Borderlands 3 (PS4) Review
Release Date: 13 September 2019
Date Played: 7 May 2021
I think I've just outgrown Borderlands. I remember 100% completing the first game including all of its DLC. A few years later, I played the sequel and just didn't have the drive to continue much beyond finishing the story. This time around, it was a real drag just getting through the campaign. What happened?
Firstly, I played the entire game in Co-op. I'm absolutely sure that this made the game a lot more fun. If it hadn't been for having a partner on the couch with me, I probably would have given up long before the final credits rolled. Borderlands has never been much for story and instead relied on its zany characters and outrageous situations to carry you through. Throw in a bunch of awesome guns to loot while playing with friends, and you have a winning combination. This time around, Gearbox really dropped the ball. You chose 1 of 4 classes of character and once again set out on the planet Pandora to gather riches and fame. You quickly learn that all the psychotic inhabitants of the planet have joined a cult that follows these post-apocalyptic internet influencers called the Calypso Twins. They are Sirens (magical beings found in all of the Borderlands games) and they are gathering all the energy they can by sucking it out of everyone they come across. They want to get into the vaults hidden around the galaxy and absorb the energy of the vault guardians so they can ascend into godhood. You have to group up with the resistance group, the Crimson Raiders, to try to foil their plans. Returning are most of the characters from the previous games. There's Lilith, Claptrap, Tannis, Maya, Tine, Mad Moxxi, and others. Actually, I think every old character from the series makes a cameo, but it feels very fan-servicy without actually having any real impact since most only have a couple of lines of dialog and then disappear. You travel around to different planets that are all post apocalyptic wastelands to gather key fragments to open vaults. As with the other games, you kill aliens, bugs, and psychos all along the way. There's tons of guns to collect, side missions, places to explore. It’s a tried and true method, but you’d be hard pressed to be able to differentiate this game from its prequels if you didn’t know it was #3.
The issues with this game that make it so mediocre and forgettable are obvious. Firstly, the Calypso twins are not good villains. They are annoying, not funny, their character models are lame, and I think they are pretty much universally despised. I feel like the societal zeitgeist is to have an aversion to influencers, and choosing them as the game’s antagonists was a double edged sword. Immediately, you have foes that the public will hate, so that’s mission accomplished. On the other side, you have unrelatable, superficial, and vapid characters that the audience is more repulsed by than fearful of. Also, All of the locations in the game feel and look just like all the locations in the previous games. It feels like you've already been here before... because you have. The exception to this is when you go through the Jakob's estate. It's like a haunted house murder mystery in a characture of a Louisianna plantation. It was a really fun and unique part of the game and was by far my favorite part. It stands in stark contrast to the arid and bug infested Borderlands universe.
The guns are fun, but they don't really add any new effects from the hundreds of other guns you've gotten before and often feel super weak. Finally, the humor... is just off. It's the same old jokes you've heard a million times in the other games... but they just fall so flat. I read a review online, and someone said something to the degree that, "the dialog and jokes are extremely childish and are written poorly but you can just tell that the writers thought it was the funniest thing ever." I don't remember what member of the public wrote this review, but he absolutely summed it all up with that statement. There is a whole mission where some woman wants a cup of coffee. So, she sends you on a bunch of boring fetch quests (a theme of this game) to gather the resources to make her a cup of coffee. The whole time she's on the com's system saying things like, "OMG... COFFEE!! I Need my coffee!!! I can't do anything without my coffee!!!! Yummy, yummy, yummy!" It feels like the way a 10 year old would write the dialog of an adult. It's so terrible and actually caused me to wince at several points because the humor was so off point. There's only so many times someone will laugh at a fart joke or at a character running around in his tighty-whiteys while wearing a cape.
However, the REAL problem with this game is on the technical front. It's actually a technical mess. Firstly, and most annoyingly, the font is way, way, way, too small. In the normal game, you can just barely read the text on the screen. This goes for items names, descriptions, stats, prompts to interact with the environment, etc. When you go into split-screen, the font size is cut in half. EVERYONE on the internet has been complaining about this for years, and Gearbox has just ignored them. I'm not even joking, you have to stand like 2 feet away from the screen and lean forward to where you're about a foot from the screen to be able to read anything in the game. This is unacceptable. In addition to this, the game has some of the longest load times I've ever seen. It's around 3-4 minutes just to boot up the game. Going from area to area or fast traveling takes a minute or two. Finally, the game runs like total garbage. There's slow texture loading, screen tearing, bad animations, desynced dialog, items falling through the world, and other bugs all over the place. Not only that, but navigating through the game is a nightmare. The areas are very convoluted and overlapping. This is especially true of the home base, which is one of the most complicated areas I've ever experienced in a game. Even after spending more than 20 hours in this game, I couldn't find my way to the most basic areas of the base like the weapon vendor, or the command post. The maps are 3D nightmares and it's not clear how to get from one location to another. It's almost like the developers TRIED to make it bad. It doesn't help that it takes several seconds to open the map to see where you are because of loading times. The final nail in the coffin is the biggest technical problem of all. The game's framerate is terrible. After playing more than an hour or so, the framerate drops down to the single digits. The game becomes so choppy you can barely play it and the dialog sounds like it's in slow motion with clipping in the audio and the voices cutting in and out. What a mess.
The truth is that 2K published this game before it was finished and then decided to focus on the COPIOUS amounts of DLC packs instead of fixing the problems with this game. What a shame. I probably will never buy another Borderlands game after this. If I didn't already own the Pre-Sequel (which I haven't played at the time of this review) I wouldn't even play another Borderlands game. This was a mediocre game to begin with and the glaring technical issues, poor writing, banal missions, and generic areas make Borderlands 3 feel like a total cash grab. There's no heart in this game.
Final Status: Beaten
Final Score: 5/10 (Mediocre)
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