2024’s Borderlands film was truly a befuddling thing.

From the first trailer, it was clear that the writer’s interpretation of the Borderlands games was likely a result of a boardroom decision. Through a friend of a friend of a friend who worked on the film, I heard that the project was a total disaster. While the initial trailer didn’t look horrendous, it didn’t exactly look like Borderlands. They’re clearly going for a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe. The casting raises some questions. Why is Cate Blanchett playing Lilith? Why is Kevin Hart playing Roland? Why is the cast made up of a seemingly random assortment of grab bag characters from the first and second game? Where is Mordecai? Where is Brick? Why is Dr. Tannis hanging out with the team?

Ultimately, these are questions that don’t really matter. Because any movie based on the “characters” of the first game doesn’t have a whole lot to work with in the first place. The reason “characters” is in quotes is because they are characters only in the loosest sense. Beyond the opening cinematic sequence, Roland, Lilith, Mordecai and Brick are not fleshed out at all. And there’s nothing really wrong with that. They served their purpose as the playable archetypes for the player to run across Pandora with. They got the job done.

You could look at a potential Borderlands film in one of two ways. Writers would either have a very difficult time putting together a story with characters who might as well be identical, or they would have a great deal of freedom. The real story of Borderlands (the first one) is not in the characters but the world they inhabit. It’s about all the little quirky wasteland freaks you meet along the way.

In January, a friend asked me if I would dust off my old Xbox 360 and play through the original Borderlands – DLC and all. The novelty of the experience was intriguing. Before long, there won’t be many games left on Xbox 360 that remain playable online. Microsoft recently closed the 360 store in July of 2024. Many arcade titles, a great deal of them exclusive to the Xbox 360 marketplace, were lost to time. Borderlands was not necessarily at risk, but I decided to commit to the playthrough anyway. While I played the sequel extensively, I never actually finished the original.

Borderlands is a very influential title in many ways. The cell-shaded art style and 2010s humor are iconic, and played well at the time. The series persists to this day, and has spawned a lot of similar games in the genre. Playing it in its original format began as an unassuming quest, but became a brutal, hellish gauntlet. 

I fucking hated it. I had never hated a game more passionately while playing it. The process that began in January of 2024 finally ended in June after several much needed breaks. Under normal circumstances, I would simply stop playing a game that had as little respect for my time as Borderlands did. But this experience had become something like a marathon with a pair of training partners, each one equally struggling for breath but pushing one another on to finish the race. Sadly, I won’t have as much to show for the completion of Borderlands and its DLC as I would for an actual race. 

If you had asked me my opinion on Borderlands a year ago, my response would have been a simple shrug of the shoulders. I had no strong feelings in either direction. It had sort of passed me by. But ask me again now – after both the game and the film – and I will punch you in the lower spine.

INTO THE BORDERLANDS

And so it began. Borderlands has a pretty iconic intro, which I enjoyed in its entirety. When I played the game as a teenager, I selected Roland as my character. I recall him using a turret which could heal and replenish ammo. I remembered that as being fairly boring to use – albeit useful from time to time. This playthrough, I went with Lilith, the Siren. Her ability allows the player to enter an ethereal form and move swiftly around the battlefield, undetected and unharmed. It was decently useful for getting myself out of close call situations. My friend (we’ll call him Dr. Goomba) picked Mordecai. Mordecai uses his bird companion to attack enemies from a distance. The issue that Dr. Goomba and I came across about midway through the game was that we each had selected “support” style characters. Any other combination of the four playable classes would have likely been better for general damage output. Roland and Brick are the game’s tankier characters.

Borderlands is extremely repetitive and dull. Dr. Goomba and I did not have any real difficulty with any of the game’s encounters in the main game. The boss fights are predictable and boss enemies are bullet sponges. As long as you have enough ammo, bosses can be dealt with easily by unloading your weapon into them at a medium range. Something that both myself and Dr. Goomba noticed in later conversations was that we essentially ran out of ammo after every kill in the latter half of the game. It becomes a very irritating gameplay loop. No matter the character, no matter the weapon, my experience was to unload every bullet into an enemy’s skull at point blank range, reload, repeat. This made me feel especially stupid about the way I’d assigned my skill points, which I would later respec and respec again.

