Borderlands... just not for me.

I'll be moving on from Borderlands. Ultimately, the simple reason is that by the end of the second stream, I was no longer having fun with it, as it became very repetitive and boring to me. A chore, even. I was told by folks in chat that I picked the wrong character for the play style that I was enjoying (I picked Siren for the aesthetics, but apparently Mordacai was the guy for the sniper rifle-focused gameplay that I was having fun engaging with), and that similar to Resident Evil 5, the game is much better playing with friends online. So in other words, I got outranked rather quickly, and was told that going that path would take a hundred plus hours. The thought of that made me realize right there and then, that the game was simply not for me at all.

My biggest problem with the game, however, was something that I was already afraid of disliking when I watched the IGN review before playing the game. It's sheer amount of weapons (IGN claimed a ridiculous number in the thousands or something) and the amount of time spent on menus, especially selling junk that you pick up all over the place. I'm a simple man, and I like simplicity, and to me, that was just way too much. I have zero fun spending time on menus and reading stats. You probably see the amount of weapons it as infinite variety, but I see it as suffocating clutter.

I mentioned on stream that playing the game evoked a similar feeling to me as when I had a smartphone, with access to all sorts of amazing apps, but enjoying none of them, as the phone would constantly run out of internal memory and frequently force me to curate and delete apps in order to simply update essential ones. Ultimately, that led me to having enough, as I felt like constantly babysitting the darn thing, and made me not use smartphones at all ever again. And that's how I felt about this game, having to constantly look at a gazillion guns and a bunch of numbers on a overly colorful menu that was visually nauseating to me, a massive chore, and not fun at all. I understand that some people have fun with inventory management and numbers, but this is my review and not theirs, and I can't stand that type of stuff. Yes, I do find Resident Evil 4's inventory management a lot of fun, but it's a gazillion times simpler than Borderlands. You're deciding between a couple of weapons here and there, not a gazillion of them all the time. At the end of the day, I just really hated that aspect of the game, and that's that. I dreaded picking up new stuff because I knew that I would be having to deal with the looking at stats and comparing numbers to see which weapon to sell or to keep for half an hour. I'm just not into that, period.

Now, I didn't completely dislike the game, of course. I had a lot of fun with all T.K. Baja's missions, which revolved mostly around fighting skags. The first one, was going deep down into skag territory in order to retrieve eight Bladeflower seeds for T.K. Baha, and there's also the one where you have to retrieve his prosthetic leg from a big skag called Scar. Those missions were when I started to really enjoy the sniper rifle, sneaking around and shooting skags from afar, it was awesome. It gave me a similar joy as hunting deer in real life back in the day. The other mission I had fun with was the first part of the getting to Sledge mission, which took place indoors. It was full of very tough enemies that outranked me, and at some point it was so hopeless that I was told by someone in chat that it was best to get out and do some side missions to increase ranking. But I persevered, and managed to get past all the enemies and eventually, Roid Rage Psycho. And as always, overcoming a big challenge makes you feel great afterward.

After that, it was back to the open world on the way to Sledge, but sadly, I just never got there. The sniper rifle wasn't really cutting it anymore, and going back and forth to sell weapons because of the inventory being full all the time began to wear me down. I just wasn't having fun anymore. I was planning to return for a third stream, but ultimately, I decided that there's a lot of games out there for me to play, and there's no point insisting upon a game that didn't really click with me. It happens sometimes. The best thing to do is to move on, in my opinion. I understand that this game is beloved by many people and created a lot of memories, and I have no doubt that online co-op must have been a blast, but for me, at this point in time, is a hard pass. I'll be moving on to the next game, and it's unlikely that I will revisit this title, but like I said, I did have some fun with it. On the streaming aspect, as with a lot of those competitive and/or online shooters, it did attract the sweaty nerd types in chat, who are always extremely unpleasant and cringe to interact with. The backseating, for once, was actually mildly welcome and somewhat helpful at times. My heart was just not on this one, sorry.