The Borderlands Game I've Played Most

With Borderlands 4 out but me being unable to play it currently, I’m left with a little bit of FOMO and the knowledge that I’ll just have to revisit one of the other games instead. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, because I’ve had fun with every Borderlands game I’ve tried. But while everyone else is talking about the newest game, I’m going to talk about the one I played and enjoyed the most.

The Handsome Collection

So the first Borderlands game I picked up was a physical copy of The Handsome Collection because I had read that it was one of the best couch co-op games you could buy when I got my PS4. I wanted something I could play with my friends and my dad that wasn’t a LEGO game (even though I absolutely love LEGO games), and that wasn’t a fighting game.

So it was that I bought the game, and my first foray into the world was entirely blind, and neither I nor my dad had any idea what we were doing. We didn’t make it very far. At the time, I hadn’t played many “serious” games - not that Borderlands takes itself seriously - but I had spent most of my childhood and teen years playing games that didn’t have a high skill threshold.

I’m also unsure what my first first-person shooter was, but I am sure that this was the first big game that I had played with that mechanic. So we didn’t get far, and I put the collection to the side for a little while and came back when I got good.

Then, my roommate in grad school and I decided to take out all of our stress on video games, and we loaded in The Handsome Collection and, not knowing anything about the series, we started playing the Borderlands game I’ve played the most.

It’s The Pre-Sequel

Yep. It’s that one. We picked it because of how the game presents the options to you, and because we wanted to play them in the chronological order as we understood it. We didn’t know anything about any of the other games, we just dived in.

I don’t regret it.

I’ve played the other games on and off, but this remains my most played and the one I have the most fun with. While Borderlands 4 may well take the prize later when I can afford to purchase it, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel remains my favorite. There’s a level of odd charm to it; you get to meet a lot of the characters that show up in the other games, and you do get to play as the villains in a fair number of cases.

Athena is never really a villain, and I did play as her for my first playthrough, but my roommate was a Nisha fan and loved playing as a morally ambiguous sniper. I played through the entire game at least twice, the second time with Aurelia.

While the game, I learned later, received a fair amount of criticism when it was released, to someone who hadn’t played the other games, I had no issues with it, and some of the mechanics I liked better. The oxygen and ability to glide/double jump were actually quite fun to me, and I had to unlearn that platforming skill when I moved to the other games.

And it might be sentiment, or I might just be fairly easily pleased by video games. I don’t expect every game to change my life. I don’t expect every game to have the highest budgets and best plots. Sometimes, I just want to be entertained for a little while.

But I have given it a fair amount of thought, and I still find The Pre-Sequel to be my favorite one. The one I played the most beyond that was likely Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. While I did enjoy the magic system and created a terrifying character surrounded by as many summons as I could manage, I think I enjoyed The Pre-Sequel more.

Borderlands 2 is obviously quite good, and Borderlands 3 was plagued by the microtransactions scandal, but by the time I played it, I had a decent time, but not as good a time. I hope I end up enjoying Borderlands 4. But for the time being, The Pre-Sequel is where it’s at for me.