I had a lot of fun, exploring the overworld of the Metro universe. The open levels are nicely designed and, thank god, it's not overloaded with side quests and things to do like in a modern Ubi game. The shooting mechanics felt solid and upgrading your equipment motivates even more, searching for new weapon parts or items. The Stealth mechanics were okay. Story wise it's good too, but the ending felt very abrupt. Also, there is a big problem with the player character Artyom, who doesn't speak ingame for the THIRD time! There are many scenes, where people interact and talk with him, and it felt extremely odd, that he never responds or says anything. It works in Half Life or other titles, but not here, in my opinion.
The game is visually great, looks and feels like an older adventure, but unfortunately, on the technical side it feels old too. For instance, the options menu is not in the game, you have to open a file in the games dictionary, where you've installed it. Sound is also managed over there, so be ready to change it there first because it was damn loud on the first start. The puzzles are fun and reasonable at first, but later in the game, it gets really absurd, especially when you pick up items, that feel completely random, if you don't have any idea why you're picking those things up. Also, be careful to really check everything in a room! Some areas are a pain to backtrack, because John, the player character, is extremely slow in some areas. The story and world is okay, felt very generic though with lots of tropes and clichés. Definitely pick it up, if you like old school adventures, if you're searching for a good story and/or clunky gameplay isn't your thing, you should maybe look somewhere else.
I didn't thought that Tales from the Borderlands contains such a great and funny story that also brings some very essential plot points to the overall lore. So, this isn't some kind of spin-off tale. Fans of the Borderlands-series must play this game if they want to know what happens between Borderlands 2 and 3. The reason why I can't give it five stars is the fact, that it heavently uses the overused Telltale-formular and their old engine: easy and straight forward gameplay, often wooden animations and sometimes bad lip sync, weird pacing at some moments and sometimes weird freezes from one scene to another.
