New Tales of the Borderlands review of a good attempt that didn’t go all the way

It’s impossible to talk about New Tales from the Borderlands without mentioning it with love and a bit of sadness. Narrative GamesThe dead and reborn company that has been spawning a huge amount of narrative adventures at a frenetic pace over the years, focusing on multiple high-end intellectual property like The Walking Dead or The Wolf Between Us. Among the variety was the Gearbox shooter series Borderlands.

It might have seemed like an odd choice given the transition from an action game to a game that was the complete antithesis of it, but the result was cracking and many (rightly) considered it the best game in Telltale. Now we are in the opposite situation. The oddity with New Tale coming from Borderlands is not the idea of ​​using Borderlands for a narrative adventure, but the idea of ​​it being made by a different team.

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X from October 21, 2022 | This new game, which will be released for S and Nintendo Switch, is actually directly Transmission Software and takes us away from Pandora. Have the new creators of this series (as silly as it sounds to call them “new”) have been able to equalize or surpass the results from the first game? Or is Telltale Games’ masterpiece still unique?

To find out, just keep reading ours. New Tales from Borderlands review!

three in Promethea

New Tales from the Borderlands ushers us in a new triple character. We will take it from Anu, a brilliant scientist who dreams of a world without weapons. Then we find his brother Octavio, a street kid who thinks he has what it takes to be the richest on the planet. Finally, there’s Fran, a woman who manages the family yogurt (bad) and manages her anger (too bad).

The three of them are ordinary people, but in the world of Borderlands, fate is immediately ready to help them. when does everything start boring – one of the multinational corporations of Promethea, the planet where the events of the game take place – the company of Rhys, the protagonist of Tales from the Borderlands, decides to make a hostile takeover of Atlas very hostile. Anu works for Atlas and must escape from the space station to land on the planet and save his brother, who has become one of Tediore’s primary goals in the meantime.

New Tales from the Borderlands adventure all the features you would expect from a Borderlands game. There is no shortage of the most extreme and sometimes unnecessary violence. Not all characters lack an obsession with weapons; this is only in contrast to Anu, who seems to be the only one who wonders why everyone is always so fierce and dependent on weapons. There’s no shortage of easy-prank robots, and there aren’t even loot boxes that frankly contain money (handy for purchasing alternate costumes) as the characters don’t have any equipment.

So the feeling is more of being in a Borderlands game than it is with Tales from the Borderlands, at least superficially. this storytelling style It’s also what you’d expect: extremely funny, always determined to mock every move or joke for a laugh. Can he do that? Yes, especially in the early stages, where the plot has not yet turned serious and there is no room for sentimentality, where it almost completely points to it.

this the more dramatic side In the final stage of the story, it grows with the characters becoming a slightly more close-knit group and realizing that their actions have weight on the entire planet and perhaps the entire universe (it’s impossible to be more precise, without spoilers!). New Tales from the Borderlands struggles a bit in this episode.

A little too simplistic, New Tales from the Borderlands adds a stage where characters put their weaknesses before them, all of which are obvious to the player from the very first moment, as they are the most important element of their characterization. However, the game fails to get the characters to confront and reliably accept them, and shifts from “random idiots” to “role-conscious heroes”. ineffective.

Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about a complete plot derailment. Simply, the characters and the narrative they fail to express their true potential and the last is sufficient, but New Tales from the Borderlands is less effective than it deserves.

Anu, Octavio, and Fran, along with the various supporting players, work as long as the tones stay clear, but when things get serious, they’re not entirely convinced. Fortunately, I serious moments they are a small part of the adventure.

The team perhaps should have taken a little more time to grow them. New Tales from the Borderlands – even spending extra time in each area to devote to secondary elements – it actually takes eight and a half hoursor less than the previous section (at least ten and a half required on average).

Elections, QTEs and minigames

New Tales from Borderlands too Telltale Games game structure. As a “choose your own adventure” style game, you have to constantly let the characters decide what to say, which partially influences the relationships between the three. In reality, however, choices only have weight in the final, and there are no major events occurring as a direct result of our actions. Gearbox’s operation is a little more closed and linear than many Telltale Games. It’s a pity, because the € 39.99 required for the game also gave the impression of a slightly larger project.

Between one dialogue and another we will have to complete a series of QTEs. In this case, Gearbox decided to make things as simple as possible by predicting where the icon will be on the screen and a QTE prompt that will tell us what kind of button (lever or button) we should press. Getting QTEs wrong is a choice, not a lack of skill.

So far everything is normal. Where New Tales from the Borderlands is trying to change is a mini games series and alternative interactions. Anu has a pair of technological glasses that allow him to analyze objects, and when he needs to complete a scientific breakthrough, he slaps his devices with healthy violence. Octavio, on the other hand, has a bracelet to cut various elements of the environment. Finally, there is Vaultlanders, an action figure-based mini-game where you have to fight against an opponent, choose your own fighter from among the fighters we find and win by progressing.

vaultlanders It is based on unique attack, defense and skill stats for each action figure. In reality, it’s much more detailed than necessary because it’s just a mini-game, and we have to repeatedly press a button to attack in our turn, and then complete a very banal QTE to avoid enemy shots, and then finish it in our next game. return. Even the mini-games mentioned above are utterly trivial and have made us doubt: we understand that Gearbox wants to simplify everything so as not to put players in a bind, but expanding these components makes New Tales from the Borderlands fun variety. Plus no damage. Unfortunately, as they are, they are only occasional and uninteresting breaks: their best advantage is that they are not repeated too often.

New engine for Borderlands

Finally, a quick comment about technical side. One of the weaknesses of Telltale Games games was the graphics engine, which struggled in terms of performance and transitions even in the face of some in-game improvements.

The transmission worked well in this regard, but we expected nothing less. The graphics are in line with the main epic and the result is always great. The animations are of high quality and the expressions of the faces reflect the emotions of the characters well. we especially appreciated english dubbing, is always at a high level, both in terms of heroes and more secondary characters. All game features italian texts.