Quick Look: Borderlands: The Handsome Collection

Excellent been waiting to see how this turned out

never really got into Borderlands. I played both and didn't care at all about them. Now, Destiny... there's a game

Hey, a Quick Look.

As someone who doesn't play games on PC (I prefer to spend my money on owning all three home consoles, and prefer the console experience) the PS4 version of this game is basically fine.

I held off on buying Pre-Sequel, knowing it would eventually make its way to the new systems. While it's disappointing that it doesn't offer a rock-solid, 60fps experience, it's still a much nicer looking, and better running, game than its last-gen counterpart. So essentially, I'm happy with it.

It's still a superior experience of both games to their previous gen counterparts, and I'm happy about that.

The technical problems, mainly the tearing, look real nasty on the Xbone version, though. :/

Borderlands! Yo that Telltale game is PREEETTY good. I'd recommend it! Oh and these games are pretty good but I'll played the hell out of them on PC :I

Seems like the Xbone version is the worst to get when comparing this between consoles. I've been playing on PS4 since mid last week and I've experienced no screen tearing and only one or two instances of frame rate drop. Other than that, my Ps4 BL2 experience is on par with the PC version. Load times feel about equal as well.

I know Jeff hates BL2 and BL:TPS, but it really seems like he doesn't like them because...they aren't the first Borderlands.

Meh.

Jeff has a real case of rose-colored glasses as far as the story and characters of BL1 is concerned.

Gotta agree with Jeff on this one. I never found a cool gun in BL2. BL1 I had to make hard choices about getting rid of lower level guns that I freaking loved playing with.

Same feelings as Jeff, I never found a gun that stuck with me in BL2. The first one handled the guns and most of everything else better.

I don't remember Jack yelling "Son of a Taint" as much as he does in this QL, it is kinda off putting

This website in general paints a way too generalized picture of BL2 since forever. That game was/is really fun, the story and characters are not even close to as terrible as some people make them out to be (I liked Tiny Tina and I thought Handsome Jack was funny, and I know I can't be the only one).

I wish BL1 was included in this package, if only so Jeff could see how it doesn't hold up at all.

Has he ever been vocal in praising the story or characters of BL1? I feel like i've only ever heard that he preferred the feel and the general gameplay of the first game.

@2headedninja do you think you're the one painting a "too general" picture? "The game is really fun" and "The characters are funny" are about as completely open to opinion as "The game wasn't as fun" and "That characters weren't funny".

The humour and writing by Anthony Birch are meme and internet driven largely, and if you've spent 5 minutes on this website you know how much every staff member loathes internet humour for the most part.

Characters like handsome Jack aren't that way so I'm not sure why they don't like him. It's fine not to like any of it, but not liking something doesn't make it terrible. Borderlands 1 felt completely soulless to me and just for having a personality and style I loved the second game a lot more. I also happen to enjoy the humour and writing so that goes a long way.

Jeff's story complaints aside, I feel like he would've enjoyed BL2 more playing as a different class. I played about 5 hours when it came out with the commando and got really bored. Wasn't till I bought it for PC and started over as the mechromancer that I actually enjoyed the game. The anarchy mechanic gets pretty ridiculous, especially at higher levels.

In order to get matchmaking to work, you have to turn your settings from friends only to public.

What weapon Manufacturer did you gravitate to Jeff? It seems like you were using a lot of Jakobs guns for a character who doesn't really benefit from them. Maybe try some Vladof or Dahl weapons? Though you've probably already know about all this :X

@lackingsaint: Last Bombcast he started to defend the story, but kind of quickly dropped it as the first game had a premise opposed to an actually story to tell (until the DLC at least).

@alistercat I loathe Anthony Birch, but Borderlands 2 actually had a story at least. I will agree that the meme humor was way overdone, but it isn't even most of the jokes in the game. I also agree in not understanding what exactly they don't like in regards to Handsome Jack. He seems like a different version of Pagan Min and everyone on the Bombcast seemed to love him.

I liked BL1 a lot, but BL2 turned me off with how bullet spongy enemies were. Mechanically it wasn't fun, and this remaster clearly doesn't change that.

I was strangely the exact opposite which is really weird!

I love Anthony Burch. He's great.

And yeah, the meme-yness gets pretty overblown most of the time.There is way way more original material in the game.

