Tales From The Borderlands: Episode One - Zer0 Sum Reviews

Tales From The Borderlands: Episode One - Zer0 Sum is ranked in the 93rd percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
8.8 / 10.0
Aug 5, 2015

Tales from the Borderlands – Episode One: Zer0 Sum does a brilliant job of drawing the player into the world of Pandora. Both fans of the franchise, and players being introduced for the first time, will appreciate the engaging characters and their story.

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4.3 / 5.0
Jul 12, 2015

Admittedly, the QTE portions won't be for everybody. I've also noticed minor glitches like character lips not moving sometimes during dialogue. If you like point-and-click adventures, however, Tales from the Borderlands is another solid and entertaining addition to Telltales' lineup of games.

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4.4 / 5.0
May 5, 2015

Zer0 sum is like an impressive pilot to greenlight a TV show. Hopefully the rest of the season is just as good.

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7.5 / 10.0
Apr 5, 2015

With three episodes still to go, Tales from the Borderlands has plenty of time to inject extra thrills into the story and hopefully introduce some more compelling gameplay elements. All the same, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into episode three, thanks to the compelling characters and hilarious dialogue.

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6 / 10
Feb 21, 2015

Predictable and glitchy as all get out, it's still fun

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Readers Gambit
Guest Author
7 / 10.0
Jan 26, 2015

Although Tales From The Borderlands is a humorous and well written opening to the series, it often struggles to run at a decent framerate and suffers largely at the hands of an outdated engine.

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9 / 10
Jan 13, 2015

When Tales from the Borderlands was announced, I honestly wasn't sure what to anticipate, but with one (quite long, but well-paced) episode, Telltale have sold me on another one of their ideas. It's shares a lot of DNA with both Borderlands and the usual Telltale adventure games, and yet it's nothing like them at all. It's one of their best offerings, and a refreshing new direction for both a game series that had begun to go stale and a gameplay formula which had started to feel repetitive.

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7.4 / 10.0
Dec 31, 2014

Zer0 Sum tells the best story and introduces the best characters in the Borderlands series. As a Telltale game, the humor tends to fall a bit flat at times, and it lacks the drama Telltale do so well.

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Drew Hurley
Top Critic
9 / 10
Dec 24, 2014

The comedy, the story choices, the setup - it's all done well in Tales from the Borderlands: Episode One - Zer0 Sum. The next episodes can't come quick enough! Grab the season pass and enjoy waiting with baited breath for each episode to be released. The team here at Cubed3 certainly will be!

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Dec 24, 2014

From jail-breaking a Hyperion Loader Bot to teaming up with a rather familiar-looking vault hunter, this departure from the main franchise is off to an epic and hilarious start!

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GameGrin
Top Critic
9 / 10.0
Dec 20, 2014

Overall, this first episode is a fantastic introduction to the genre's take on the Borderlands universe. While there are the occasional long periods of player inactivity, they do little to distract from the engaging story and characters, especially as you'll spend most of this time laughing. If this is what Telltale has to offer for episode one, then I can't wait for the rest of the series.

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8 / 10.0
Dec 16, 2014

Telltale Games bring their trademark style of adventure gaming to the chaotic wastes of Pandora in Tales for the Borderlands, a surprisingly refreshing take on the world made popular by Gearbox Software's first-person, role-playing series

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8.5 / 10.0
Dec 15, 2014

Tales from the Borderland: Episode One is light on challenge but makes up for it in a big way with story and presentation. This is a great opening chapter to the series regardless of your familiarity to the Borderlands world.

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NZGamer
Top Critic
8.5 / 10.0
Dec 14, 2014

It's the perfect blend of Borderlands' humour and Telltale's penchant for great writing and narrative-driven gameplay, and I'm eagerly awaiting the rest of the season. I just hope that Fiona will come into her element soon, the way Rhys did right from the opening credits.

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8 / 10
Dec 10, 2014

Another hit to add to Telltale Games ever growing library.

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8 / 10.0
Dec 8, 2014

Tales develops an interesting world filled with rich characters that was imprisoned within the shoot & loot framework of Borderlands and Borderlands 2. Free from those constraints, Tales is already well on its way to telling a damn good story, and that's the best kind of loot there is.

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9 / 10.0
Dec 8, 2014

Tales From the Borderlands: Episode One – Zer0 Sum is one heckuva debut. Somehow, the developers allow the action and story to leap off the screen, and they give a sufficient amount of time to each. The visuals are superb, the soundtrack is excellent, the cast is worth knowing, and the overall atmosphere and style is vintage Borderlands with Telltale's obvious influence and flair.

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9 / 10.0
Dec 4, 2014

As far as introductions go, Zer0 Sum gives us a hell of a welcome to Tales from the Borderlands. The aesthetics and writing are true to the source material, the humor is on point, the characters and voice acting are great, and the story is entertaining and engaging. Since they're turning a traditionally FPS series into a point-and-click adventure, it heavily relies on quicktime events and action sequences, but it does a good job of mixing objectives and pacing to keep it from getting stale. "Zer0 Sum" sets up a lot of exciting possibilities and daunting mysteries into motion, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

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Dec 3, 2014

Tales From The Borderlands kicks off with a feel-good tour de force. Not only is Zer0 Sum a satisfying and frequently hilarious use of three hours, but it would have been strong enough to stand on its own as a masterful piece of interactive Borderlands fiction. As Zer0 might say... :D

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Dec 3, 2014

Telltale has demonstrated that their knack for writing and developing characters is as solid as ever, even with the wacky 'Borderlands' license. With 'Zer0 Sum,' the first episode of 'Tales from the Borderlands,' Telltale got the story heavy take on the colorful world humming. The characters and script are smart and snappy, and elicited a chuckle from me more than a few times through the brief playthrough. If they can lock down the bugs cropping up in the technical performance, this would be about as good as it gets for an adventure game.

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