New Tales From The Borderlands Review – Forgettable Story, Unforgettable Characters

The humor in the Borderlands mainline series has been one of my greatest complaints. I’ve had some good laughs while playing, but Borderlands’ jokes land more like a shotgun blast where some hit and others don’t. That’s okay in bursts, but shotgun blast after shotgun blast can get exhausting. Telltale Games’ take on this universe, Tales From The Borderlands, remedied this by providing a more nuanced and subtle take on the humor coursing through the franchise’s veins. This Borderlands game was a favorite of mine, thanks to its great storyline and the memorable characters. 

I’m happy to report Gearbox’s take on that formula in New Tales From The Borderlands retains that same sense of humor with a vastly improved visual style more in line with the series’ latter entries. It also features a cast just as memorable – I already want more of them. Unfortunately, though, the entire package is let down by a lackluster overarching narrative lacking cohesion, and I’m left wishing Gearbox gave these characters a better story to exist within. 

New Tales From The Borderlands features a few familiar faces and names with Tales From The Borderlands’ Rhys, now CEO of gun-manufacturer Atlas, and other mega-corporations like Maliwan and Tediore. Borderlands 3 gamers should be familiar with Promethea as the setting for most of this game.

Altruistic but internally selfish scientist Anu teams up with her adopted street-smart brother Octavio, his assassination bot LOU13, and Fran’s Frogurt owner Fran. The trio work together in order to save Promethea and secure the vault treasure. They also attempt to change and create the world using an anti-gun device. This story is a good introduction to the story and it’s five parts. I was eager to find out where it took me. However, just hours later I found myself confused. 

The story moves between subplots which seem unrelated to the main conflict without spoiling any details. At one point, I’m desperate to dodge a Tediore invasion. Then, an hour later, I’m on a Shark Tank-like game show trying to pitch Anu’s device to investors. And then, my primary concern is seemingly to open a business amidst the rubble of the Tediore invasion that’s still ongoing. Although I was hoping for more of the Save-the-World narrative that the first episode had, the steps and sidebeats along the route are more distracting than necessary and more loosely connected.

With a nice bow at the end, the story wraps up well. I felt happy to have seen what the characters had gone through. The cohesion that I experienced in the final episode and the rest of the game would have been a plus. 

New Tales From The Borderlands contains four of my favorite characters from this universe, aside from the story. Anu is funny and quirky in a classic scientist-getting-in-the-way-of-herself way, and some late-game revelations add more depth to her personality that I appreciate. Octavio plays it cool, and I had fun shaping the kind of “cool” he is with my choices. Fran is a sexually-confident middle-aged woman who’s put aside subtlety in favor of outright telling people, “we should bone.” She feels the most like a classic Borderlands character – with a handful of fart jokes, too (admittedly, one of these made me laugh a lot).

However, my favourite was Lou13. My favorite character was LOU13. His witty and funny humor, as well as his struggle to escape the confines of his assassination programme kept me laughing the whole time. While each character had their strengths, the best conversations were shared together. Each person was brilliant in its own right, but I enjoyed the way they riffled on each other. 

Of course, the success of these moments came down to Gearbox’s excellent character writing and the choices the game presented me with at both trivial and pivotal moments in the narrative. Fran could be set up by me making a powerful comment when Tediore troops arrest her, or she could simply answer my questions with fart sounds. Gearbox was a joy to create. It is reminiscent of Telltale. 

Mostly gone are the Telltale “this person will remember” notifications. This is an interesting touch. It removes the gamified aspect from the game and lets the player make their own decisions without being aware of how it affects the story. They were missing in my experience. I didn’t feel like I was in control of my actions without these tips-offs. While I had made all the decisions I wanted to make, it wasn’t clear how those choices affected the bigger narrative. The instant reactions were there; it was easy to tell if Octavio, for example, didn’t like what Anu said. My actions changed the overall narrative in a way that was not obvious. Although I made guesses all through, I am still unsure if Decision X was the cause of Consequence Y.

I also wasn’t impressed by what I was doing when I wasn’t selecting dialogue choices. The game’s mechanics are simple: swipe left, right and up; or press a button to repeatedly push it or hold it down. Occasionally, you can walk around a small area to find money or talk with locals, but these didn’t do much for me. This type of adventure gameplay was the standard years ago at the height of Telltale’s development, but it feels old now, and I wanted more variety. 

Occasional minigames such as a parody JRPG or one where you had to hack into a PC and remove NSFW messages from a screen helped, but it was not enough.

Vaultlanders, an episode-length minigame featuring Vaultlanders figures, can be fun, but it is only for the very first time. Each episode has a different set of Vaultlanders, each with its own abilities and stats, but that doesn’t matter much. Never did I struggle to defeat an opponent and didn’t worry about my stats or abilities. That’s because playing involves mindlessly spamming the attack button and occasionally dodging by swiping a direction when the enemy attacks. You can skip this minigame, as with all of the others, but I found a good reason to play through them. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a purpose, and these quickly became pace-breaking annoyances I had to deal with when I just wanted to get back to the story. 

When my 10 hour journey in New Tales From The Borderlands came to an end, I felt satisfied that I had experienced it. There’s good in there, but it’s sometimes muddled by dated mechanics that feel more obligatory because Telltale did them in the previous game rather than something necessary to its enjoyment. As a character-driven game, the cast is outstanding. Gearbox could have provided a stronger story than their individual characters.

Ultimately, New Tales From The Borderlands feels like more of the same and fans of the first are likely to enjoy this, but given it’s been nearly eight years since that first one, I wanted more of an evolution.