High-performance playtime
Wild guns fall to bad jokes.
Borderlands 3 is stuck in a time when memes lasted months rather than days, when referential humour was still a novelty and not exhausting, when you could point at something the slightest bit abnormal or gross and call it a joke. Simpler times, not necessarily better times.
Borderlands 3 feels like a retro shooter rather than alive and present in modern humour and pop culture. It’s simultaneously repulsive and compulsive, an FPS RPG that excels when its weapon generation system spits out guns that feels great to shoot, adorned with broken attributes capable of turning hordes of goons, bugs, and soldiers into clouds of red mist, elemental particles, explosions, and big damage numbers. Then it tells one of its many long, bad jokes and the cloud dissipates.
It’s still a Diablo-like masquerading as a shooter, now with new traversal moves, gorgeous gun models, and improved weapon feedback. But Gearbox has done little to build on the Borderlands formula, while chucking the pitch perfect writing of Tales From the Borderlands in the bin. It’s the best and the worst of the series at once.
It irreversibly changed what I expect from the series. But Borderlands 3 opts for a best-of approach, something like a sitcom clip show. The new space travel setup takes the player on a tour of the galaxy in search of yet more vaults, each stop an excuse to roll out an old character only for them to disappear or fade into the background as soon as they say hello, shoot some folks, and crack a few one-liners in sidequests that do little to reveal anything about them or test them in any way.
The new locations are a welcome change of scenery from the muted deserts of Pandora. Eden-6 is your typical swampy jungle, where dinos and pootossing jabbers chase me around the swamps and through the treetops. Promethea is a slick corporate dystopia composed of uniformly branded architecture and bright neon lighting. Each location has its own enemy types, though in practice there’s not much difference between fighting a swarm of COV soldiers or a swarm of bandits. Borderlands 3 usually tests players with a mess of enemies in open, multi-tiered arenas, more of a war of attrition than a tactical puzzle. Besides a few tough bosses, the true challenge comes from deciding whether to shelve a badass electro- pistol that basically works like a super shotgun or a fiery SMG that shoots a heart-shaped bullet spray for a plain weapon with an elemental affinity better suited to a region’s enemies.
Between the bugs, the extended non-jokes, the self-aggrandising jabs at game design trends, and a few groan-worthy cameos, Borderlands 3 has a lot in common with Gearbox fan events as of late. An excess of loud, extended posturing holding what everyone really came for hostage. It’s a shame, because a better Borderlands is actually possible, but it’s just not Borderlands 3.