Recent reviews by apple1417

There's literally no endgame, they even removed tvhm so you can't even replay the story with a geared buildn

If you're already a fan of the series, this is absolutely a great borderlands game worth powering through, but I wouldn't recommend it to a new player.

This game has all the same sorts of issues as the previous games, but it's simply too long. It took me 45 hours to beat the main story in a "90%" playthrough, and another 20 to beat the current dlcs and to 100%. What's just slightly annoying in a 12h game really becomes a lot worse when it keeps happening over and over in a 45h one. One single cutscene where you just suddenly lose, and for some reason don't even try shoot the villan? Forgiveable. Half a dozen? Not so much.

Pros:
Tonnes of great QoL tweaks.
Amazing music and sound design.
Adding mantelling greatly improves movement.
Random enemies actually drop rare loot.
Proper knockback.
The best skill trees in the series.
A wide variety of new unique items to learn.
Perhaps the best social features - granted I've played exclusively solo so far.
It's actively being updated and rebalanced.

Cons:
Many control issues - it's overly controller focused, there are minor differences to previous games with no option to switch back, and they don't work the same on every screen.
Very large maps for the amount of detail in them.
Shoehorned collectable systems with really odd unlock and "worthwhile reward" timings.
General gearbox buggyness - some walls aren't solid, items fall through the floor, etc.
The jokes have somehow gotten even more immature.
Tonnes of padding where you do nothing but listen to a character speak for a few minutes.
An absolute cop out of an ending.
It's actively being updated and rebalanced.

Pretty good speedrun.

If you're going to buy this game anyway, do yourself a favour and switch to the "legacy - pre se2017" beta before downloading.

I adore this game. As you can see, I've put more hours than anyone reasonably should into it. I do still think it's an amazing game, but after what's happened in the "recent" updates I can no longer recommend it.

On February 23rd 2019, after over a year without any updates at all, they suddenly came out with the beta that ruined everything. The older version itself was released 8 months after the one before it, it basically seemed like support for the game had ended. But out of nowhere they came and upgraded the entire engine. Normally this would be seen as a sign of great devs, but it introduced so many small issues that have never been fixed.

One of the biggest changes was that they removed 32 bit, open gl, and directx 11 support. Have an older pc that barely fits the minimum posted requirements? Won't work on current patch. Most people will only find this out when they've downloaded everything and the game refuses to launch, and if they troubleshoot enough they'll find out they just need to redowload the whole game on an older version. The only place is says this is a pinned thread in the forums, which no one will check untill they start having issues, there's no warning on the store page or when you try run the (non-existent) 32 bit version.

Another big issue was licence validation, though this seems to be mostly fixed now. The update added stricter license checks, which caused many false positives on people who legitimately bought the game and hadn't tampered with files, preventing them from even launching the game.

But the biggest crime is what they did to the workshop. It is completly unusable now. 4 years of mods all gone. There were some amazing custom campaigns (Rebirth, Schrödinger Cat, Only Puzzles 2) that could easily add hundreds of hours of playtime, but you can't play any of them anymore. The update changed where the maps are stored on disk, but just moving them over isn't enough. They also redid how light maps, and a few other mostly irrelevant features, work, so every single map has to be re-saved to work. These old map makers from years ago aren't all going to come back just for that. But to add insult to injury, once you've fixed everything, you can't even upload your fix. They broke workshop uploads.

This was all reported months ago ( https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/464416372756054027/642277787008368641/State_of_the_Workshop.png ) but we've never gotten more than a "we're looking into it". The entire workshop has been unusable for months and nothing. It adds so much extra content and replayability to the game but nothing. This is why I cannot recommend this game.

Now if you switch to the beta I mentioned at the top this all goes away, it just starts working again, you can play existing maps and upload your own all fine. This is why, if the rest of my review hasn't persuaded you, I still highly recommend switching into that beta.