The Borderlands Series Ranked

Borderlands is a very unique series in the first person shooter genre, combining high action shooting with branching skill trees to build up each playable character and a knack for what has been described as “gun porn” as tons of randomly generated guns can be found and needed to replace your ever growing arsenal. The series has also been praised for its cartoonish style and mostly lovable cast of characters to play as and give you quests. With the 5th game in the series in development I thought it would be fun to rank the games from best to worst. I will not be adding the Telltale Games’ title as its not a real Borderlands game and more of a choose your own adventure story.

1.Borderlands 2

One of the most promising titles in the series, it not only delivered on the hype created from the first game, but added so much more. It’s story was interesting and every single playable character was fun to use and the quests all had funny moments that let us connect with the people we were helping through the campaign. It also took the amount of guns we could get and only multiplied it, so even named quest weapons would look slightly different each time you were given them. It also brings back characters form the previous game for nostalgia and see more of what they were like since they were not given a lot of development in the first one as well as solid villain anyone can hate easily.

2.Borderlands

This was the title that started it all off, with one of the best openings to a game of all time to show off each character with a very memorable theme song. This also gave us some of the games first stables throughout the series that were used as inside jokes or callbacks in future installment for the fans to remember. This game also had a very different feel due to the games score making it feel more like a western than a sci-fi adventure, which it really was.

3.Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

This was the game I wanted to be the best in the series and even had a mixed cast down the line so players didn’t have a choice between 3 guys and 1 girl. Now you have 3 girls, 2 guys and a robot that everyone hates! Which was a very progressive choice for gamers who didn’t always want the better characters to be male dominant so I applaud the developers for being progressive. If only the game wasn’t a flop for many die-hard fans who only played it to get past the story and never pick it up. The game had the weird idea to try and show off how the villain of the last game became a villain and make it look like there was more of a grey area between who was really good, him or the characters form the previous games, but the writing was lazy and a lot of the actions made didn’t really change my opinion of him and a lot of the “grey area” was characters doing things for the sake of the plot and instead of making you think makes you upset at how little effort it felt was put into it. I could go on for a while for why I don’t like this game but I should list some positives as well. It is the best game optimized for PC gamers even though it came out after the first 2 games and it ran better than both of them when I played it. It also had a very interesting concept for gun porn lovers in adding a grinder. This would take 3 guns of your choice and grind them together into a completely new weapon(its better in concept as the guns were all randomly generated from the grinder and sometimes didn’t have any features or elements form any of the guns you put in). Lastly It did also have one of my favorite playable characters in the series known as Handsome Jack’s doppelganger who only did any of this to pay off student loans and how can I not relate as a college student?

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