David Dvorak

I had a hard time getting into this game and enjoying it. The graphics are beautiful, the characters are fun, there's some amusing dialog, and in general it is a charming game. However, there are some elements about it that are frustrating. First, there is too much dialog. I don't think it's possible to play the game for more than 1 minute without some kind of dialog popping up. For instance, in each area there is a side objective to find toads and rescue them, there can be from 10 to 20 toads to find. Every time you find one there are at least a couple boxes of dialog to scroll through. Granted, some of the dialog is funny, but c'mon, just let me get back to the main game without needing to go through dialog boxes. Additionally, it felt like this game was in constant tutorial mode. I played i through the second stage and the game was still constantly telling me how to play it. I appreciate new game mechanics being thrown in during a game, but it in this case it seems like you never fully understand how to play the game aside from just doing exactly what the game tells you. It makes you feel like you have little control and are constantly being guided through and are only there to push the button the game tells you to. The battle mechanics are new, I applaud that, yet I found it frustrating. The puzzle on a timer element grows tiresome to the point that I try to avoid battles as much as possible. It's a long process that gets tedious. It's nice they added things to help like the ability to buy time and help with coins, yet still it grows tiresome. You can block attacks, but the problem is the timing on the enemy attacks is always different and you never know when to initiate a block. In Mario RPG for instance it's very easy to know when an attack is going to hit you and when to block. In this game you usually have to take a few hits first before you get it down. Boss battles are even more frustrating, the puzzle element is different and I found it tiresome. Finally, this game added the element of weapons breaking. Yes. Every few battles your new shiny item will break and you will need to backtrack to the nearest shop to get a new one (I haven't found a way to repair them yet). Imagine in Mario RPG needing to repair new hammers or turtle shells every 10 battles. I think you'll still enjoy playing the game, I had fun. Collecting coins and hearing that pleasant ringing sound never gets old. But man, this is the most frustrating Mario game I've ever played.

I enjoyed my time with this game even though the content is very thin. You should know that you will mostly be listening to a story, button pushes are probably spaced apart in 15 minute intervals. It's nice to have Borderlands content in the interval between Borderlands 3 and 4, I just wish they could have held off a bit longer. We just got Tina's Wonderlands in March and I doubt Borderlands 3 will drop any sooner than 2026, so now we have another 4 years in which I doubt any further content will drop. Would have been nice to give this another 6 months to stretch the time between major games. The story is all about the characters who are largely entertaining. I thought I would be annoyed by Anu after hearing her described as neurotic, I actually enjoyed her the most...if we get to see her and Tannis team up in BL4 beautiful things will happen. Fran was great as well, like a more confident version of Pam from Archer but without crossing into cliche. Octavio annoyed me, but that's more likely due to my personality rather than any flaw in his development. I liked seeing another nod to Lorelei, I've enjoyed seeing their transformation from when they were introduced in BL3 through the indirect reference via Paladin Mike in Tina's Wonderlands....I hope this continues through BL4. It was nice to finally meet the executive behind Tediore, it's too bad we never got to see her team up with Aurelia Hammerlock, that would have been quite the ice queen duo. I was disappointed by the large amount of characters that were initially thrown in our faces as if they would be main fixtures, only to never see them again. For instance...Radon, Diamond Danielle (whose name I almost forgot, that's how incidental she is), and Paco. There is a huge push behind these characters in the early game and they each get their own marquee screen introductions...then poof, they're gone never to return. This is especially disappointing when there is so much build up around Diamond Danielle and Paco being mysterious and having unknown backgrounds. And then it becomes irrelevant because we get no further detail...they shall remain forever a mystery. The plot is...incidental, this is all about the characters and how they interact and grow together. It remains to be seen if the MacGuffin of this story turns out to be something of consequence in Borderlands 4. If the original Tales is any indication, it will not. Many people have talked about hating the ending and it being disappointing...I wasn't that outraged by it. Anu's self healing towards the end becomes a bit abstract and drags on too long (building a bridge to empathy...big eye roll), but it's touching nonetheless so I'm okay with it. I was hoping to see a different treatment of Tediore...all throughout BL2 and BL3 in game characters make fun of Tediore guns for being garbage. I wish that could have come out more in the company's look and feel...instead their treatment feels very similar to Maliwan in BL3, nothing new here. As I considered several reviews of this I wondered if everyone who reviewed it got the same story experience due to the "choose your own" adventure nature to the game. I wonder if different choices would have produced a story different enough to change a person's opinion about it. I'm curious enough to play it again and see if I can produce something different. For example, someone commented about the "skateboard rating" not being properly explained...in my playthrough it was quite thoroughly explained, but perhaps not everyone got that chunk of dialog.

