BORDERLANDS 3
It is big, but it’s not clever
You’ve heard the expression ‘less is more’, right? On the basis of Borderlands 3, we’re not sure Gearbox has. The game is stuffed as full as one of its loot chests, with so many enemies and side-missions and upgrades that they practically spill out of the screen onto your floor. And that’s before we get to the billion guns Borderlands 3 is capable of generating. The number of meaningfully different firearms is, we suspect, much lower – but it still makes for an unprecedentedly huge arsenal. As well as Diablo-style damage stats, each gun comes from a specific manufacturer with its own proprietary features: COV guns let you hold the trigger down without worrying about reloading, but will eventually overheat and break down. However, with a Tediore-brand weapon reloading’s the best bit – you throw the entire gun away, and as it explodes a fresh copy materialises in your hands. Add a sprinkling of random perks like alt-fire modes or corrosive ammunition and it’s easy to end up with a gun that feels entirely unique.
Honestly, it can all be a little overwhelming, especially when you first fire up the game and are asked to pick one of four Vault Hunter characters. There’s Flynt, the gadget-brandishing Operative; Moze, the Gunner (plus her mech BFF Iron Bear); FL4K, a robotic Beastmaster with their accompanying menagerie of monsters; and Amara, this game’s representative (there’s always one) of the Sirens, the Borderlands universe’s answer to the Jedi Order.
PET CHARACTER
Whoever you choose, it’s hard not to feel you’re missing out on three-quarters of what the game has to offer, and Borderlands 3 doesn’t make it easy for you to sample its many flavours. You’ll have to restart the entire game and endure a lengthy, unskippable cutscene before you can try out a new character. We started with FL4K, whose AI-controlled pets aim to keep you company during solo sessions, but found them as much hindrance as help and ended up settling on Amara instead, with her twofisted approach to combat – or eight-fisted, if you push her powers in that direction.
Every character can be customised, from their looks to abilities, via a skill tree so sprawling you could take refuge under it in a storm. Each character’s upgrades are split into three, each with an associated power, marking different paths you could take them down. So Amara can become a brawler with boosted melee damage and weapons that are most effective at close quarters, or focus on dealing Elemental damage to shock, freeze, or incinerate enemies.
In theory you can mix and match, but the synergies
“THE GAME IS STUFFED AS FULL AS ONE OF ITS COUNTLESS LOOT CHESTS.”
between abilities within each tree mean you’re probably better sticking with upgrading one until it’s maxed out. So really, you’re picking from one of 12 possible characters. It feels a little like turning up to the world’s biggest all-youcan-eat buffet equipped with a single chopstick.
SQUAD GOALS
The solution to the skills gap is co-op, where you band together with three other characters and see all their powers in action. This dials up the already chaotic combat to near incomprehensibility, which sounds like a negative but Borderlands 3 somehow makes it work. Wave after wave of minions is fed into the mincing machine that is your current favourite gun. And with every other kill you make, the screen fills with an update telling you this is your 60th kill with a pistol, your 100th headshot, your 1,000th bandit exploded like a balloon filled with raspberry jam.
The guns, for all their variety, feel consistently good in the hands. Before you can get bored, there’s a new toy to play with: an automatic pistol with an underslung taser, a Tediore SMG that sprouts legs and chases enemies when thrown aside, a sniper with electrified ammo that shorts out enemy shields, a rifle with sticky rounds which embed in your target and then explode… In combat, in customisation, in just about every aspect of Borderlands 3 Gearbox throws out conventional wisdom and replaces it with its own maxim: more is more, duh.
VERDICT
More guns, more planets, more skills, more… more. If you liked the previous ones, this gives you plenty of the same to enjoy. Borderlands 3 is the very definition of the bigger and better sequel. Alex Spencer