As synonymous with the Borderlands series as its trillions of guns, masked psychos, and dodgy vehicle controls are its iconic musical intro cinematics. Serving to acquaint us with four new Vault Hunters and the setting they’ll be gunning through, they’ve taken us everywhere from a bus driving across Pandora to a rocket hurtling through space.
At their best, they set the tone perfectly. At their worst, their forced action hero coolness can inch over into cringe. Across the breadth of the now 16 year old series, in spin-offs, sequels, and pre-sequels, we’ve seen the full spectrum.
So, as we wait to see what new cinematic Borderlands 4 lavishes us with, I think it’s the perfect time to make the definitive ranking of the series’ intros, from the first game right through to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands—though leaving out New Tales from the Borderlands, which rudely doesn’t feature one at all.
We’ll start with the worst, and work our way up to the best, using the most rigorous of decision-making criteria. Disagree with my picks? Let me know in the comments. Just make sure your thoughts are accompanied by a catchy 2000s-era rock song, please.
6: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
Song: N/A
What happens: The heroes confront the Dragon Lord, but face certain defeat… until Queen Buttstalion arrives to imprison him with her magic.
Score: 🔫/5
Verdict: Perhaps appropriately for a game that technically doesn’t even bear the Borderlands name, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands breaks all the rules with its intro. There’s no song, no mode of transportation, and no Vault Hunter introductions. Instead, we get some celebrity voice talent and a lead-in to the game’s tabletop RPG conceit.
The thing is, if you’re going to swerve away from the traditional approach, you’ve kind of got to have a good idea for what you want to do in its place. Wonderlands doesn’t, really. I liked the game well enough but this intro isn’t particularly interesting or even funny, and it commits the cardinal sin of lampshading that it’s doing bad storytelling (with Tina’s iffy GMing skills and her unicorn deus ex machina) but still just doing bad storytelling. It really doesn’t get you excited to jump in.
Sorry Wonderlands, you get last place.
5: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Song: Black Dragon and Goodbye by The Vines
What happens: Our heroes’ rocket ship is boarded by bandits on its launch into space. After fighting them off in style, the team realises they’re about to be shot down, and… quietly accepts death?
Score: 🔫🔫/5
Verdict: Considering Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a lower budget spin-off, it’s weird that it has the most over-ambitious intro in the series. It feels a bit too long and stuffed with ideas—just a fight on the spaceship would have been enough, without the substantial lead-in and the strangely melancholy ending.
Speaking of, this is the only intro with two songs. That’s already indulgent, but the fact that neither really feels right for Borderlands anyway makes it feel like a real folly.
It does do a good job of showing off what each Vault Hunter is about (though minus points there for the zany Claptrap interlude), and I like that it sells the game’s premise by literally taking us from Pandora’s desert up into space. But it’s truly bizarre to end one of these intros with the characters seemingly coming to terms with their own mortality, and to pop out into the character select screen at a point where it appears that they’ve all perished.
4: Borderlands 3
Song: Put It on the Line by The Heavy
What happens: The Vault Hunters follow a lead to a bar full of ugly bandits, and violence ensues.
Score: 🔫🔫🔫/5
Verdict: Borderlands 3 has the only one of these where the song is actually specifically written for the game, which is pretty cool. But… it would be a lot cooler if it was a better song. Sadly, Put It on the Line just feels like a weaker re-run of Short Change Hero.
The fight choreography is some of the best in the series, though, and helps bring up the energy levels where the music struggles. It does a fantastic job of selling each Vault Hunter’s niche in the team and making them look badass and fun to play in their own right.
It does oddly feel like it’s missing something, though. It’s a good fight, but I’m not sure it’s a good introduction. The bar brawl premise makes it seem like just another encounter for these guys, instead of feeling like the moment they exploded into the world of Borderlands.
Ending with the bus just pulling up slowly in front of them just underscores the lack of momentum. It’s a nice throwback, but it doesn’t exactly get you hyped to take control.
3: Borderlands
Song: Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant
What happens: Not a lot, actually. Marcus is driving the Vault Hunters across Pandora in his bus, and while they’re travelling, they strike cool poses. That’s about it.
Score: 🔫🔫🔫🔫/5
Verdict: There’s an endearing simplicity to the intro that started it all—nothing really happens and it’s pretty short.
In some ways that’s limiting. Without some kind of action scene happening, it feels like Gearbox doesn’t know how to show off the Vault Hunters, and the result is odd moments like Mordecai randomly swinging a knife (he’s a sniper) and Lilith showing off her powers in a way that leaves you none the wiser what they actually do.
But this cinematic isn’t just here to show off our heroes, it has to get across the whole tone and style of Borderlands at a time when we didn’t really know what that was. And it does that brilliantly, with an absolute banger of a song—maybe the best one of the lot?—and some really simple imagery that sells the Wild West meets Mad Max feel of the series right away. This is a world you want to hop off and explore.
2: Tales from the Borderlands
Song: Busy Earnin’ by Jungle
What happens: Rhys and Vaughn arrive on Pandora in a stolen company car air-dropped from space.
Score: 🔫🔫🔫🔫/5
Verdict: Technically Tales from the Borderlands has five intros, one for each episode (and they’re all great), but I’ve boiled it down to just the first. And you’re telling me New Tales couldn’t even do one?!
This one feels closest to the style of the first game’s, to me. Again, it’s very simple with not a lot of action, but it just radiates coolness and atmosphere. That’s mostly thanks to a strong song choice paired with a blinder of an idea—an expensive company car air-dropping into the deserts of Pandora conveys everything you need to know about the game’s corporate-fish-out-of-water story, and it just looks rad as hell to boot.
Telltale’s more cinematic sensibilities really shine through, with more creative cinematography including lovely sweeping shots of the landscape and some subtly expressive close-ups on the characters.
That final gag—Rhys and Vaughan freaking out at having hit one of Borderlands’ most expendable enemies with their car—is the perfect full stop. This is your annual reminder that Tales from the Borderlands is far better than it had any right to be.
1: Borderlands 2
Song: Short Change Hero by The Heavy
What happens: While travelling by train across Pandora, the four Vault Hunters have to fight their way through an ambush by Handsome Jack’s robot minions.
Score: 🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫/5
Verdict: While the first game set the formula, it’s really Borderlands 2’s template that most of the other games are following. Introducing the idea of a full action sequence instead of just a bit of posing, it creates the perfect stage to show off what makes its Vault Hunters cool.
The song choice is excellent, and following the train as it travels from the deserts of Pandora into a very different biome helps sell the idea that this is a sequel that goes beyond the constraints of the original.
It even manages to introduce the main villain effectively, too—setting up how important Jack is going to be to the game’s storytelling. And then we get a (literally) explosive ending that just makes you want to step into a Vault Hunter’s shoes right away and find out what happens next.
Borderlands 2 earns its space at the top with ease—and it’s definitely the intro Borderlands 4 will need to match up to when it drops very soon.
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