Lilith’s unique ability ultimately became the most useful for travelling more quickly across boring, dead environments to collect the macguffin I’d failed to notice earlier in any given area. In some places, enemies respawn no matter how many times you’ve been there. But in others, the areas are forever vacant.

And so on we went. From flat desert to cave to flat desert, Dr. Goomba and I put hours upon hours into the game. Something that’s often overlooked in retrospectives about Borderlands is how poorly it ran on original hardware. My little Xbox 360 was chugging for long stretches of this game. Slain enemies almost always explode into 5-10 little pieces of loot, be it money or ammo or a new shiny gun that – wait…ok yeah no I already have this one but in blue. Anyway, each time an enemy explodes, Borderlands tends to stutter. And with dozens of enemies and dozens of explosions, this game ends up stuttering A LOT. Not to mention the individual damage numbers that fly across your screen. Or the gore setting, which only worsens the problem. Modern PC ports don’t share the same issues, but I think a lot of people look back on the first game with rose-colored glasses when it comes to performance.

And of course, loot. Borderlands, for all it’s issues, was a pioneering game in the looter shooter genre. It’s part of what drives the sense of progress. While there are some guns you attain as quest rewards, a great deal of the weapons a player will find in Borderlands come from enemy drops. And of course, the coveted weapon chests. A lot of these are found at the heart of a psycho’s shanty town or deep in a skag cave. Some might be a little better hidden, requiring a few skill jumps to reach. But for the first 5-10 hours of the game, those things will keep you going. At first, it really does feel like every crate contains a weapon better than the one you’re currently holding. Which, to some, might feel cool. But to me, it felt obnoxious. Constantly swapping weapons was never ideal for me. Especially considering a fun little quirk I was experiencing where I had just two available weapon slots for the majority of the game. I later read on an old forum that I could acquire my other ones by entering single player and turning in some quests myself for the reward (which previously, only Dr. Goomba was getting). But while I did get to 3 slots around my 20th hour of gameplay, I never did get that 4th one due to what I assume was some sort of bug.

But no matter. I didn’t mind going into my inventory screen mid-fight because my SMG apparently only did the one type of damage the boss I was fighting was immune to.

Perhaps most disappointing of all was the final boss. The lead up to the boss is actually one of the more challenging parts of the main game. The enemies you battle on the path up that snow covered mountain are extremely irritating to beat. Maybe challenging isn’t the right word. I think time consuming is a more accurate description.

The DLC

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

And then…the dreaded DLC. We decided to play them by order of release, which meant The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned was up first. A zombie island is a fun and promising premise and a welcome departure from the base game. At least at first. 

The Halloween theme is enticing. You find yourself stepping off of a boat and battling the undead. You fight through a few hordes of them before you figure them out. They run at you, arms outstretched. And they die quickly. I suppose the idea might have been the classic zombie trope in which a singular undead doesn’t present much issue. But when they gather in large numbers, that’s when you need to watch out. But in this game, all enemies gather in large numbers. Skags, psychos…whatever else the game has that I can’t recall. Seemingly, the game places as many enemies as it can in a given area without pushing the engine past its limits.

It isn’t long before you are assigned the first of many quests that ask you to collect “zombie brains”. This is a frequent quest type in Borderlands, and one of the most insulting. BUT, before I whine about these quests, I should say that Borderlands didn’t invent this. Many games have similar quest types that I would usually just skip. But Dr. Goomba had a gun to my head. So, away we went.

So, in this quest, a character from the base game has been zombified and for some reason now lives in the swamp on the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. He groans his little zombie sounds and sends you off to go get brains. So far, nothing new from the quest design. The player is given a quest to kill an enemy, said enemy drops a new item, and the player must collect anywhere from 10-100 of them. In the case of the zombie brains, the number goes much higher than 100. In fact, it goes up to 1000. But wait! You can’t just collect brains as you go and cash them in later. You first have to do 10. Then return to the quest giver and do the next amount, and repeat and repeat again and again, etc. But while you wait, you can’t just store the extra brains for later use. You can only collect them while you have a new quest active. Otherwise, they just go into a void and disappear. This, believe it or not, was the final quest of the DLC for us.

