Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Skip · Shooter · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $39.99.
- Length
- 18.1h
- Value
- $2.21/hr
- Reviews
- 79% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 70% over the last 30 days against 79% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8500 / ATI Radeon HD 2600, 13 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Launch into the Borderlands universe and shoot ‘n’ loot your way through a brand new adventure that rockets you onto Pandora’s moon in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
March 2023 is where it bottomed out, at $3.99. It has been discounted 95 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 15 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 42 percent on value. It is pricier than 95 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Borderlands Game of the Year ($29.99, scores 71) beats it on value, while it beats Tiny Tina's Wonderlands ($29.99, scores 25).
Players rate it 79 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 70 percent. Something recent has soured the room. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 1 was written by a buyer who refunded it, sampled from reviews written June 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 64 percent of the 2,007 reviews written there were positive, against 79 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 18.1 hours. Doing everything runs 61, 3.4 times as long.
The drop-off
82% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
437 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel: A Good Game Stuck in Borderlands 2's Shadow TL;DR Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a good Borderlands game, but coming directly after Borderlands 2 makes its shortcomings difficult to ignore. Low gravity, Cryo weapons, lasers, Oz kits, and some excellent Vault Hunters give the formula enough new ideas to feel worthwhile. The story also provides an interesting look at Handsome Jack before...
I think the main reason I did not finish this game until 2026, despite replaying Borderlands 1 and 2 multiple times, is that, while it's not a terrible game, everything The Pre-Sequel does, Borderlands 2 does better. I like the idea of taking the same game engine and making more of what players loved about 2 but: - The writing feels like a bunch of people who read a lot about Borderlands humor and story studied...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel scores 45/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/261640/borderlands-the-pre-sequelThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.