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I love a bad joke. Dad jokes, terrible puns, and one-liners—they all appeal to me, which is why I’ve always found the Borderlands universe painfully funny. I still laugh about the town called Buttsville in Tiny Tina’s Wonderland. The original Tales from the Borderlands was as hilarious as it was heartwarming, introducing new characters who—thanks to its adventure game structure—actually had a purpose and a story I cared about. And despite the genre shift, it was very much a Borderlands game in every sense: vault hunting, scams, capitalism, guns and quirky humor.
Need to know
what is that An episodic, QTE-heavy story-driven Borderlands spin-off.
Expect to pay: £34.99/ $39.99
Developer: Gearbox Studios
Publisher: 2K
Reviewed on: Intel i7-9700F, RTX 2070 Super, 32GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Link: https://newtalesborderlands.2k.com/
Release date: 21 October 2022
New Tales is still fun, but too many jokes overstay their welcome and overall, it just feels a little rushed. It’s obvious that Gearbox tried to mimic the pacing and storytelling style of Tales, but instead, we have the introduction of characters that are never really seen again and plot points that end up being loopholes.
The narrator in New Tales from the Borderlands presents the three main characters as idiots and doofuses and he is not wrong. Our trio of “heroes” might be some of the most annoying protagonists I’ve ever played, which is a credit to the writing team because that’s exactly how they’re supposed to be. You play as each character in rotation and will control various conversations in a group setting. Murderbot, Lou13, is also present for the majority of the story but you can’t play him, which is quite disappointing.
Allow me to introduce these dingus: there’s Anu—a nerdy doctor and a restless, socially inept weirdo—and her younger brother, Octavio, a power-hunter. If TikTok was in the Borderlands universe, he would be the app’s most annoying creator. And Fran? Actually, I really like Fran. She is confident and makes it her mission not to lose her shit to the other two idiots every five seconds. She made a lot of sex jokes that I laughed at, and some I made a shocked Pikachu face, so I have some complicated feelings about her.
New Tales from the Borderlands shares a similar theme to the rest of the series: one mega body tries to take over the other, searching for Vaults and the treasures that lie within. Eridium, easily the most sought after commodity in Borderlands, can move into New Tales: it’s healing shard time. Only, there is an angry entity that lives in the shard that was separated from their mortal cosmic twin. And did I mention that Tediore managed to get his hands on it and that the apparently sentient little thing possessed Anu and no one knows what to do with it? Yes.
This is… actually a cage
For once, there isn’t much focus on the main or supporting character’s backstories, which is quite refreshing. I don’t much care who these losers were before they became a bomb expert/sniper/taco stand owner. There is a quick turnaround of introductions where said characters are only briefly seen again in montages. There are a lot of montages, one per act, and they kind of sucked. I would have preferred them to be playable sequences and, while the songs used in them were good, there wasn’t the usual bombastic use of music to set the scene like in other Borderlands games.
Whether it was a budget problem or a time constraint, there is a lot missing from New Tales. All episodes are available upfront, so you won’t be waiting months between releases, but you’re definitely still left wanting. In one sequence, Anu and Fran are in a shark tank and Fran is beating sharks. Only, it’s all QTE with Octavio narrating and—except for a quick glance at the blood seeping into the tank—you don’t see any of the action. And considering that Fran’s whole ethos—if you choose to keep her on the straight and narrow—is “I won’t break my angry sobriety,” it was really disappointing to see it all reduced to behind the scenes.
QTEs felt really overused—did I really need a quick sequence to slap some cage bars, or as part of a gratuitously overwrought “science experiment” to see if the healing patch? really worked? There are a lot of what could be really fun moments hidden behind QTEs, and I can’t help but feel that a step-by-step release of each chapter so that more time could be spent on the development of New Tales would be the better option. You can play with the difficulty of QTEs in the menu, and failing one doesn’t automatically lead to death or game over, but it will affect the story in ways that may not be clear until later.
5 billion dollars? That’s almost 6 billion dollars…
As usual, New Tales is full of toilet humor and is really funny, but you probably won’t find it that funny if you don’t like memes. Fran and Lou13, in particular, had some cracking one-liners that made me pause the game to laugh. In between the usual awkward, *finger guns* kind of laughs like “[screams internally]” and timely use of the phrase “thirsty”, is a reference to OnlyFans (if you guessed it’s OnlyFrans, then well done), and insults about playing story-driven video games with lots of four-wall-breaking stares. .
On the other hand, there are a lot of sex-heavy jokes that don’t land well at all, and many are recycled making them a bit stale after a few hours. It’s also painfully boring to see the characters in pretty much the same situation every time. Anu will freak out and be super awks, Octavio will play buzzword bingo himself and act painfully incompetent, and Fran probably makes the situation sexually tense for reasons. It takes the majority of New Tales to see some real growth between the characters but for some reason they just never seem to learn. Or maybe I just made some really bad decisions for them.
At the end of each episode, you get a rating on how well each character connects with the other, and Lou13 will rate your team’s morale on a scale from zero to skateboards. Why skateboards, you ask? No idea, it’s never properly explained except Lou13 tries hard enough to be sensible but unfortunately got all of his great guy talk from Octavio.
I got fired for playing Vaultlanders
The Vaultlanders action figure minigame is great though. Vaultlanders are action figures of characters from previous games, like Maya, Fl4k and Brick. Each has unique attack and defense stats and an ultimate type that you can use mid-battle. Basically, it’s Mortal Kombat but with plastic figures. You knock your action figure away from your opponents, dodging attacks and then hitting them with critical attacks until you get a KO It’s as silly as it sounds and I love that you can get access matches at any time from the main menu.
There is a common character—found in many cold areas for reasons never explained—that reminds me of your rival in the Pokemon games. If you find him, you are locked into a battle and winning the battles means you can take the Vaultlander figurine from him. After you’ve won the first battle against him, you can choose to play Vaultlanders matches from the main menu if you need a break from the story. Unfortunately, meeting the Badass Superfan falls into the same repetitive story trap as the rest of the non-QTE sections: You can finally roam around for free, loot some boxes, oh and a little prompt tells you there’s a Vaultlander or two hidden in this very small area
The Badass Superfan and the rest of the Tediore troops are some of the best tertiary characters. The banter between them is so silly and funny and I ugly laughed a lot. It reminds me a lot of Jake Peralta and the Brooklyn 99 squad—vague, incoherent nonsense that’s just for laughs. One of the soldiers forgets his teammate’s name and just yells “Doug? Wait, isn’t that Anthony? Doug Anthony?” and the absurdity of this happening during what is actually a pretty stressful stealth QTE mission made it funnier. Throughout the story, there’s a good mix of really silly humor with serious decisions or QTE events that save it from being soulless, but there’s still something missing.
Unfortunately, the Telltale magic just isn’t there. There are predictable twists and surprising events throughout the story with many successes and setbacks, but Gearbox just didn’t manage to get the pacing right. Chapter-based games can always feel like a bit of a slog in the middle, but parts of this were downright painful to get through. You can’t even skip ahead with the dialogue, so you’re stuck in a sequence until either a QTE starts or you can finally have some freedom to roam around a tiny restricted area. It’s hard to understand who the target audience is for New Tales, other than older millennials with a cynical sense of humor. It made me laugh a lot, but equally, there were too many sections that I wanted to just end that sucked a lot of the fun out of it.
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