ComingSoon's New Tales from the Borderlands review goes into why this sequel lacks the heart, humor, and charismatic character seen in the original.
New Tales From The Borderlandsstumbles out the gate in two ways: its format and first “episode.” The “episodes” are more like chapters that abruptly stop the action and are vestiges of the past since this game was released all at once and not over a period of months. Regardless of its classification, its debut chapter starts weakly and does little to make you care about its main cast.
There are some attempts at exploring each character’s past trauma, but the writing isn’t adept enough to do anything meaningful with the themes of self-worth and connection that the narrative circles around. Due to a lack of charm and personalities that are never fully fleshed out, these hollow characters are a far cry from the original’s charming trio of Rhys, Fiona, and Vaughn.
Given Gearbox’s expertise in frenetic shooters, there was an opportunity for the sequel to break away a bit from Telltale’s formula, which had begun getting stale when the studio collapsed in 2018. Instead, Gearbox is following that established blueprint, not bothering to try to innovate or freshen it up — instead hoping that specific kind of genre fatigue has just subsided in the past four years.
The only changes to this well-trodden formula are negative ones. There’s a distinct lack of “They will remember that” prompts after significant choices, making it difficult to understand how character bonds are developed. There are also annoying quick-time event hints that alert you to when they’re about to occur, which takes out all the surprise and only clutters up the screen.
A few minigames have also been added into the mix, such as Octavio using his jailbroken phone to hack into various machines and Anu smacking her custom gun to make it work . These are mostly just time wasters, though, as there’s nothing to them — the hacking especially feels like a remnant from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era — and at least the smacking is funny the first time you do it.