Tales from the Borderlands
Handsome Jack is dead, let the next contender step up. That next contender is you, Rhys, and it is time that all your hard work, underhanded dealings, backstabbings, and alliances place you in the place you deserve, the CEO of Hyperion. It isn’t until you arrive to get a speech about what you’ll need to do as the head of Hyperion, when things go totally wrong. This is where the real adventure begins. Your actions throughout this game will help shape the final outcome. You can control either Rhys or Fiona, a very clever, good looking con-artist who only has dollar signs in her eyes. The actual game will center around telling the story of how the craziness that you find yourself in all went down.
I freaking love TellTale Games. I’m always blown away by the complexity of the story, and how my actions will truly change the overall narrative. There were always tons of twists and turns just around the corner. For the most part, whatever decision you make will be written in stone and the story will continue. There are a couple of parts where you may have to restart a section because you let a main character die, but there’s not a whole lot of those sections. Tales from the Borderlands is broken up into 5 different chapters, each of them building off of the previous episode all the way up to the end. You can always restart a chapter, but to be honest that feels cheap to me. You have to ride this horse all the way to the end.
I have to hand it to the writers/directors of each of the chapters, I was locked in and engaged almost 100% of the time. The flow of the story was constant, many of the choices weighed heavy on me after I made them, and that made it all the more enticing to keep playing. I create relationships with all the characters and when a twist happens I feel the pain of betrayal, or the soothing relief of something going your way. Each of the characters that you’ll be interacting with have their own personality. I didn’t feel like there were any cookie cutter characters outside of the random NPCs, but that’s to be expected.
The marriage between the TellTale Games look and the look of Borderlands was amazing. I felt as if I was in those environments playing the main game. It does remind me that this game, Tales from the Borderlands, happens between the events of Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3. Ironically I picked up Borderlands 3 after completing this game and immediately felt that I had a leg up on where some of the story was going to take me since this game definitely has some parts that happen after the actions I’m taking, currently, in Borderlands 3. I think it is abundantly clear that I NEED good voice acting, and this game, in all of its chapters, freaking nailed it. The look of the characters combined with the voices, which conveyed a full range of emotions, made this game a must play for me. If you have ever played a TellTale Game I know I don’t have to tell you how amazing this game is, but if you haven’t played any of the TellTale Games before, you are really missing out on the high quality, well put together stories that are crafted through their games.