10 Awesome Video Games That Should Have Been Terrible

5. Tales From The Borderlands

By now, the whole Telltale formula is starting to look a little see-through. We get drawn into the lives of well-written characters in precarious situations, and make ostensibly crucial decisions in progressing them through the plot. While in earlier games like Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, this felt like a unique and gripping experience, by the time Game of Thrones came out it began to to feel a bit over-familiar. But released almost concurrently with GoT was Tales From The Borderlands, which received much less attention presumably because it was set in the relatively obscure universe of an action-oriented RPG-shooter. What tales could Borderlands really have to tell? Pretty good ones, as it turns out, as you control an unlikely pair of protagonists who tell their respective stories in flashback form. All the inevitable death and destruction you'd expect in a Borderlands game is there, but the eccentric and varied characters are written in such a way that they're both emotionally engaging, more lighthearted and self-referential than the stern heroes of Telltale's other major games. Is Telltale's rinse-and-repeat formula timeless? Probably not, but Borderlands definitely gave it an unlikely new lease of life.