When comparing Borderlands: The Handsome Collection vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends Borderlands: The Handsome Collection for most people. In the question“What are the best open world games on Xbox One?” Borderlands: The Handsome Collection is ranked 8th while NieR: Automata is ranked 11th. 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
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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 Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
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 Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.