This game is an absolute joy to play. It captures everything that I loved about Borderlands and Borderlands 2, addresses what went wrong with Borderlands 3, and introduces new features that make me hopeful for Borderlands 4. I love the introduction of Melee weapons. Melee has always been an underpowered afterthought, now it shifts to a primary means of dealing damage. It's also one more item that you can leverage for an enhancement. Spells are incredible, and I feel bad for Gearbox because it's going to be hard to go back to grenades after the amazingness of spells. They sound great, they feel satisfying, there's great variety in the ways you can cast them, and the effects are amazing. Melee and Spells greatly uplift the gameplay in Wonderlands. The adjustment to legendary drop rate was welcome. Legendary items feel legendary again and I strongly recommend not messing with how it is. I enjoy the Overworld, it's a novel way to navigate between maps and it's less tedious than vehicles (which were absent and definitely not missed in this game). The detail of the Overworld is nicely balanced, it's not so linear that it is tedious but it's also not so detailed you get lost. I know there's tons of goodies out there that I may have missed but I'm okay with that, I like that it's not easy to 100% clear and I can keep exploring. I appreciate being able to nullify encounters, it's simple enough to do if I'm not in the mood to be interrupted. The characters and voices are great. I was bummed out by the handling of Tina in Borderlands 3, I'm grateful to have a chance to interact with her young self one more time before she presumably grows older in Borderlands 4. Izzy is amusing, I wish she could have been more of a mission giver like Moxxy. Wanda Sykes was a great choice for Frette, her voice translated really well to a robot character. I love that I get to hear Andy Samberg being Andy Samberg while I play this game, it's like watching Brooklyn 99 and playing Borderlands at the same time. People will say that this game is too short. Eh, maybe. It's definitely not the length of Borderlands 3 but I feel the opportunity and incentive to explore is greater. I have much more fun poking around the cracks and crevices of a map looking for a lucky die than I do listening to Tyreen Calypso's annoying banter. People may also say this game is buggy too. Yeah there may be some things functionally that are weird, but I feel the game is much more hardened than Borderlands 3 at time of release. I can navigate the menus without any performance issues so I call that a win. My hope is that Gearbox carries forth what they did well here and applies it to Borderlands 4.

This game is very annoying. The cheesy animation style graphics cheapen a legendary series built on 8 bit graphics. 9 and 10 were still in the same style, to call this one 11 is misleading. Should have been branded as its own series like Mega man X. Yes the graphics are beautiful. Are they true to the Mega Man series proper? No. And the difficulty. Good lord. On the 2nd easiest difficulty I can't beat one boss. The stages are fine, the boss fights are too much.

I was enjoying the first few hours of this game. Then I got to the Shambler. Without any spoliers...you are put into a situation where you need to quickly find a solution or the game ends. This is pure trial and error, there is no clear indication at all of what you need to do. So what happens is you wander around looking for a solution, you die in under a minute, you reload the game, you try again. Repeat. With no indication at all of what the hell to do. Time consuming, frustrating, and no fun. Even after I found an explanation online of what you need to do, I still can't do it within the time given. Screw this game, I was enjoying it but this part ruined it for me.