New Tales from the Borderlands

I went into New Tales from the Borderlands cautiously optimistic. The original Tales was a genuine surprise, Telltale wringing warmth and wit out of a looter-shooter universe, so the appetite for a follow-up was real. What Gearbox Studio Quebec delivered instead is a game that highlights, chapter by chapter, exactly how hard that original formula is to replicate. The structure is a five-episode graphic adventure played across three characters: Anu, an anxious scientist whose physical comedy is genuinely well-performed through motion capture; her adopted brother Octavio, a wannabe street hustler whose arc lets you shape the flavor of his "cool" through dialogue choices; and Fran, a frogurt shop owner with a motorized hoverchair, a short fuse, and a complete absence of a filter. The fourth key figure, assassination bot LOU13, quietly steals most scenes he appears in with deadpan humor that actually lands. On paper, this is a solid cast. In practice, the writing underserves them constantly, pivoting to cheap gags at moments that could have built genuine character depth. Anu is a brilliant scientist who cannot figure out a door handle. Octavio, bafflingly, forgets what a building he has worked in for years looks like. These aren't endearing quirks, they're lazy plot devices dressed up as jokes. The gameplay side of things is minimal even by the genre's standards. Anu scans objects with her goggles, Octavio uses his ECHOdeck for hacking minigames that barely register as challenges, and the Vaultlanders collectible battle system, where you pit plasticine figurines of Borderlands characters against each other by bumping them together, is charming in concept but trivially easy to win every time. Dialogue choices arrive infrequently enough that reviewers have noted you can step away for ten minutes, come back, and find the story has simply continued without you. That is not a design philosophy that invites engagement. There is also some light exploration to find money for cosmetics, but those only unlock a handful of outfits and color variants for each character, so the incentive to poke around is low. QTE sequences show up occasionally, and a small number of genre-homage segments nod to 16-bit adventure games and survival-horror, which at least signals some self-awareness about how thin the interactivity is. The reception tells the story plainly. Steam sits at 31% positive, and the critical consensus across outlets is a split between "decent enough for hardcore Borderlands fans" and "a disappointment with a messy, meandering plot." Metacritic's critic score lands at 69, mixed, not catastrophic, but user scores skew sharply negative, driven largely by fans who came in hoping for a spiritual continuation of Rhys and Fiona's story and found a new cast on a shakier narrative chassis. The pacing is the most consistent complaint: the final episodes in particular drag when momentum should be building, and major plot threads bounce around subplots that feel disconnected from the central conflict. There are real things to like here. The visual style is sharp, the voice performances are strong across the board, and if you go in treating this as a light animated series rather than a game with stakes, some of the comedic timing works. Episode three gets particular credit from players for finding the groove the earlier chapters miss. But that is a thin argument for a full-price purchase at launch. For anyone who loved the original Tales, the gap in quality is too wide to ignore. For someone new to the series, starting with Telltale's version makes more sense. The audience this actually suits is the dedicated Borderlands lore completionist who wants to log everything in the universe and has calibrated expectations going in.

Alex · Scout Team

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