I will say right off the bat that I didn’t notice a lot of difference between the original Borderlands and the Enhanced version when it comes to visuals. That being said this was always a game that was more about art style than detail. The good news is that I didn’t notice any groundbreaking bugs introduced which is a pitfall that many enhanced editions seem to have these days. The core game play is still very fun. There are still a lot of guns to be found and a plethora of choices in how to build your character. Shooting is very fun and in a game like this it has to be. The game is still very fun to play solo, which is what I did. The main story is the same, which is to say vague and not the main feature. I enjoyed it for what it was but the game, for me, is still more about exploration of the world and the any little characters you come across. The music for the intro and credits is fantastic. There isn’t much voice acting but it’s split. The voices of the various side characters are pretty good but the little quips by the main characters get tiring fast. Driving isn’t fantastic but is more than adequate to get the job done. I found the boss fight to be a bit underwhelming, not bad, just not overly difficult. The end also seemed a bit rushed as it made the character of Steele kind of pointless as well as not having a lot of real finish to the story. I also didn’t like how entering a vehicle kills your turret as a soldier as there didn’t seem to be a good reason for this to happen.
I played Borderlands Enhanced on Linux using Steam’s Proton. The game never crashed on me but did have a few small issues. One was that no matter what I set AF to in the options it always defaulted back to trilinear and had to be changed whenever I started the game. Secondly was a side quest glitch where a claptrap wouldn’t show up on screen because I wasn’t on a specific quest yet the yellow exclamation point was there to show I should be able to pickup a quest there. There was also another side quest where in the arena the next round of opponents didn’t spawn and I had to kill myself in order to respawn which fixed the bug. There were five AF settings; one AA setting; a v-sync toggle; an FOV slider which went from 70-115; an AO toggle; and ten other graphics options. Performance was very good as the lowest my frame rate went was 88 FPS although the graphical quality wouldn’t warrant much more. The cut scenes are only 30 FPS but this wasn’t an issue. Alt-Tab didn’t work.
Game Engine: Unreal 3
Graphics API: DXVK
Disk Space Used: 20GB
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
Graphics Settings Used: 2560x1440; highest settings; 16x AF; FXAA; 100 FOV; v-sync on
GPU Usage: 34-100
VRAM Usage: 2308-4289 MB
CPU Usage: 10-17 %
RAM Usage: 5.6-7.2 GB
Frame Rate: 88-165 FPS
Overall considering that the old version of Borderlands is no longer for sale on Steam I can say that this is still worthwhile to buy for newcomers. It doesn’t make the game worse in any real way and while I can’t say it makes the game better you are still in for a treat. The game play is fun solo or with friends; the story is decent and the side quests interesting; the graphics have a good style; the music is great; and the performance is awesome. There were a few bugs I encountered but they were minor and able to be worked around. I finished the game solo in twenty one hours and fifty six minutes. I paid $10.19 CAD for the original Borderlands and got this Enhanced edition for free. It is still easily worth it’s current price tag of $32.99 CAD.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 23.0.3 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.3.2-zen1-1-zen | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165hz | Proton 8.0-2