Review: Borderlands 3 Is a First-Person Shooter with No Point of View

The game is boorish, infantile, and violent, and, in refusing to take any sort of consistent stand, is wildly off the mark.

Borderlands 3
Photo: 2K Games

Futuristic settings in many works of fiction often exist for creators to reflect on the present, but Borderlands 3 takes that approach much too literally. Instead of commenting on modern-day America, the game essentially just mirrors it, wrongly thinking that an exaggerated tone is a suitable substitute for an actual opinion. This makes for shotgun satire that’s loud but scattershot. Borderlands 3 is boorish, infantile, and violent, and, in refusing to take any sort of consistent stand, is wildly off the mark.

Over the course of nearly 100 missions designed primarily as loot-delivery systems, you’ll meet a stand-in for Tommy Wiseau at the Sin-A-Plex, overload a bandwidth-throttling CPU by uploading “dank” memes, and kill the murderous carnival hosts Penn and Teller, err, Pain and Terror. Yes, that’s Penn Jillette’s voice, and he’s joined by a bunch of outstandingly over-the-top voice actors, but no aspect of Borderlands 3 is ever really saying anything of import. It’s all just endless references to popular culture, which is why you get random side missions that just mash together a panoply of things, like the one where you enter a Bachelor-like dating competition that’s decided with a Fortnite-like battle royale. There’s plenty of first-person shooting and punching, but very few punchlines, unless you count the forlorn last words of slain foes, such as “I never took up painting!” and “Jokes on you…I was in massive debt!”

After three games—four if you count the non-FPS Tales from the Borderlands—the Borderlands series really might not have anything left to say, even if it does offer you the opportunity to choose between four new protagonists, each with their own unique action skills. There’s Zane, the Irish-accented Operative who has the ability to swap places with his own digital decoy; FL4K, who permanently gets a beastly companion; Amara, who has status-afflicting Siren magic; and Moze, a mech-riding Gunner. But after a few hours, the novelty of their class mechanics wears off, making the remaining 30 hours of the game’s campaign a tedious retread of everything you’ve seen and done before in the series.

Advertisement

The developers at Gearbox Software do their best to avoid that franchise fatigue by finally allowing players to leave Pandora and travel to four other planets, each of which has its own enemy types and architectures. Athenas, for instance, is a monastery besieged by the shield-heavy miscreants of the Malawan corporation, and Eden-6’s bayou is infested by fleshy saurians. Pandora has wide open deserts that are perfect for vehicular combat missions—even if the game’s rigid controls make driving through those environs remarkably unfun—while Promethea, Atlas’s corporate homeworld, is a narrow grid of urban streets and high-rises. But if interplanetary travel is handled well in Destiny and Mass Effect, insofar as each of the planets in those games feels uniquely alien, the whole Borderlands 3 galaxy shares the same pottycore mise-en-scène. No matter where you go, you’re still scrounging for loot in toilets, teaming up with underwear-clad characters, and taking shit from foul-mouthed villains.

It’s a shame, because there’s a sense that underneath all this more-is-more fan service—just about every character who’s survived a prior Borderlands game plays some role in this one—there’s a deeper, less-cartoonish story than the one it provides about Troy and Tyreen, the murderous twins who’ve used their violent livestreaming to appeal to and unite Pandora’s bandits. Their antagonistic antics are dulled by repetition, so much so that it’s jarring to see Tyreen suddenly get serious in the game’s final act, set on a long-lost alien planet. Then again, even here at the end of the galaxy, the game still makes room for two bickering robot butlers and a “homeopathological” doctor, which suggests that while the series’s overarching plot is capable of expanding and maturing, the game’s tone is incapable of growing up.

Even the things that Borderlands 3 dwells on, like gunplay, end up feeling unfocused. That comes, in part, from the game’s intent on advertising “over a billion guns,” a feat achieved only by counting the tiniest statistical shifts between otherwise identical weapons as a difference. Because you’re always out-leveling gear into obsolescence, you can’t just focus on one type of weapon, as you have to be flexible in shifting between whatever randomly comes your way.

Advertisement

Do you want a small-caliber pistol that deals armor-destroying damage and is manufactured by the Children of the Vault, and as such doesn’t need to be reloaded? Too bad, here’s a long-range sniper rifle that has to charge each shot, deals flesh-melting incendiary damage, and was made by Hyperion, which provides a damage-boosting shield when aimed. There’s no guarantee you can play the way you prefer, or that you’ll have the right gear for a tricky boss, and attempting to micromanage one’s unreasonably small inventory slows the game’s fast pace to a crawl. (It’s worth noting, too, that you can’t pause in co-op; if you attempt to find a safe place to sort through your gear when in a squad, you’ll likely be left behind.)

In the course of mercilessly mocking everything, Borderlands 3 inevitably opens fire on itself, in a mid-game side mission involving the dudebro adrenaline-junkie Chadd. His quest perhaps too well encapsulates the game’s target demographic, as well as its gameplay; essentially, Chadd loves danger and stunts, and is constantly throwing himself into foes or off of cliffs, instantly dying and then waiting around for you to revive him. In turn, much of the game focuses exclusively on careening around enemy-filled arenas, filling the screen with massive explosions and color-coded status damages until you win (or die) in a colorful cacophony of action that you can’t clearly see. Borderlands 3 hurdles over this extremely low bar that it sets for itself, but like the game itself in regard to just about everything, that’s not saying much.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by 2K Games.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Developer: Gearbox Software  Publisher: 2K Games  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: September 13, 2019  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Inense Violene, Sexual Themes, Strong Language  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.