Borderlands Game of the Year
Worth it · Shooter · 2023
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $29.99.
- Length
- 20.6h
- Value
- $1.46/hr
- Reviews
- 90% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Borderlands Game of the Year is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 8 GB of storage. Windows only.
Get ready for the mind blowing insanity! Play as one of four trigger-happy mercenaries and take out everything that stands in your way! With its addictive action, frantic first-person shooter combat, massive arsenal of weaponry, RPG elements and four-player co-op, Borderlands is a breakthrough experience that challenges all the...
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 2015 is where it bottomed out, at $4.99. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 54 in the 14 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart.
On value it sits in the top 12 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 91 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 83 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Borderlands 2 ($4.99, scores 80) beats it on value, while it beats Borderlands 3 ($5.99, scores 59).
The press gave it 81; the people who bought it give it 90 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 3 percent of players ever finish it. On a 20.6-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. None of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written May 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 72 percent of the 1,367 reviews written there were positive, against 90 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 20.6 hours; clearing it takes 73, which is 3.6 times the campaign.
The drop-off
82% start to 3% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 20.6-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
142 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
There is something really enjoyable about experiencing Borderlands as a solo adventure. The combination of first-person shooting, RPG progression, and an almost ridiculous number of weapons gives the game a unique identity. I especially enjoyed exploring the different areas and gradually becoming more powerful. Borderlands is much more enjoyable with friends. The shooting and looting become more entertaining when...
The Great Granddaddy of all Looter Shooters. If you can find the original hardcopy of Borderlands 1 GOTY, snatch it up. Randy Pitchford captured lightning in a bottle one time. Fallout 3's art direction & story beats. Diablo's Loot & Rpg mechanics. Add that heady mix to a Mad Max/Road Warrior & Pitch Black sci fi horror hell world. Bang, you've got Pandora. A dystopian Wild Western with ray guns, hostile fauna...
omg I have to stop trying to play this. it's so boring. the map is incredibly empty except for like 3 types of enemies. expect to get randomly one-shot regurlarly. expect bullet sponge enemies that don't have any reason to be one. weapons sound like pea shooters and combat in general doesn't have any weight to it. expect needing to run back and forth so much. through the boring empty map. god is this annoying...
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
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Borderlands Game of the Year scores 71/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/8980/borderlands-game-of-the-yearThe 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 11, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.