Borderlands: Game of the Year Enhanced

Borderlands: Game of the Year Enhanced is Gearbox's souped-up re-release of the 2009 shooter-RPG that essentially launched the loot-shooter genre as we know it. You pick one of four distinct classes - the tank-y Brick, the sniper-specialist Mordecai, the soldier Roland, or the siren Lilith - and then spend roughly 30 hours shooting your way across the arid wasteland planet Pandora, hoovering up procedurally generated guns with genuinely obsessive efficiency. The Enhanced version bundles in all four DLC expansions, bumps up the visual fidelity, adds a new character respec option, and raises the level cap, which matters if you're returning to squeeze more out of a build you remember fondly. The core loop is still the best argument for the game's existence: kill things, open chests, compare numbers, swap guns, repeat. The procedural weapon system generates shotguns, pistols, SMGs, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and revolvers with varying manufacturers that each carry distinct mechanical quirks - Jakobs guns fire as fast as you pull the trigger, Maliwan weapons lean into elemental damage. None of it reaches the depth of, say, Path of Exile's build architecture, but there's a satisfying tactility to finding a corrosive SMG that absolutely melts armored enemies and running with it for the next five levels. The four skill trees per class are short by modern standards, and the RPG system is closer to Diablo-lite than a full CRPG, but the bones are solid and the build variety holds up surprisingly well into the endgame DLC content. Where the game struggles, and has always struggled, is narrative. The writing is deliberately absurdist and leans hard on over-the-top humor, which works in small doses. By hour 20 it starts to feel like a Saturday morning cartoon that forgot to end. Claptrap, the series' mascot robot, goes from endearing to mildly exhausting. The main quest is essentially a long errand run toward a final reveal that lands harder now, in retrospect, knowing where the lore goes - but first-timers may find the payoff underwhelming. Filler quests abound. There are kill-ten-of-this missions that exist purely to pad runtime, and Pandora as a world is atmospheric but thin on the kind of environmental storytelling that makes a wasteland feel lived-in. Co-op is where this game genuinely earns its stripes. Borderlands was built around four-player co-op, and the Enhanced version supports it cleanly on PC. Running the DLC campaigns - especially The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and the superb Claptrap's New Robot Revolution - with friends transforms the experience from a competent solo grind into something much more chaotic and fun. Enemy scaling adjusts for group size, loot drops become genuinely exciting group events, and the game's humor lands better when there's someone to share the groan with. Solo is fine; co-op is the intended delivery mechanism. If you're coming to this fresh in 2024, be aware that the sequels have significantly raised the bar on writing, class depth, and visual variety. Borderlands 2 in particular made almost every systemic improvement you might wish for here. But as a foundational document of a genre, and as a co-op loot romp that still runs well on modest hardware, GOTY Enhanced holds up. The 81% positive Steam score across 27,000 reviews isn't a fluke - people keep coming back, mostly because the gunplay is snappy and the loot drip is dangerously well-calibrated.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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