Mario Bautista
The Borderlands series is having a massive stonking sale, and regardless of your opinions on some of Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford’s recent—er, let’s just call them ‘online moments’—the sale is downright generous.
For starters, Borderlands 2 was made straight-up free yesterday. If you are at all a fan of shooters, looters, or either genre, you have legitimately zero reason not to snap this up before the offer expires June 8. But the current Borderlands franchise sale is also worth a peek.
The headlining deal is the Pandora’s Box bundle. Originally released back in 2023, this thing’s already a good deal at a baseline, but with 45% off, the value is kinda absurd. It includes all three Borderlands games, the Pre-Sequel, the very good Tales from the Borderlands and the, uh, less-than-good New Tales From the Borderlands.
The icing on the cake is that you also get every single DLC released for all of them—classes, expansions, storylines, you name it. All for around $36/£28. Borderlands 3 is actually a pretty stand-out option, here. While I found the game’s base storyline downright unbearable, every one of its DLCs fare far better, ranging from acceptable to ‘honestly pretty good’.
Besides, the gameplay across all titles is remarkably consistent. Gearbox figured out the looter shooter formula proper with Borderlands 2, and has only added some thin layers of mechanical switch-ups since. Clunky dialogue aside, I have basically never played one of these games and not had an acceptable time.
The bundle’s also worth it for Tales From the Borderlands, which is some ripe fruit from the Telltale golden age. Enough to make me wish Borderlands 3 had actually done a decent job with its story. New Tales From the Borderlands is, uh, less good, but Telltale didn’t make it, and given the value you’re getting elsewhere, you can comfortably leave it uninstalled. Or give it a bash, I’m not your dad.
Mind, if you just want to dip your toe in, you can also snap up baseline Borderlands 3 for $3/£2.50—or Borderlands 2 and all its DLC in the Handsome Collection for $14.50/£11. Solid deals both, with both full-length games being priced like bitesized, experimental indies.
The only absentee Borderlands game is Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands—which is a bit of a shame, since I had a jolly old romp with that—otherwise, if you want some cheap, numbers-go-up fuelled dopamine? There’s hundreds upon hundreds of hours of it here.
