Borderlands 3 is the fourth entry in the borderlands franchise; one which I enjoyed a lot in the past. I was on the fence about this new one - whether to get it at all, for instance - because of controversy surrounding people involved in making it, but ultimately I nabbed it during a pre-order sale; I had to know what they would do to the Borderlands recipe to make it update it to 2019s standards, I wanted to know if I still enjoyed that game of game and also how they would tone it. After playing about half the campaign (I still want to finish it at least once) I can answer these questions. They didn’t update it, I still enjoy that kind of game but with diminished returns and the tone is still horrible.
After having to restart the unskippable intro cutscene for three times because the keyboard controls in the game are kinda bad and I kept selecting the wrong character, I was thrown in the classic Borderlands intro; arriving in a new land with an annoying robot to guide me through a tutorial of sorts, telling me everything about the new traversal mechanics they’ve added in this game. Climbing on things, and sliding (basically crouching while running). I never used sliding and climbing was only necessary in some very obvious spots to reach optional objectives, but all right.
I have selected FL4K as my vault hunter, a robot hunter that uses beasts to fight. The concept is neat (I selected that character because I wanted a solo ally that could revive me and distract foes) but having two different skills mapped on a tap of the F key and holding it is kinda bad. The skill trees work pretty much the same as in other Borderland games, except now you can have different action skills and customize them with passive effects; This is a nice addition to the game. I haven’t tried anyone else yet - I don’t want to go through the intro cutscene again - but one has a mech, another can summon gadgets and the last one is a siren with special powers. They all seem to have an okay range of abilities and passives and, time permitting, I want to try them all.
Everything about the characters in Borderlands 3 is the same as it was in the other games, for better or worse. Which in my case is pretty much for the worse, since the characters are one note caricatures of very specific archetypes, all of which seem to involve just saying nonsense or things that would matter more in another context. Some of the jokes in Borderlands 3 are good, some of the story beats could be interesting, but I wish the overall tone of the game and the characters it portrayed was more on the serious side. At least you can ignore that stuff and just go for the shooting and looting…
…which isn’t -that- great. This game has too many useless guns. The new power rating metric can help, but I’m drowning in bad guns, whatever I kill or open will probably have a couple bad guns in there. They don’t serve any purpose. They should just be replaced with cash instead. You still have the classic array including assault rifles, shotguns and rocket launchers, but now weapons have extra modes. This can range from a shield when the weapon is raised to toggling between multiple elements or having another sub-weapon attached. Besides the element toggle, I rarely use that system. I also found running out of ammo a bit weird, maybe it’s a 2019 thing, but while reloading is perfectly fine, running out of ammo during a pretty long gunfight just felt unnecessary.
I haven’t went through the whole story yet and I didn’t get to use all the characters either, so my judgement on Borderlands 3 isn’t 100% complete, but it’s more of the same, and that has diminishing returns for sure. I don’t feel hooked to it the same way I felt for 1, 2 and the Pre-Sequel one. You could tell me this is a DLC for Borderlands 2 and I probably would almost believe you. It’s an okay game if you enjoy that specific brand of RPG Shooter, but if you don’t have any kind of nostalgia for Borderlands, I probably would ignore this one safely.
