Review — Tales From The Borderlands: The Vault Of The Traveler

Tales From The Borderlands

We Sit Down And Review Tales From The Borderlands — The Vault Of The Traveler. This Is The Fifth And Final Episode Of Telltale’s Take On Gearbox’s Famed Franchise. Here’s Our Review On How They Did

All great things must end sometime and sadly here we have the final episode of Tales From The Borderlands‘ first season. There have been a lot of ups and not so many downs for this take on Gearbox Software‘s franchise and it has been one of my favorites from Telltale Games to date. But does it hold up and make us want a Tales From The Borderlands season two? Does everything that they set up pay off when all is said and done or will Tales From The Borderlands be forgotten to time? Here’s our review of Tales From The Borderlands‘ finale: The Vault Of The Traveler.

Story

It feels a bit redundant to say again but this episode of Tales From The Borderlands obviously picks right back up where the last episode ended. Everyone was in some kind of sticky situation and needed to get back to Pandora to claim the vault and save their friends. That is just what they do and along the way open up the Vault Of The Traveler to slay the monster and claim all of the loot. Given the developer and the franchise of course nothing goes exactly to plan and that’s where we come in to help wrap up this season of Tales From The Borderlands.

Hated

For the first time in any of the episodes of Tales From The Borderlands this episode starts out and ends on really slow notes. Insanely slow notes. This could be based off of how over the top the last episode was but it went from amazing action at the cliffhanger before to slow and steady. Of course everything picked right up later in this episode of Tales From The Borderlands but then it dropped back off as things wrapped up. Given all of the episodes we’ve already experienced the pacing just didn’t fit in at all. Almost as if Telltale Games brought on a new writer just for this episode who had not experienced any of the prior ones.

Tacking on to that, for the first time in any of the Tales From The Borderlands episodes it never felt like any of the choices made really mattered. They were just there to give you the semblance they did but in the end the story the developer wanted was what we were getting and there was no deviating from it. This is a video game and things do need to be a bit static for the code to work but unlike everything before in Tales From The Borderlands nothing was blended in so we could have that feeling. This was their conclusion and not what we had been building to throughout the season.

Loved

While the opening and closing did seem a bit out of place given everything else in Tales From The Borderlands, the middle and climax of this episode were just as we had come to expect from Telltale Games and Gearbox Software in the franchise. In fact it is specifically all of the fighting with The Traveler that made me fall in love with this episode of Tales From The Borderlands. It is hard to explain without spoiling the experience but let’s just leave it as an arcade fighting type simulator makes its way into Tales From The Borderlands and you get to control a Voltron type creature in the fight. That shouldn’t spoil too much.

The levity that is brought into the dialog here in this episode also is top notch. Even when things are completely serious and Telltale Games is trying to bring you to tears with Tales From The Borderlands little things are brought in that just fit so well in the Borderlands universe that the misty eyes no longer stay a problem. Again a lot harder to explain without spoiling any of the story for the game. It’s just like they crammed in another new writer for the second and third act of the story who truly understood the Tales From The Borderlands and Borderlands stories to bring back the entertainment.

Overall

Plain and simple if you have been playing Tales From The Borderlands since the first episode dropped then you should pick up the final one. You shouldn’t leave a video game unfinished. If you have yet to play Tales From The Borderlands then now is the time to go out and pick up the whole season to enjoy. I honestly think this is the first and only episode I found a little lackluster. The rest of the season more than makes up for this and possible would have fixed my experience if I played each episode of Tales From The Borderlands back to back instead of waiting in between. You can now play it from start to finish and you should if you haven’t picked up anything yet.

Plainer and simpler…Tales From The Borderlands‘ full first season is worth the time and money. Get It!

Tales From The Borderlands — The Vault Of The Traveler was developed by Telltale Games and Gearbox Software. Tales From The Borderlands — The Vault Of The Traveler was published by Telltale Games for the PS3, PS4, PS Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC on October 20^th 2015. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes.