I'm not a big adventure game guy, but I love Borderlands, so I just had to try Tales From The Borderlands for myself. The potential for great story telling in that universe is there - with its numerous factions, humor and weird sci-fi tropes - and I had some fun with The Walking Dead. I'm quite happy to have tried TFTB, it's a great adventure game mixed with plenty of Borderlands nods and lore and although the gameplay is a bit on the simple side, I wouldn't ask for more in a game that's all about characters and situations and how you react to them.
One of the nice touches of this game is how they've taken the Borderlands style - UI and all - and applied it to a Telltale adventure game. There are plenty of nice touches here and there from item descriptions to the way characters react. There is a little action sequence where you build a loader bot to kill enemies and it's well executed as well. If you've played all three borderland games, you might recognize most of the references they make. Although some were probably people you would only see in DLC packs, so the humor was missed on me. Familiar themes are also used, vault keys, vault hunters, bandits, all that jazz.
The characters they've created for this are also interesting - as much as you make them - and you control two of them separately. One is a Hyperion employee - followed in tow by his best friend, an accountant and the other is a Pandoran con artist - followed by her sister, also in the trade. The new characters they introduce - villains, supporting cast - also all fit into the universe they had to build upon. The decisions you make during various conversation options more or less impact how the story go - though I suspect that there are so main lines that must always stay the same no matter how you play.
To finish, the way you play the game is also plenty competent. Sometimes you walk around and investigate things - the hyperion employee has an eye scanner that lets him get more info on stuff - and sometimes you just click on things to continue the story. There were no really big puzzles and seemingly no overwhelmingly bad choices for how to proceed. There was light combat, mostly QTEs, which feels like the way to go for a game that isn't fast-paced at all and I had no difficulty with them.
Tales From The Borderlands is pretty great, the only real flaw with episodic games such as this one is that I now have to wait for the other parts.
