though you rarely get to see your own face it’s a nice feature for co-op, and seeing Soldier with a handlebar mustache is pretty charming.

The Verdict

Borderlands: Game of The Year Edition polishes up a game that already looked great and played well, so the upgrade to 4K isn’t a dramatic transformation. Improvements to navigation and inventory management remove some of the tedious moments that originally slowed things down, but the changes to the already weak final boss fight make it significantly easier, which is the exact opposite of what it needed. Of course, Borderlands’ campaign’s gameplay, humor, and charm hold up, which makes it a reliably good time, especially in co-op.

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