Borderlands: The Handsome Collection Review (Xbox One)

We’ve seen a lot of remasters this generation and Borderlands: The Handsome Collection from 2K Games and Gearbox Software packs in a whole lot of content for you featuring Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel along with all the DLC, and offers upgraded visuals, performance and a lot more.

This collection is a no-brainer if you haven’t played Borderlands 2 and the Borderlands: Pre-Sequel before. If you have, it still offers every DLC released so far, which means you will have a bunch of amazing shoot and loot games on your next-gen system of choice.

These are not games that you can complete in a few days. There are tons of quests and sidequests and the world is beautifully crafted and the cell shaded graphics are spectacular to look at.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was released recently and you can play as Handsome Jack in the game. He was the main antagonist in Borderlands 2.

I played both games on the Xbox One and there were massive patches of around 16GB waiting for me. Gearbox recommends you download these patches because it adds additional content to the game. Their reasoning was that this content wasn’t finished in a timely fashion and had to be released digitally.

Borderlands 2 is one of the best games of last gen and a chance to play that on your Xbox One and PS4 is an exciting thing. The visuals are overhauled and matches the PC version. This game is a lot more polished than The Pre-Sequel for some reason and it’s weird considering The Pre-Sequel came out after Borderlands 2.

One of the main issues with The Pre-Sequel is the performance. There’s some heavy screen tearing, sluggish controls and the frame rate does not remain stable. While the writing and the mission structure are great and makes you want to play the game, the technical issues make it very hard to continue. Of course, you can get used to it but it’s pretty inconvenient.

Borderlands 2 on the other hand performs a lot better than The Pre-Sequel, but frame rate drops are prevalent in certain sections of the game.

If you love such games, this collection will provide you a lot of enjoyable content, and if you have played these games on your last gen console, you can move over your save to PS4 or Xbox One. The catch being that the save transfer only works if you are going from Xbox 360 to Xbox One and PS3 to PS4. This is still a very nice option.

You can co-op and there’s a split-screen co-op option as well. These games are meant to be played with friends. The online netcode is pretty smooth and I generally did not have any issues.

Having finished Borderlands 2 on the PC, I prefer that platform a lot because it eliminates major technical issues like screen tearing and frame rate drops. I have not played the PS4 version and do not know how the performance is on that platform.

While it’s still a good deal for PS4/Xbox One owners, if you own a high end PC that’s the place to play these games. Hopefully, Gearbox can deploy some fixes and make the console experience a bit better.

There are a lot of things to do considering the amount of content that is bundled in this collection. It’s a huge time sink. The gunplay and general feedback is not as good as, say, Destiny, but there are some cool things you can do in the game.

Borderlands: The Handsome Collection offers tons of content and will basically keep you busy for a month or so if you get hooked on to its shoot and loot mechanics, humorous writing and lively characters.