Before we could collect 1000 brains, which we were both really itching to do, we had to kill Dr. Ned. This quest is sort of a blur for me. I think he turns into a werewolf and you shoot him in the head and he dies. Come to think of it, that’s how they all go.

Mad Moxxi’s Underdome

This is the worst of the DLC. For one, this is not a true story DLC at all. It’s an arena horde/wave survival mode. There are few things that the Borderlands developers love more than throwing a wave defense mode into these games. It appears at least 3 times in the first game alone (not including the DLC) in the form of quests. But in this case, it’s all wave defense. No story, just a shallow, cheap, punishing, poorly made, poorly optimized survival mode. This DLC was the same price as the other releases, which was somewhat misleading.

Mad Moxxi’s Underdome consists of 3 different arenas. It was initially meant to have many, many more. But that idea was scrapped. You can still see the remnants of the other possible doorways in the hub. But thank god they didn’t add more because 3, as it turns out, was too many. To beat the DLC, players must endure 5 rounds, with each round containing 5 waves of different enemy types. It’s a gauntlet that ranges in challenge level from breezy to unfair. About 75% of the time, you don’t think twice about it. But, if you and your partner(s) die, you’ll be sorry. The game sends you back to the start of the previous round. So, if you’re on round 4, wave 5, and you die, you are forced back to round 3 wave 1. That means you have to endure a total of 9 additional waves just to get back to where you were when you died. In an arena survival mode already consisting of 25 total waves, this is a brutal punishment. Not for the challenge necessarily, but for the tedium. And this is the name of the game for each of the 4 Borderlands DLC. The runtime is artificially stretched out at every point. At least Mad Moxxi is straightforward about it. She presents you with a fight and says go. The other NPCs run you around in circles. On Zombie Island, you’re asked to collect zombie brains in increasing amounts. First 10, then 25, then 50, 100 and 250. That’s a lot of fetch questing. All for the quest giver, T.K. Baha, to throw up guns that never quite stack up to your player level. 

Speaking of gun drops that don’t stack up, Mad Moxxi was famous for it in the arena DLC. At the end of each round, you are dropped a stack of loot as a reward. A pile of weapons, shields, and upgrades fall from the sky. I don’t know that I kept a single one through the entire DLC. The loot drops were all underleveled and underwhelming. And we definitely could have benefited from some decent upgrades, because the enemies in the Underdome were brutal. There must have been something in the water, because my friend and I had to put nearly 4 times the damage into those enemies as I did anything else in the game. The following 2 DLC felt like a cakewalk by comparison. The Underdome’s psychos and brutes were the definition of bullet sponges. If they wanted an absolute gauntlet of a DLC, they accomplished that and then some.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx is a fan favorite among the 4 total DLC that were made for the game. And for the life of me, I can not figure out why. Perhaps it was the promise of the armory itself that lured players in. 

This DLC places you in a small town at the cross section of several major elevated highways over the desert below. The character’s motivation is to access the titular armory. But to get there, you’ll have to do a lot of driving first. A lot of driving. Whereas previous sections of the game were usually designed in a way that made both walking and driving viable, this DLC forces the player to take these long sections of empty highway to and from their destinations. For some reason, there is no fast travel in this DLC. The player has to walk to a “Catch a Ride” station, spawn a vehicle, and ride for about 5 minutes each way. Sometimes more, but hardly ever less. These highways have no exits. They are not a matter of convenience to get from one place to the other while avoiding the hazards below. There are no hazards below. There is no below. The highway is the map. Placed along that highway are large spawners for robotic drone enemies. These specific enemies present no threat whatsoever. You can always cruise past them without issue. 

