Franchise Hub
Borderlands
Gearbox's cel-shaded looter-shooter series — guns by the million, characters by the dozen, tonal whiplash by design.
Borderlands essentially invented a genre and then spent five games figuring out what to do with it. The original was a proof of concept: co-op, procedural guns, a cel-shaded world. Borderlands 2 refined that into one of the best loot-shooters ever made, carried as much by Handsome Jack as by its systems. Everything since has wrestled with the same problem — a formula good enough to keep going, with a writing voice that's aged harder than the shooting has.
This hub covers the highs honestly and the dips honestly. Tales from the Borderlands is, on the quiet, one of the best things the brand ever produced. Borderlands 2 is still the series' high-water mark. The later entries have to be judged on their own terms.
Reviews, retrospectives, and the broader question of what a looter-shooter owes its players in 2026.
Key Games in the Series
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