-Large, sandy desert
-Bandits and psychos everywhere
-Redneck car dealers
-Alien creatures out to kill you at all times
-87 bazillion guns
-Moxxi straight out of Only Fans

Man, Texas sure is great !

This review is based on 100% completion and 14.5 hours of gameplay.

Would I recommend this game? I would, but there’s a major caveat that I’ll detail below. The Enhanced Edition is essentially the same as the original GOTY version, but with improved graphics and some noticeable quality-of-life (QOL) updates. So, all my thoughts on the original GOTY version apply here too.

The game itself is solid, with well-designed mechanics and gameplay that still feel good by today’s standards. The story is easy to follow, and the writing holds up as well. Where this edition shines is in the graphics, which are noticeably improved compared to the original. It doesn’t feel like a rushed job; it genuinely looks enhanced. There are also a few added features that make the game feel more refined.

Since this is an older game, it frequently goes on sale, so I’d recommend waiting for a discount before picking it up. If you’re thinking about getting other Borderlands games, I highly suggest waiting for the Pandora’s Box Collection to go on sale. I managed to get the entire Borderlands franchise for around $50, which was about the same price as this game on its own. Keep that in mind before purchasing.

Unfortunately, the game has a major issue with frame drops and stuttering. I couldn’t find a solution that worked for me, but there have been numerous complaints online about this problem. Some players suggest it’s due to a memory leak, but I can’t confirm that myself. For me, the game would run fine for about an hour, then the frames would drop into single digits, turning it into a stop-motion animation with a 2-4 second buffer between frames sometimes. The only way to fix this was to close the game entirely and restart, repeating the process every time the issue occurred.

I tried two guides from Steam that aimed to fix an issue like this, and while they may have slightly extended the playtime before the stuttering returned, this might have just been a placebo effect. You can check out those guides by LoG!c ©®™ and lordbean here and here.

You may or may not encounter this issue, but it’s something to be aware of before buying. Make sure to do your own research to see if it’s something you can fix or are willing to deal with.

There are co-op achievements that require another player, and one achievement needs two additional players. There are also two semi-buggy ones, which I’ll mention below.

Speaking from the perspective of someone who imported characters from the original GOTY edition, you’ll be able to carry over around 30 of the 80 achievements immediately, including some of the grind-heavy ones like those from Moxxi’s DLC, which means you won’t have to do them again. One important note: you must import the character you originally earned those achievements on for them to unlock. The rest of the miscellaneous achievements will unlock quickly by performing the required actions just once, such as killing a single enemy with an explosive weapon instead of the usual 25.

Alphabetsoup has a good guide that covers how the achievements work with importing in more detail, which you can check out here.

Unfortunately, you’ll still need to redo all the co-op achievements, with the longest being the 15 missions completed in co-op. These are all fairly easy, but you’ll need someone to help. The toughest achievement, which doesn’t carry over, is for defeating Crawmerax. I highly recommend tackling this with at least one other player and using the glitch spot to take him down, as it still works in this edition.

There are five achievements that can be a bit tricky. The first is for killing the boss at the end of the game, as this boss doesn’t respawn, so you’ll need to replay the entire campaign unless you can join someone else who’s at that point. The other troublesome achievements are for completing all the missions in certain areas, specifically Arid Badlands and Rust Commons. From my experience, these need to be done in the first playthrough, not the second. I tried doing them on my second playthrough, but none of them unlocked, except for the “5 missions completed” ones, so check online to confirm this before you waste time as I did.

Overall, importing your previous game’s characters and doing a quick clean-up will net you most of the achievements. The remaining co-op and tricky ones can be done fairly easily with a little effort.

Thank god for FOV slider and automatically picking up ammo and money without having to hold E. Everything is sharper here and the cut scenes lost all their compression artifacts. If you're a completionist, start with the non-enhanced version and just import your characters, otherwise if you don't care, just skip to this. You'll need to do some mop up afterwards but all the bosses respawn and the kill counts only need 1. For some achievements you'll need to be on Playthrough 1. I'll also note that people suffer some massive frame drops, down to single digits, and you'll need to restart the game to fix it. This happened to me about 3 times in 10 hours.