Review – Borderlands: The Fall of Fyrestone #4 (IDW Publishing)

Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Mikey Neumann
Artist: Agustin Padilla
Release Date: 12th November 2014

I think it’s fairly safe to say that people who play Boarderlands aren’t exactly doing it for the in-depth storyline and well written dialogue. You play the game because you get to shoot stuff with big fuck-off guns and level up while playing an awesome, beautifully rendered FPS/RPG. In that respect, this book fails. Completely and utterly. There’s very few big guns so far, and i’m not sure how you *could* level up in a comic! HOWEVER, and it is a big however, the comic does features all of the things that the game lacks. There is a much more in-depth storyline from Neumann, which has been beautifully written and manages to perfectly capture the essence of the game without it seeming like a cheap tie-in, as well as more character progression in a sense that you actually pay attention to what’s happening to them in between the shooting!

We find ourselves at the peak of Brick’s plan in this issue, which goes exactly the way you would expect it to. With witty lines from Claptrap and Neumann managing to capture exactly what makes these characters so great, I’m finding myself really enjoying the series so far. There’s just enough familiarity to the story that it makes it comforting to read, but with situations that just aren’t possible in an open-ended game that shies away from the clichéd “cut-scene to show you what we couldn’t program into the game”.

Augustin Patilla’s art of the book is serviceable, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. It would be hard to capture the cell shaded look of the game, so instead we get as close as we’re going to and it looks fantastic. with the kind of mannerisms we’ve come to expect from characters like Marcus, Claptrap and Mordecai, they’ve been put on the page exactly the way I’d want them to be.

With a nice teaser at the end as to where the story is going from here, I’m definitely a convert. It’s a nice bridge between the recently released “Pre-sequel” and Boarderlands 2 (my personal favourite) and I can only hope they keep it going for the long run.

Rating 4/5.

Chris_Avatar The writer of this piece was: Chris Bennett
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