Both games had their issues. BL1 was pretty light on character development and story, with the exception being some of the DLC. The mechanics were pretty solid however, and the loot system felt balanced. Finding a new gun seemed to happen at regular intervals.It's been a while, but I also felt like the difficulty scaled a lot better, but I could be mistaken.

For better or for worse, BL2 put more of a focus on the characters and the story. I loathe Tiny Tina, but felt Handsome Jack was pretty solid. Everyone seems to highlight the meme/internet humor issue, but there was plenty I found enjoyable that didn't seem like some obvious internet joke. Maybe I need to spend more time online. When it comes to the mechanics, they did fuck up a few things. While the skill trees are more fleshed out and allows for more versatility than BL1, unique/cool weapons seemed hard to come by. When I did finally come across a cool weapon, I had more powerful but blander weapons in a couple levels. Add on the fact that drop rates were really shitty, and it starts to make BL1 look like it had significantly better gunplay, even if it is largely the same. BL2 also had some difficulty issues when it came to later playthroughs. Just because I want to keep leveling up doesn't mean I want every encounter to be badass city.

To be clear, I loved both games, and probably put more time into BL2 just because of the amount of content. I do think @jeff would have enjoyed another character like Gaige or Salvador more than Axton, as I found him to be pretty bland, but I think Jeff's issues with the game are bigger than that.

Well I know that Borderlands 1 was not great and 2 was great but still has a bunch of problems.

Even though Handsome Jack wasn't "memey," I do distinctly recall actively disliking his lines and characterization. The entire "Butt Stallion" thing, eating pretzels, "kay bye," "and his kids were all, like, waaaahhh," "did you see that? Her head went *pbbbbt*." All of it just felt so forced and, I don't know, like every time I heard him talk, the game was all but flashing "HEY THIS GUY SURE IS WACKY, ISN'T THIS HILARIOUS" in the center of the screen.

I mean, overall, I didn't like most of the humor in BL2 so it's not really the fault of his character in particular, but he did happen to speak a lot of the lines that I disliked the most. Claptrap was probably the runner-up, but almost every character has at least a couple lines that felt to me like they were trying too hard.

Yup. This sums up my feelings rather succinctly. A couple of my favorites were blasting the asshole neighbor off the mountainside and the rednecks v. irish quest line. To my recollection, BL1 doesn't even try anything like this. It's basically just, must open vault because, duh, you're a vaulthunter. I also thought it was clever how they integrated the BL1 characters into BL2's story.

I 100% agree with Jeff. I LOVED Borderlands 1 enough to get a platinum on it and hit level 69 on Lilith, and at least 20 on every other character. Didn't even finish Borderlands 2. I wasn't playing Borderlands for the story or character development so I was fine with there being none of it besides the occasional dialog in the background that I could chuckle about and immediately forget, in contrast to BL2 trying to make you care about any of it. Didn't like Tiny Tina, Handsome Jack annoyed me, the characterizations of all the BL1 characters bugged me, everything about them just made me wish they'd shut up and let me get on with it. Also I never found a gun I really liked in the 20 or so hours I played of it, while even now I can think of 3-4 in BL1 I loved (a Jakobs revolver with a scope I used for about 10 levels, an SMG that did silly amounts of fire damage combined with Lilith's ability).

And I still think BL1 holds up pretty good. After being sort of bummed by BL2 I went back to 1 a few months on PC later and put about 10 more hours into it before stopping myself to play more recent stuff. Game is still awesome.

There's a perfectly fine incendiary barrel standing next to the target, no need for fire weapons.

wow, just looking at this video gave me a headace, how can you call this a new generation when you go from 720p--> 1080p, but cant maintain 60fps on old games? it drops to 40 a lot of the times.

goddamn does Jeff sounds tired and bored during this.

Ive got a pretty nasty case of the clap(trap)

I didn't like Handsome Jack not because he was using memes as humor, but because his humor seemed like it was trying to create a meme out of it. He just never shut up about the stupidest stuff, and it got to a point where I was wondering how on earth he got to be the head of an interplanetary corporation if all he does is spend his time on the radio harassing a mercenary on a backwater planet.

@gradris said:

That was a lot of Borderlands 2 for me. Especially Tina.

Borderlands 2 is still pretty rad, but I've played it too much to just buy it again.

I don't know if people noticed this, but Jeff always, and I mean always, plays FPSs with assault rifles. In almost every FPS I've played, an AR is outright the least interesting way to play the game.

