Tales from the Borderlands: A Telltale Games Series takes place some time after
Borderlands 2, and is a story told by Rhys and Fiona as they are held captive. You start off in control of Rhys as he talks about his life on Helios as a Hyperion company man along with his friend and co-worker Vaughn (Hardwick). When Rhys finds his promised promotion usurped by his long-time business rival, Hugo Vasquez (Warburton), he decides to take revenge on the new Vice President by horning in on a deal to buy a vault key from a Pandoran contact.
When Vaughn and Rhys head down to the planet with 10 million of Hyperion's cash on hand, they hope to swoop in, make a quick deal, and return as heroes. What they don't count on is Fiona and her side of the story.
Fiona, her sister Sasha and their surrogate father Felix have concocted a rather interesting con. They've made a fake vault key and have manipulated a local thug, August (North) into selling it to Vasquez. When Rhys and Vaughn show up to make the deal instead, the con artists start to get a little antsy, especially when they realize that Rhys' cybernetic eye could easily scan the prop and realize it isn't real.
Unfortunately, the deal falls apart rather badly and not only are Rhys and his friend trying to retrieve their stolen $10,000,000, but August isn't too happy with Fiona and Sasha. Both of these become major driving factors in the two main characters' adventures, but the money and fear of August are quickly overshadowed when the group discovers an old Atlas facility that appears to have a map to an actual vault.
Tales from the Borderlands is an adventure game in the same style of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Game of Thrones. That is to say, they are more like interactive movies where you work your way through a lot of dialogue with stints of quick-time sequence based action. There are a few major differences between Tales and those other games, though. For one, Tales from the Borderlands is far more lighthearted than most of Telltale's games. While there is a good bit of simple slapstick silliness in the game, there is also a good mix of darker humor that will still make you laugh a lot.
The other major difference is the amount of action in this game. While the other three do have action sequences that will result in a Game Over if you aren't fast enough, those events aren't very frequent and most of those games are all about building up the suspense for some heavy hitting drama. In this game, I found the number of action sequences to be fairly high and regular, and I often felt like my characters were in a lot more peril than in the other games. Sure, The Walking Dead would have you trying to shake off a really close zombie, or Game of Thrones throws you into a sword fight, but Tales from the Borderlands frequently puts you in fights with bandits, psychos or even your co-workers (that last one is, quite frankly, one of the funniest scenes I've ever played through and had to pause the game several times just to get through because of laughing so much). When it comes down to it, while all these games fit the adventure genre, this one is much heavier on the action and comedy than the drama, and it pays off big time.
Tales from the Borderlands is broken up into five episodes, and while we typically get the episodes one at a time and review them in pieces (for example, the Xbox One episodic reviews we have), this time we got the A Telltale Games Series, which not only let us experience and review all five episodes as a whole, but it also comes with a set of skins for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!.
