I adore FPS games and kind of enjoy comics, so an FPS game that looks like a comic should bring me back to childhood, right? Let's fire up Borderlands GOTY and find out.
The game starts off with an unskippable bus ride a-la Half Life to a desert shanty town. You choose your class (I picked Siren), get off the buss and meet Clap Trap, your resident comic relief. I spent some 20 minutes here hunting for all the boxes with money, only to later realize they respawn and I ended up with $50k+ after 20 or so hours of gameplay. Enemies respawn too and can do so while you're backtracking, which makes it very inconvenient to die.
Upon death, you lose some cash and respawn at the last pole you visited, and since they're strewn about the map, you'd be well-advised to not die at all. The first problem I noticed is that enemies tend to be bullet sponges. They all have levels and there's no way to outsmart or outgun a higher level enemy; it feels like shooting at a mountain. Conversely, doing missions that are below your level is a breeze and I felt like I can melee my way through an infinite number of such enemies.
Borderlands GOTY feels very gamey and brought me out of the immersion all the time. For example, there are shops conveniently placed at the entrance to each map that look like vending machines where the player can buy medkits, ammo and guns. I never bought medkits or guns, rarely bought ammo and only focused on ammo capacity upgrades. There is a variety of shield modules as well and some of them provide slow HP regeneration, which I found the best because they meant just hiding behind cover was enough to avoid dying.
There's all kinds of junk that you can loot and sell but your inventory is fairly limited. Some mission rewards do provide inventory expansion upgrades but you'll still have to haul junk back and forth to sell it off. Overall, I spent some 30% of my time in Borderlands GOTY staring at the inventory and shop menus, which I don't find particularly appealing.
I can best describe the gunplay in Borderlands GOTY as floaty: enemies move like they're floating and the guns feel like they're floating in my character's hands. The recoil in Borderlands GOTY is really weird and does not reflect how I'd expect a gun to behave, which significantly changed the way I approached the game. This is best seen if shooting at an enemy when aiming down sights (ADS) compared to shooting at the same enemy zoomed in with a weapon that has optical zoom.
Recoil doesn't really affect precision if you're zoomed in but does when ADS, meaning that an optical zoom pistol that does 10 damage performs better than an ADS combat rifle that does 25 damage. On paper and in theory it should be the reverse but what that means in practice is that you'll spend up to a minute trying to take down one guy if you're using an ADS weapon while his comrades chip away your health.
Switch over to a comparatively weaker weapon that has an optical zoom and now you can take them all down within the minute and move on while spending less ammo, time and losing less health. Hitting the head produces a critical hit, which is typically 200% of normal weapon damage, so again you're rewarded for quick mid- and long-range sniping that spares your time and ammo. Elemental weapons have a chance of producing a burn/stun/etc. effect on each hit and again the rapid fire weapons make it more likely to stunlock or just burn through enemy health compared to slower weapons.
I have no idea why the Borderlands devs made it that way but I'd be using a combat rifle with iron sights and shoot at a low level enemy prancing in front of me. Shooting single bullets at center mass missed 90% of the time; switch to an optical zoom pistol and now my shots hit 90% of the time and I can consistently pull off criticals, which effectively negates the weaker weapon damage. So, snipers should be the strongest weapons in the game, right? Well, there's a catch there.
The enemies are fairly stupid and either charge you or get stuck behind cover. Some of them also have regenerating shields, like you do, and require a concentrated burst of damage to take them down before their shield recovers. Using a sniper that has only 3 bullets in the magazine means you can't afford to miss and must aim at the head to guarantee a kill but again you have to deal with a glacial fire rate. Snipers are useless against those enemies that charge you and nearly useless against those stuck behind cover, so their only use is in taking down exposed, unreachable enemies standing high above or high below.
I tried the slow, tacticool approach until I got bum rushed by enemies who hacked me to death, I switched over to an SMG with an optical zoom and just mowed them all down and continued sniping the living daylights out of everything that looked at me funny. So, you should look for rapid-fire weapons with a huge magazine, an elemental effect and an optical zoom. Snipers, shotguns and revolvers are so underwhelming because of their slow fire rates, slow reloads and the bullet sponginess of enemies, so my advice is to go for SMGs, combat rifles, pistols and rocket launchers, which will let you use cover, exploit AI stupidity and avoid dying. Close quarters combat might work but I didn't find the game encouraging it that much, probably because I used Siren.
One huge problem with Borderlands GOTY is its saving system. The game saves automatically and may produce corrupted saves for no apparent reason. At one point I was about 25 hours into the game and had a level 20 Siren. I quit the game, the power went out for a couple minutes and I could no longer launch the game due to a "failed to find file for package core" error. The save file somehow became corrupted and when I reinstalled Borderlands GOTY and replaced the save with my own, the game warned me "corrupted save detected, delete it Y/N?".
I found no way to resume the game with my Siren character, meaning all that time went down the drain. I did have some fun but the core of the game just wasn't strong enough to make me go back to it and start it all over. What if it happens again when I'm level 50? Some forums did discuss solutions but nothing they mention worked for me, so that was it.
Borderlands GOTY seems way too undercooked and, while the graphics still hold out well even in 2020, there is just way too little meat in it for me. The RPG elements are barely present, save the elemental system and experience that lets me level up to choose a "2% more damage with a critical hit" skill. At one point, I got an item that said "Resilience skill +1", which sounds great except I have no idea what that is and the game doesn't explain it.
The checkpoint/save system is a real problem and I found it gamebreaking. Luckily, I experienced it early enough so I didn't invest too much time in the game. Why are developers so obsessed with putting all their eggs in one basket? Just let me back up, copy, rename and otherwise fiddle with my save game files. Whatever, it's Borderlands GOTY, so take it or leave it, I guess. For me, it's quite clear – I'll leave it and move on to greener pastures.