The way that New Stories from the Borderlands exists at all makes me feel great inside, taking into account that it needed to oppose the demise of Obvious Games to do as such. The first 2014 verbose experience snatched me with its magnificent composition, sharp funny bone, and affable principal characters in Fiona and Rhys. While the detached, full-game-in-one-take care-of-follow gets a ton of things right, its endeavors to figure out the obvious recipe – also the runtime – stall what is generally an entertaining frolic on another planet with another cast of wannabes.
What I like most about New Stories from the Borderlands are its three new heroes: the pretentious, smarty pants researcher Anu; her road-brilliant, acclaim-pursuing take on sibling Octavio; and the rageaholic frozen yogurt retailer Fran. L0u13 (“Louie”), a killbot who begins to scrutinize the reason for his one-note presence and gets a ton of snickers when the end credits roll, is likewise curious to see what happens in a non-playable job. New Stories was dealt with by Borderlands engineer Gearbox itself directly following Obvious’ destruction, yet the nature of its characters and their humor is genuinely predictable.
The gathering begins in their separate individual ways however is immediately united by, in commonplace Borderlands style, a Vault, its fortune, and a shrewd enterprise. Furthermore, the first 80% of New Stories does a fairly great job of mirroring what compelled the primary Stories game so fantastically: senseless humor conveyed outstandingly by skilled movement catch and voice entertainers, childish savagery, and isolated yet entwining plotlines. Furthermore, as Vaughn and Blarney before them, a portion of the side characters you meet en route supply probably the most paramount minutes, remarkably the anonymous, activity figure-fixated Tediore corporate fighter, the mutually dependent talking firearm Brock, and the ex-Psycho fittingly named Stapleface. You’ll have a lot of opportunities to toss humdingers and jokes at everybody, be they companion or enemy, and your four discourse choices in each trade are continuously sufficiently engaging to make it extreme to pick only one rapidly.
All things considered, playing New Stories as a full, non-verbose game truly features why the obvious style experience works best ramblingly: it’s unmistakably consumed in little portions. To New Stories’ credit, it offers you each chance to play it that way, with breaks between five 1-2-hour episodes showing how your decisions contrast with different players, very much like in Obvious’ unique. Inside every episode, however, genuine ongoing interaction is amusingly negligible, which will be natural to obvious veterans. There are next to no riddles; you’re generally watching cut scenes and playing out a periodic fast-time occasion – however, I really do need to give props to the superb music video montage-style groupings that occur in every episode. Without a doubt, your regulator is down, yet they’re a tomfoolery and invigorating method for separating the enormous areas of QTEs and discourse trees.
New Stories attempts to give your hands more to do by sporadically allowing you to meander around a scene, looking at items and opening boxes for cash that you’ll always be unable to burn through all of on the reserve of restorative person skins, or take part in minigames, for example, hacking or the Vaultlander activity figure battles. These exercises are a decent redirection on paper, however, they’re all ludicrously basic. I don’t know if you could bomb one assuming you attempted, and keeping in mind that all by itself isn’t reprehensible, there’s additionally no greater award for acing these arrangements rather than essentially passing them.
In any case, where New Stories truly fails is in its last episode, none of which I’ll show here for spoiler reasons. I have no bad things to say about the pacing or character advancement in episodes 1-4, however, the finale not just lingers too long – with a somewhat long obsession with carefully hauling every one of the three heroes through an excursion of self-revelation – it likewise tilts the plot off a bluff of science fiction ineptitude that appears to be lost even in Borderlands’ anything-goes universe. So, the story gets truly cheesy toward the end – paying little mind to which finishing your decisions leads you – killing the force it had painstakingly worked through its initial four episodes. It’s a genuine “it’s the excursion, not the objective” sort of circumstance.
The Verdict
New Stories from the Borderlands effectively recovers a ton of Obvious’ unique sorcery with a new, entertaining, and friendly new arrangement of fundamental characters, yet sadly it likewise presents new issues – both in the story and in a few weak game mechanics – that gum up the works. You don’t have to have played the main Stories to partake in this one, however in the event that you will pick either, stay with the first and return again to this pseudo-spin-off with tempered assumptions on the off chance that the first gets you however much it snatched me.
