As Gearbox hypes up the next installment in the beloved looter-shooter franchise, promising the biggest and most ambitious entry yet, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the legacy. As a long-time Vault Hunter who’s journeyed through every Borderlands title over the past 16 years, I’ve got some well-earned opinions ready to share. Here at Digital Tech Explorer, we’re diving deep into the series to help you make informed decisions about where to spend your time. From the foundational original to the most refined experiences, here’s my personal ranking of the Borderlands library, from worst to best.
5. Borderlands (the first one)
If 2009’s Borderlands is your favorite vintage, hear me out: “Worst” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad”. While the original title undoubtedly laid the groundwork for a genre-defining franchise, it’s a solid but unrefined start. One of the series’ biggest strengths—its reliable and unchanging gameplay loop—also means you can clearly track its improvement on a more-or-less linear curve.
This makes the first Borderlands the least compelling of the bunch. Movement feels slow and plodding, the pacing—especially in the early-game—is like wading through treacle, and its narrative is largely forgettable. In a vacuum, Borderlands deserves immense credit for kicking off the looter-shooter movement in earnest, but later iterations simply do a better job. If you’re looking to play a Borderlands game today, I honestly can’t think of a single reason to go back to this one unless you’re seeking a specific nostalgia trip.
4. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands—I certainly had a good time playing it. However, when matched against the rest of the roster, it feels more like an elaborate DLC than a fully fledged Borderlands game. The setting is a fun send-up for plenty of TTRPG-based jokes, but its class structure and spell system are easily the weakest build mechanics in the series.
While the ability to combine two classes into one character is an interesting mechanic, one of the series’ core strengths lies in each Vault Hunter possessing a unique identity that truly shapes gameplay. By comparison, the Fatemaker’s classes often feel light on flavor. Instead of playstyle-defining abilities like Brick’s berserk mode or Zer0’s Decepti0n, most of Wonderlands’ class abilities are just things you hammer off-cooldown. The multiclassing aspect technically increases variety, but it also necessitates that no single class rocks the boat too much, which feels like it left Gearbox with less wiggle-room for truly distinctive abilities. It also misses an opportunity by not including any of the game’s OG Vault Hunters, despite its promising premise.
3. Borderlands 3
If you bounced right off Borderlands 3 I absolutely do not blame you. Yes, the story was atrocious, yes, the characters were annoying, and yes, the memes were several years too late. However, while Borderlands 3’s story was insufferable, its moment-to-moment action is arguably the best in the entire Borderlands series.
It’s a fantastic mashup of every game that came before it, taking the foundational shooting of the first game and the more intricate classes and loot of the second. It then stacks the entire series’ evolved movement tech—butt slams, mantling, and sliding—to make the combat truly sing. I’ll happily stand by the assertion that Borderlands 3 has the best-feeling combat of the entire franchise. It helps that its DLC offerings are also pretty good, adding significant value.
2. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is genuinely great, if you can forgive all the space-Australian accents. It features a solid story with some surprisingly decent character work, a novel lunar setting, some entertaining low-gravity mechanics, and a splendid roster of Vault Hunters with truly distinct playstyles.
Athena in particular is not only an incredibly compelling character but also boasts one of the most satisfying Vault Hunter skills in the entire series. I will never tire of hurling her Kinetic Aspis at a bunch of mooks. It also introduced the iconic butt-slam, which is my single favorite addition to the series’ movement—more so than mantling or sliding. Being able to decide “hey, I don’t want to be in the air anymore” will never cease to be satisfying, especially since doing so results in a glorious explosion. And this is Borderlands, after all; explosions are like 90% of the entire point.
1. Borderlands 2
You probably saw this one coming—while I prefer the movement fluidity in the third game, Borderlands 2 truly has it all. It boasts a stacked roster of great Vault Hunters with unique playstyles, a story that actually manages to be consistently entertaining the whole way through, and a villain so charismatic he cast a literal shadow over the rest of the franchise. Plus, the jokes are actually funny.
Every other Borderlands game comes with some sort of caveat involved—the first one clearly shows its age, Wonderlands’ classes aren’t as interesting, the third game’s story is obnoxious, and the Pre-Sequel’s oxygen mechanics can be a bit peculiar—but not Borderlands 2. It expertly nailed every single positive aspect of the Borderlands series, and the only way I could feasibly see it improved would be some kind of remake that integrates Borderlands 3’s advanced movement tech.
Honourable mention: Tales From the Borderlands
I can’t rightly place Tales From the Borderlands anywhere on this numerical list because it’s not actually a traditional Borderlands game—it’s more an interactive narrative with choices and QTEs. However, it accomplishes something the main series never quite has: it truly gets the potential potency of the Borderlands vibe, arguably even more profoundly than Gearbox itself. The elevator pitch of “A Telltale Borderlands game” absolutely should not work, but it does, brilliantly.
While the main franchise sometimes struggles to find consistently good character work and dialogue from entry to entry, Tales is brimming with it in a way that feels nigh-effortless. Rhys and Fiona play off each other with buckets of charm, Vaughn is just a little guy, Sasha is carrying the brain cells for the whole group, and Loader Bot is my son and I will die for him. It turns out, the funniest joke you can tell in Borderlands is to have its occupants—surrounded by space magic, Lovecraftian vault monsters, madcap bandits with buzzsaws, and comically evil corporations—just be normal people trying to survive.
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