The real frustration comes from the ever-changing roadblocks. Here, bullet sponge enemies await. These enemies wear armor and vary in type, but only barely. Some shoot bullets that do a lot of damage, some shoot bullets that do a little damage. Some are big, some are regular sized. Oh, and some fly. Really, these only exist to break up the driving. Anything else you encounter on the highway can be driven past with ease. There are drones and enemy vehicles, but you don’t really benefit from sticking around to kill these. 

Once you’ve driven around and run enough errands for the locals, you get your shot at the armory. You drive to the gate, fight the soldiers who guard it, and push into the boss arena. There, General Knoxx awaits. He’s quite large, wearing a mechanical suit and wielding large guns. The fight presents a slight challenge. There isn’t much to it, but it’s enough. Once you kill General Knoxx, the entire compound begins a self destruct sequence. You get about a minute to dig through the many loot crates of the armory. My friend and I went to work, blindly grabbing at everything we could get our hands on. The countdown reached ten seconds and we booked it for the exit. The armory exploded behind us and that was that.

Well, actually we weren’t done yet. Seeing as we were being completionists, we returned to the hub and took another quest…to go back to the armory and loot it again. 

Did you think it blew up? Yeah, nice try. So return we did. We fought the soldiers, got back to the boss arena, and there he was again: General Knoxx. He looked pretty good for a guy we killed just 30 minutes prior. So we fought and killed him again. And then we went back to the armory. And then we looted the armory again. By now, the illusion of looting had long faded. In the last 10 hours of gameplay (at least), I hadn’t picked up anything that surpassed the quality of the weapons I already had. So when it came time to loot the armory again, we ignored anything that wasn’t considered “rare”. This time we let the clock hit 5 seconds before we left the armory for a second time. 

Finally done? Nope. You get another pass at the armory. So, we drove our vehicle all the way back. We stopped at the roadblock, sprinted past the enemies, got in another vehicle, reached the armory, sprinted past THOSE enemies, fought General Knoxx a third time, and looted the rare, twice exploded armory a third time. This time we pushed our luck to the limit. We didn’t even attempt to leave when the clock hit zero. And we lived to tell the tale. As luck would have it, there are actually no consequences to remaining inside the armory during the explosion. This was the only DLC that my friend and I did not 100%. The reason? Cramerax the Invincible. The recommended level to fight this giant crab monstrosity is 64-72. We, even after 40-50 hours, were only level 50 or so. The leveling system hits a brick wall once you reach about 40. It becomes extremely slow and grueling. And at this point, our patience was wearing EXTREMELY thin.

After wrapping up the usual “kill 1000 enemies and pick up a generic loot item” quest, we had successfully “finished” the DLC. 3 down, one to go.

Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution

This one is fairly forgettable. Which is odd, because it was the only DLC teased at the end of the main game. Claptrap turns evil or something. I think it took us the shortest time to beat, but it’s because we were able to speed run this. We still finished each and every quest, but for whatever reason the enemies in the 4th DLC presented little issue for us. It really began to feel like a fever dream. We both sat mostly silent at this point. I recall being slumped over on my couch, half asleep for the majority of this. What an unceremonious conclusion to this experience. Yet, somehow, very fitting.

In Conclusion

So, that’s Borderlands. It was enlightening, in the sense that I’ve never wasted so much time on something I hated so thoroughly. Unless you count my ex-wife! I’ve never been married.

The ultimate injustice, the true Seinfeldian circumstance that caps off the whole experience, was when the Borderlands film was nearing it’s release. My friend, Dr. Goomba, was staying with me about a week prior to the movie’s release. I had tried and failed to get advance tickets to a media screening to the film. The representative I spoke to said the following about getting an early screening in my area:

“That’s up to Lionsgate and how they allocate their funds as each early screening incurs a cost.”

I imagine that they’d already written the film off as a total loss. And they were right to do so. But the punchline to the entire experience is this: my friend made me finish all of Borderlands in advance of the film. Upon it’s release, we both made plans to see it. But then after I’d left the theater and called him to discuss, he said “Nah, I ain’t watchin that shit.” And he laughed all the way to the bank.