Borderlands The Handsome Collection - Maxi-Geek Review

When the Handsome Collection was announced, I thought it was just a current generation re-release of last years The Pre-Sequel, but with all the bonus content and not to mention the fantastic Borderlands 2, it is more than that.

If you are not aware, Borderlands tasks you with exploring vast alien worlds in the hopes of locating and opening a legendary vault. The concept is simple, along the way you collect an insane number of weapons and take on harder and harder bad guys and creatures, until you are a total powerhouse. While the outcome of the Borderlands games is the goal, it’s the characters and charm the world has that draw you in. Of course if you have played any of the past games this is not going to surprise you.

Borderlands 2 is perhaps the game that seems the most different here, the game was released some years ago and the changes made to it have help it keep an equal footing with most of the recent re-releases. The biggest changes to the game itself are the load times are drastically shorter and it runs a lot smoother. The game initially was able to support two players at once, but it did struggle to achieve this fact, now however the game can run both players at 60 frames per second or if you really want to get lost in the fun, 4 player can sit down locally and enjoy the game, but doing so with cut it back to 30 fps, which is acceptable. The game also comes packed with all the previously released content, which includes new playable characters from the get go, along with all 12 content packs, all of which add around 10 hours to the game, if you 100% them.

The game also thankfully maintains its charm that comes packed in through the visual style the game embraced with Borderlands 1 and while I am sure other people may pick on the cel-shaded visuals, minus some texture load issues, the game looks remarkably good. The aft for mentioned texture issues deals with how the textures are loaded. Whenever you enter a new area, elements that are not ready will render as blurry textures and then loads in the correct ones, while I was not expecting it all to be perfect, still seeing that as often as I did was a letdown.

Another area the game has improved however is in how you deal with your teammates, when playing online. Before you had to manage the team outside of the game, which usually resulted in some fun times, but now you can do it from within the game, which makes things a lot nicer. While that in itself is not a massive change, it does help streamline the experience and lets you get back to shooting things. Of course Borderlands 2 is only half of the package here, the other half is the Pre-Sequel.

When Gearbox announced that the Pre-Sequel was coming to only PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, a lot of players were upset that it was not making its way to the newer consoles and now that it has, the wait was kinda worth it. I say kinda worth it, because the game was initially built on the same engine as Borderlands 2, all the issue that 2 has in its current gen release, the Pre-Sequel has them as well. It is not to say the game is not fun, because it is, but the slow loading textures still is a pain. But as with 2, it offers 4 player local co-op and a wealth of content for all players, but the biggest issue was fixed here.

The game when it released last year on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 struggled to run correctly, the PC build missed a lot of the problems, mostly due to the ambition of the game last year outpacing the power of the consoles, which resulted in players hitting a lot of lag spikes in the game, most commonly found when using the new cryo-weapons, but thankfully the power in the new consoles has fixed that issue, in fact the game rarely showed any issues with lag at all. For anyone who has invested a lot of time into their PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 copies of the game, don’t worry, you can import those saves into the new versions and continue where you left off, but it might just be more fun to start a new, with a different character.

For those coming to the series for the first time, the amount of content and zaniness packed within will make it worthy of your time and for those returning it is still as fun as ever. The Handsome Collection might not be the pinnacle of Remasters, but it is damn close.

Thanks to 2K Games Australia for supplying the game for review