"Borderlands 1 GOTY Enhanced" What Have They Done To My Childhood?

 

    LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT. I originally started to re-playing all of the games in this series because the Borderlands movie was finally coming out. I had played Borderlands 1/2 before, but without any of the DLC's, so this time I was hopeful that I'd have more to play for since I now own everything these games have to offer. I absolutely regret playing this game, not because I think the base game itself is bad, but this is an awful, and I mean awful remaster. If you do plan on playing this game I just hope you do it early enough in your life so that the humour still might make you laugh, and frankly just stick with the original if you can. I actually really loved this game as a child, and for the most part I still do, it's just that it's aged terribly, and frankly if you save the DLC for the end, like I do, any and all passion you have for the game will be lost. At this point, all I hope for is that Borderlands 2 hasn't aged as poorly as this game has, because that genuinely was one of my favourite games as a child. 

    I'll get it right out of the way, do not play the DLC in this game, I do not think it is worth it at all. Sure there are quests in them, but they aren't very interesting, and frankly all of them feel like very blatant attempts at extending the length of the game. Take for example, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, which is by far the worst offender. Why is there no fast travel in this map? It's a genuine question, and why are over half of the maps in this game long winding roads that take 5 minutes to traverse through in one direction? And why is the best car in that DLC also one of the slowest as well? It's genuinely infuriating how this DLC should probably be closer to 1 hour in terms of length, but they artificially extend it, not only by making these long roads that you have no easy way of traversing, but by also introducing these quests that are basically just killing waves. You don't even receive any meaningful rewards. 

    The Moxie DLC is a cool mode for anyone that likes to kill in this game, except it misses a very important aspect of this genre, any sort of good loot. After all this game is supposed to be a looter shooter, you get a bunch of gear you're constantly swapping out and killing as many enemies as possible, but that's just not the case here. Instead, you just get some random setting with some random gimmick, and frankly it's just kind of exhausting to play, especially after you've just finished the entire game. And don't even get me started on the bugs, which just makes these DLC's that much more infuriating. Fun fact, you can't even place down a custom waypoint in this game, because if you do, you'll forever be plagued by one being on your minimap for no good reason, even if it's literally off of the map. It's so stupid, I don't get it, it's such a small thing but it's just so persistent that you can't get rid of it. Not to mention, the settings don't even save properly? Tell me why my frame rate is always set to 50hz? Or why it won't save some my anisotropic filtering? Or why text will randomly disappear? All of these little things start to add up, and what you get is a very infuriating experience that slowly builds up to the point where you reach the end, and you're just kind of fed up with everything.

    The same could be said for money and loot. Now don't get me wrong, at first, earning and finding all of this loot is fun, but eventually you reach a point where all of it stops mattering. Remember that cool gun you won by slaughtering a boss after 7 tries? Well it's too low leveled so it's functionally useless compared to a much more common gun you just found off of a random grunt. There is practically no point to the vending machines at all, and by the end I was just carrying millions of dollars on me because in my mind it was better than spending them on the most useless loot in vending machines. I get that at some point, since I did all the quests, I would start to become pretty over leveled for everything. But at the same time, how can you claim yourself as a genre-defining game, then slowly lose part of that identity as the game goes on? By the time you're about 75% in the game, it becomes less of a looter-shooter, and more of just a shooter, and not one that is all that great either.

    I think part of what made this game feel lacking is that there is no voice acting. The story just feels so much weaker when most of the story is explained through text on the screen that you could accidentally skip through, or low quality cutscenes that you could also skip through by accident. I mean sure, the story was never the strongest suit of Borderlands 1, but when the game plays like it's Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, it makes it very hard for me as a fan to stay engaged into the story. Not to mention, the villain is kind of easily the weakest character in the story. The zany, wacky side characters are cool I enjoy them, like Zed, Scooter, Marcus and Tannis. But Commander Steele, who's supposed to be this big bad villain, needs to be randomly shoved in every time you kill a boss just so you remember that yes she is indeed still exists/is relevant to pretty much anything. I don't know the story just wasn't as strong, and combine that with all of the terrible little mishaps the enhanced edition introduced, this wasn't a very pleasant experience for me to play.

Final Score: 65/100

    Look, I'm probably giving this game a higher score than it deserves because I really did love this game as a child. And there were moments, real glimpses when everything was working well enough and I just felt great bashing everything in as brick with my firsts. I hope that maybe on a first listen you'll be able to experience that as well, but for anyone that's already played this game, I'm hard pressed to find a reason for you to even try it. Fun fact, the DLC is so infuriating that I didn't even bother trying to complete it. Seriously, I'm actually so angry at how bad this remaster is. Though, I don't know why I'm surprised considering how low the Borderlands franchise has fallen pretty much since the Pre-Sequel. I'll get to them eventually I promise, it's just I now lack the enthusiasm to finish them as quick as I once did.