You know this song and dance by now, talking about news, days, people. To quote a fake Italian, let’s go! Monday, the Twitch Prime update came with an action-adventure game. Tuesday Sherlock’s gay youth was announced, and 2K is expected to be releasing more Switch ports. Wednesday, I spoke about the Formula E mess, and Alexx spoke of some rats with scurvy. Then finally, on Thursday, I spoke about how Far Cry 5 is free-to-play, and Jaydyn discussed The Last of Us Part II‘s gameplay details at the State of Play this week. It was a quiet week, all-in-all.

So, now onto this week’s free game on the Epic Games Store, which as we assumed last week and I predicted in a video yesterday released after it was revealed, it is Borderlands! Tell me again, what’s that looter-shooter series with characters that exposit every detail? The one that bored me to death when I was last told to download it. Ahh, yes it is Borderlands! Specifically, Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel thing from a few years ago. I said it last week when I knew it was going to be the Handsome Collection, it feels stupid to sell this as a definitive collection when it is missing the first game.

So with that, I thought I’d jump into Borderlands 2, the one I’m the most familiar with as it was written by Anthony Burch of Hey ash whatcha playin‘? The thing is, with my established knowledge, I knew I wasn’t going to be coming into this one, all-in-all, recommending it because of my opinion. This is the problem with free stuff, you are always recommending it because, well, people like picking up free stuff. That’s kind of the point of Borderlands, you run around finding boxes that aren’t being protected well enough, or soon won’t be, and you suddenly have some free money, ammo, or a slightly better gun. It is doing the looting, and indeed, the shooting.

Between gun combat feeling about as satisfying as having ping pong balls loosely spat at you, Claptrap not shutting his claptrap, and quite dull environments early on, I don’t know what to say. I have about two hours each week, and while that’s enough for some smaller indies, with one of the biggest releases for 2012 it is another story. If you like your online looter shooters, or you’re like our own Alexx, you know if you’ll like this. At some point, I might need to drag Alexx into a voice chat and get him to explain to me for our YouTube channel why I should like Borderlands.

Though that’s not the only thing free this weekend. As we’ve already established, over on UPlay you can pick up Far Cry 5 to try and then buy for about $15. Though, here on Epic we still have something for those of you who like putting air quotes around the phrase “capitalism,” while yelling that destruction of property is “just the cool thing to do, man!” and something else stereotypical of the misguided youth of Citizen Smith. “Freedom for Tooting!” and all that. Sludge Life, is the next game from Terri Vellmann and Doseone, the duo behind the retro-style FPS High Hell. As this slightly undercuts us on the idea of doing a review, given we were provided a press key a few days before, expect a review that is about as empty as a politicians’ promise.

However, hold on mon frére, for there is one more thing left to talk about. If you head on over to the Bethesda.net site and check in on the Arkane 20th anniversary section, you will be able to join the Arkane outsiders. Once you do and you’ve logged all the details, you will get a free copy of Arkane’s first game. Arx Fatalis is what studio creator had dreamt of creating, something akin to Deus Ex and System Shock, an immersive RPG sim. It is now a small cult game covered in NoClip’s recent feature-length documentary on the studio, and is where the creator of Dishonored came from.

Currently, you can pick up both Borderlands: The Handsome Collection and Sludge Life for free on the Epic Games Store. The current timeline for The Handsome Collection is until next Thursday morning, as usual. However, for Sludge Life the current timeline given is for it to be on sale until the 28th of May… 2021.

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