Villordsutch reviews Borderlands: The Handsome Collection…
I can still recall buying my first copy of Borderlands: GOTY edition and instantly being impressed with the visuals and the dark humour that came stapled to it, so much so that when Borderlands 2 arrived in 2012 I actually went out and bought it on release day. This was always a rare thing for me as I normally didn’t like to fight through the herd, plus I liked to wait until few patches had dropped to fix a few bugs. Borderlands 2 had taken the rather splendid visuals from the initial game, but this time they’d ramped up the dark humour. Instead of the humour being stapled to it there was a bowie knife holding it firmly in place; this sequel was fantastic. I wasted weeks moving through this sequel on the Xbox 360 but eventually I passed it on never to be seen again…until now.
Landing on our Next-Gen Machines – PS4 and Xbox One – is Borderlands: The Handsome Collection. This collection is so huge in content that if I listed all the DLC here it would require its own page and demand its own word count! The two main parts however given are Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. You do get all of the DLC ever released for these games – characters, clothing et cetera et cetera. It’s packed to the rafters with everything and you can even carry over you characters from your old machine. The odd thing that’s missing however is the original Borderlands?
Not being distracted with quantity I take to examining what the quality looks like – is this game going to be a direct dump of everything and are we just expected to be happy or will it sing? I took to the game I know best which is Borderlands 2 (we’ve recently reviewed Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel here at Flickering Myth) as I know this game off by heart. I can tell you I was truly awestruck with what has been achieved graphically here; this game shines on your television screen as you run around Pandora across its numerous environments, interacting with friends or foes. Gearbox and 2K have delivered something so violently beautiful into my living room, it has me grinning like a Cheshire Cat whenever a hyper-violent kill is made by my character and he drops another amusing quip. The game is still Borderlands 2 but this is however in no way an insult – the original game on its own is huge, sprawling, quest filled and challenging then on top of that – when you eventually do get around to finishing – you have the DLC’s to contend with. I am ecstatic that Borderlands: The Handsome Collection is now here – on these new machines – for the old gamers to reminisce and the new gamers to discover.
A testament to not just the look but the playability of Borderlands: The Handsome Collection is also shown in the movements of my household, i.e. when my daughter appeared during my play-testing of the game. My daughter I need to explain is what you may deem as, “PC Master Race”, and if a game isn’t similar in ilk to Skyrim then she isn’t playing it. An hour into my play-testing of the game, she’d already asked to create a character and we are testing out the split-screen capabilities of the game together, this option runs rather great too though the menus for the weapons can be difficult to read as you have to scroll up and down to see what they can do. Still this doesn’t detract for the fun of having two people cut the place to pieces together in the same room; you can have up to four people on one screen – if you wanted to – but I can see your play space being not much fun at this point.
Borderlands: The Handsome Collection is massive package of gaming greatness! Buying this is treating yourself to something extra special in these bleak times of games that fail to impress or make you smile. So go outside, buy this and make yourself happy!
Rating: 9/10
(N.B. This version of Borderlands: The Handsome Collection was reviewed on the PS4)
Villordsutch likes his sci-fi and looks like a tubby Viking according to his children. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5&v=ONsp_bmDYXc
Originally published April 1, 2015. Updated April 13, 2018.