Heck, even in Destiny, where ARs are downright awful, dude insisted on them. Jeff, dude, please try precision weapons, they're so much more fun to use.

I wish one of these games I could get into, this and Destiny were so easy to burn out on and became such a slog.

Never got into BL2, so maybe gonna give this a shot when it\s far cheaper.

jeff's "the commando class in BL2 isn't OP like it was in BL1" criticism of BL2 has always rubbed me the wrong way. it seems super myopic and dismisses a significant portion of the game. i played through BL2 3 times solo with the non-commando classes and had no problems with survivability

i do agree with jeff's "no one particularly good gun" assessment of but i realized that and adjusted my expectations about 10 hours in. there are quite a few interesting and powerful weapons in BL2 and for me discovering them and how they interacted with my build (and adjusting my build to interact with them) was part of the reason i kept playing

Huh...I didn't know Armature was doing the port work for the Pre-Sequel. Between their original 'Batman: Arkham Origins - Blackgate' and their ports of this, MGS and 'The Unfinished Swan,' they've really discovered their niche in development by not having a niche.

Watching them go from high level Borderlands 2 to low level Pre-Sequel really shows what I don't like about the way they handle the gameplay. He's killing same-level fodder enemies faster when he's level 2 than he was when he was 35. It's an inverse power curve and that makes progressing and finding better guns meaningless when it just gets more tedious as it goes along no matter what.

How does it not hold up?

Never understood going with the commando class in these games. There's a bunch of games already that cater to that style yet BL gives you so many more choices so why pick something so generic? I started BL2 with Zero and found his style underwhelming but once Mecromancer came out, I switched to her and had much more enjoyable time with the game. I did feel the burnout much quicker with 2 than with the first game though. I felt like I struggled just a bit more to see the game through to the end. Maybe BL2 just felt a little bit too meme-y or just obvious a guy who writes an internet series wrote jokes that would appeal to that crowd.

I just never got the whole Handsome Jack thing but Gearbox seem to be in love with him. He's a shitty two dimensional character. There was never a moment where the player could connect with him in any way to understand his actions. He was just a dick all throughout the game and he just came off as annoying and you wanted to kill him just to shut him up more than any other motivation.

There's almost nothing I agree on with Jeff regarding BL2. I think it is a fantastic game, loved the characters and the story was okay. It looked a lot more interesting than the first Borderlands, which was just a soulless game to me. The environments are a lot more diverse too.

I do hope BL3 will mix things up a bit though. I need this franchise to start looking different. Not the exact same look but slightly better. New engine please. Also hope quests will become more interesting. Like I said I had a ton of fun with BL2, but it was pretty much fetch quest after fetch quest. If BL3 does the same, it will just make me burn out on these games.

I'm also one of those who liked BL2 better than one. Cooler locales, and more of them. I thought the larger difference between weapon manufacturers was cool, and made weapons more distinct. Sure BL1 had cool weapons, but so did BL2.
And I liked almost every character in BL2. Tiny Tina is the only one I kinda hated, but outside of the main game she is pretty funny. Especially in her own DLC.

Don't really see all the hate when it comes to Handsome Jack either. He is kinda like a mix between Archer and Barry from Archer. In fact, I started watching Archer because someone compared Handsome Jack with Archer.
Mr. Torgue is great, and his DLC is worth it just for his lines alone.

So yeah, BL2 is a vast improvement over BL1, a better game in every way in my opinion.

@aistan: The power curve feels way better in The Pre-Sequel than in BL2. Enemy health/damage doesn't scale as ridiculously high in TPS, which helps even out TTK.

The big complaint I always hear about BL2 is "MEMES EVERYWHERE" but I can barely remember any of that stuff in the game. There's th edouble rainbow easter egg, dubstep jokes (which isn't even a meme?), a throwaway Arrow-To-The-Knee line, Torgue making a "Straight-Up Dawg Time" reference (which was in a DLC), and...that's all I can think of? Where is this overwhelming amount of memes that everyone bitches about?

Good god, the framerate is horrible.

Borderlands 1 is the best Borderlands. 2 was tolerable but the characters just got worse as they talked more.

At this point, I feel people being offput by internet humor is practically a meme within itself.

Oh yeah! More HD collections!

Lol at thinking borderlands 1 was better.