When comparing Borderlands: The Handsome Collection vs Gears of War 4, the Slant community recommends Borderlands: The Handsome Collection for most people. In the question“What are the best shared/splitscreen local multiplayer games on Xbox One?” Borderlands: The Handsome Collection is ranked 11th while Gears of War 4 is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Borderlands: The Handsome Collection is:
Borderlands is a lot more fun when you play it together with your friends. It's not just due to the excitement of going on an adventure together, it's also because the teamwork feels rewarding and meaningful. The various characters and guns have their strengths and weaknesses, so you can cover for each others weaknesses. It creates an experience where you learn to rely on each other and forge a stronger bond as a result.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Awesome co-op experience
Borderlands is a lot more fun when you play it together with your friends. It's not just due to the excitement of going on an adventure together, it's also because the teamwork feels rewarding and meaningful.
The various characters and guns have their strengths and weaknesses, so you can cover for each others weaknesses. It creates an experience where you learn to rely on each other and forge a stronger bond as a result.
Pro Exciting loot collection
Every time you kill an enemy or open a chest an item can drop. There are millions of possible combinations, each with their unique appearances and stats, so you never know what you'll get. It can be a really weak but rainbow-colored rifle, or an exceptionally powerful golden shotgun. The potential to find the best loot in the most humble locations makes killing enemies and finding chests incredibly exciting and satisfying.
Pro Great variety of character classes
Both games in the collection have 6 character classes (12 total). Each one has unique abilities that are affected by the skill trees, allowing you to further specialize your character to suit your playstyle. You can choose the support skills to help your teammates, defensive skills if you like being in the middle of the action, or offensive skills to quickly destroy enemies at the cost of increased risk. There's enough variety to keep it fresh across multiple playthroughs of two very similar games.
Pro Really good value for its price
The Handsome Collection contains Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: TPS with all of their DLC included, which gives you more than 100 hours of exciting content. Before this collection was released you'd have to spend more than $100 to get all the DLC for these 2 games.
Pro Local splitscreen multiplayer
Nowadays, some titles tend to exclude local multiplayer, focusing primarily on online play but Gears of War 4 is an exception. You can play both the campaign and all multiplayer modes with your friends via splitscreen.
Pro Really fun horde mode
Horde mode is a multiplayer co-op mode where up to 5 players try to survive against waves of enemies. It features regular combat and allows you to build fortifications, which you can do by collecting resources from killed enemies and using the fabricator. This allows you to build blockades, sentries, and various other defenses, giving it a very tower defense-esque feel, which is also a lot of fun.
You can also choose between 5 classes with each class being better at something different. For example, the Engineer can build and repair defenses much faster than others and the Heavy uses stronger weapons that allow him to kill large enemies much faster. As a result, teamwork is very important, so when your squad is co-operating like a well-oiled machine, it just feels incredibly satisfying.
Pro Exciting gameplay
In Gears of War you and a squad of several other soldiers fight against the enemies of humanity, using various weapons such as rifles, a shotgun, and even a weapon that fires saw blades. It's very fast paced and a lot of fun, rewarding not only effective use of cover and accurate shooting, but also quick decision making on when to charge your enemy and take them out with your knife or your chainsaw bayonet. This leads to a lot of very intense, sometimes brutal, and always satisfying battles, making Gears of War 4 a really enjoyable ride.
Pro Excellent visuals
Gears of War 4 has some really outstanding visuals with high quality textures, great lighting, and excellent shadow mapping. This makes all of the armored human characters, monstrous lizard-like enemies, and the various lush landscapes filled with ruins look especially good. All of this is turned up a notch with the help of excellent weather effects, such as rain, lighting, and gusts of heavy wind that carry massive objects over your head, giving Gears of War 4 a very cinematic feel.
Cons
Con You can't change splitscreen settings in Borderlands: TPS
The screen is split vertically when you play 2 player coop, creating massive blindspots on the sides. This is really inconvenient when playing FPS games since you won't see enemies trying to flank you.
Con Can get repetitive over long play sessions
The gameplay is very simple at its core - you get a new mission, shoot/beat up everyone, loot items, rinse, and repeat. After doing this multiple times it can start feeling a bit dull, especially at the lower levels when your character doesn't have many abilities unlocked to keep it interesting. It might be better to stick to short play sessions, which could prevent you from burning out.
Con Poorly done story
The story has some cool moments, but it mostly focuses on pointless drama and issues that end up feeling like filler because they have no real impact on the story or character building. This coupled with a few plot holes will make you want to press the skip button and just get back into the action.