Just play the original
In every story where a wish is granted - whether by some primary-coloured goon sticking out a lamp, a creepy piece of fairground entertainment, or a piece of cursed bushmeat - there’s always an ironical sting in the tale. You wish for health and it turns out you can’t die. You wish for a personal chef, but it turns out he only does offal. You wish everything you touch to turn to gold, then it’ll turn out there’s no way to turn it off - or it kicks in just as you go to the toilet, that kind of thing. You should, as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
I’m sorry I wished forNew Tales From the Borderlands, everyone.
New Tales From The Borderlands is an interactive narrative adventure set in the Borderlands universe, where you choose dialogue options, actions, and pass or fail quick-time events. And it fuckin' sucks.
As before, you play multiple characters, switching control between them as they do different things in the story: anxious pacifist scientist Anu, her (heavy air-quotes) street-smart adoptive brother Octavio, and bloodthirsty fro-yo shop owner Fran. They are also accompanied by a robot called LOU13, pronounced Louis. For reasons I won’t go into, the unlikely trio team up to steal a healing crystal from a vault, try to monetise their discovery, and eventually save the world from both the bloodthirsty head of the Tediore megacorp, and a strange entity living inside the crystal.
I honestly don’t like being very mean about games. So in the interests of both brevity and clarity, I have decided to present the rest of this review as a list of things I like, and a list of things I did not like.
Good things about New Tales From The Borderlands
Things about New Tales From The Borderlands I did not like
Look, I know making almost any game is a labour of love, but I spent like a week being sad and not knowing why, until I finished this game and realised I was happy because I didn’t have to play it every day after work anymore. All this does is prove that Gearbox cannot be trusted with their own IP anymore. The very existence of New Tales From The Borderlands is a more effective critique of corporate structure and the pitfalls of capitalism than any of the content of any Borderlands game. Apart from the best one. Just play Tales From The Borderlands.
