I've essentially played more or less the entire Gearbox back catalogue:
Half Life:Opposing forces was pretty good. 4/5
Half Life:Blue Shift was great. 5/5
Half Life:Decay was awful. 1/5
Counterstrike was a cheap cash in and hack job of an already successful mod. 2/5
Halo:Windows Edition was just a slightly dodgy port. 3/5 (The game was good, the port was meh)
James Bond: Nightfire was an okay game (Gearbox only made the PC version which was notably the weekest version) 3-4/5
Tony Hawk's Pro-scatter 3 [misspelling intentional]: Only one I haven't played, apparently the port Gearbox did was bad, but the Pc/mac are hardly the go-to console for skating games.
The Brothers in Arms series was for the most part good, but riddled with bugs and often felt unfinished. (3-4/5)
Samba de Amigo was just a very dodgy port. 2/5 (The original was actively better)
Duke Nukem Forever is possibly the worst game ever released pretending to be a treble A title. 1/5
Borderlands- was a concept with promise, executed in the worst possible way. 3/5
Borderlands 2- Actually managed to improve upon the original significantly (no surprise since it got A:CM's budget) 4/5
A:CM - Has so many nuggets of 'great', wrapped in a big ball of 'unfinished' and 'non-sense' which shouldn't have gotten through the first cuple of drafts... 4/5 (or 2/5 if you keep nostalgia and franchise loyalty out of it)
Pretty much all of their stuff has a certain 'unfinnished' feel to it. Large bugs in essential features or sections of the single player game which should have the most emotional pay off suddenly having the dialogue running too fast. I get the impression that there is some really bad mismangement going on in the company because the staff clearly have talent but arn't applying it very effectivly.
Since Borderlands 1 was first announced the studio seams to have been through some major chaos. The game was completely re-designed late in development. Duke Nukem was a throw-away project (with most of the work apparently done by outsourcing and not managing the outsourcing well). ACM went through development hell (as you all no doubt are aware) with miss managed outsourcing, several complete redesigns, no final script even when the game was supposed to be finished, and finally being rebuilt virtually from scratch last moment when they realised the origional engine was not actually compatible with certain platforms... and most of it's funding was spent on Borderlands 2 (if you believe certain 'informants').
I can only assume that they are going to do another hack-job on the homeworld series(sadly), to tide them over until their next in house IP (or between future entries in the borderlands series).
