Borderlands Game of the Year

I'll be honest: I came to the original Borderlands late, already spoiled by Borderlands 2's sharper writing and slicker skill trees. Going back via this GOTY edition means carrying that comparison everywhere - and the game earns it in some places and stumbles in others. What it gets undeniably right is the core loop: killing things, cracking open chests, and watching the color-coded rarity scale pay off with a legendary that changes how you play for the next three hours. That dopamine rhythm is still intact, and the Enhanced edition layers on quality-of-life touches - a Borderlands 2-style inventory screen, a minimap, automatic pickup for ammo and cash on the ground, and six new Gearbox-manufactured legendary weapons including the Hive Mind and Violence - that make the original feel noticeably less clunky than it once was. The four Vault Hunter classes remain a genuine draw. Brick the Berserker charges into melee with a health-regenerating Berserk mode that is exactly as dumb and satisfying as it sounds. Lilith the Siren blinks across the battlefield with Phasewalk, which can be specc'd into an offensive burst or a survivability tool depending on your skill tree. Roland the Soldier drops a turret and supports the team. Mordecai the Hunter leans on his bird companion Bloodwing and benefits from class mods that push his sniper and pistol builds in very different directions. None of these classes reach the build complexity of later entries in the franchise, but each has three skill trees and each plays differently enough that a second run with a different character isn't just cosmetic. The procedural weapon system still impresses too: fire-augmented revolvers, corrosive SMGs, rocket-launching shotguns, shock-damage sniper rifles - the combinations stack up fast, and the color-coded rarity scale gives you a readable reason to keep looting. Where the game shows its age is everywhere the genre moved on. The story is thin on purpose - get to the Vault, shoot the obstacles - and while that worked fine in 2009, a decade-plus of Disco Elysium and BG3 has recalibrated what RPG writing can look like. The side missions are largely fetch-and-kill filler with minimal payoff, and Pandora's early zones drag before the eccentric NPC roster fills out. The PC version also carries a documented memory leak that can crash the game after extended sessions; a workaround exists but it requires manually restarting every hour or two, which is annoying if you're mid-grind. Hip-fire accuracy can feel inconsistent, and vehicular combat remains clumsy enough that the dune buggies feel like a separate, worse game grafted on. All four DLC packs are included: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot (a wave-arena that is the weakest of the four), The Secret Armory of General Knoxx which meaningfully expands the story and introduces higher-level loot runs, and Claptrap's New Robot Revolution. That's a substantial content package, and Playthrough 2 scales enemies up from level 34 onward for players who want to extend the endgame. For newcomers to the franchise, this is a reasonable and affordable entry point to the series lore before jumping to Borderlands 2. For returning players, the GOTY Enhanced changes are meaningful enough to make a revisit worth considering, just keep a save-and-restart habit handy on PC.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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