‘Borderlands 3’ Review

Borderlands 3 is like a fun, reliable friend who doesn’t know when to shut up. Every time the game gets rolling, it’s interrupted with a joke – and it’s not like the jokes are always bad, they just never stop. But that’s the world that Borderlands has built, and it’s one that feels lived in and fleshed out. Its gunplay embodies the chaos and speed at which the characters work, but thankfully, the guns don’t talk. Usually for the better, Borderlands 3 retains the franchise’s unique sense of anarchy and disarray to deliver an entry that cares more about being fun than anything else.

Borderlands 3’s gunplay is a perfect balance of satisfaction and desire, where the newest weapons in my arsenal always felt useful but never so useful that I didn’t keep my eyes open for what was next. It helps that every gun plays differently, which is remarkably impressive given how many of them there are. Take, for example, the ‘Double-Penetrating Shredded Bangstick’. The DPSB (for short) uses both barrels of the shotgun to blast enemies into the sky, and owns a nice little splash-damage radius to boot. Or how about a personal favorite, ‘The Pointy Psycho Stabber’, which you get from bringing down “Borman Nates”, a gun that shoots out knives. I never got bored experimenting with the different weapons, and often settled for objectively worse guns when I had something more fun available to use. 

There are also a wide array of enemies, most of which approach with a reckless sense of abandon that feels perfectly in line with their personalities. The boss fights are a highlight, especially when the looter-shooter genre so frequently relies on bullet sponges to provide a challenge. It isn’t like Borderlands 3 is totally devoid of that, as most of its bosses take forever to bring down, but especially in the late game, each of them presents an interesting test of skill. For instance, “The Rampager” is a Godzilla-lite that takes three lengthy phases to bring down. When jumping from ledge to ledge, broken rocks crumble from the ceiling as you frantically run-and-gun. It’s all incredibly hectic and a perfect match for the gunplay, where I was forced to experiment with different weapons until I found the right combination to bring tougher bosses down. 

The only thing that slows the game down are the horrible performance issues that run rampant any time the game has a lot going on – which happens to be almost all the time. Even when Borderlands 3 is at a standstill, it drops frames when opening the menu and loading into a vending machine or new area. Even on a Playstation 4 playing on “Performance Mode”, the game couldn’t hit a steady frame rate. For a game that really owns its rugged, cell-shaded look, it’s inexcusable to have these kinds of issues so late in the console generation. 

To match the chaotic gunplay, Borderlands 3 makes a concerted effort to imitate what I’d imagine a blasted Aaron Sorkin screenplay might look like. The thing is, the base story really is pretty good and interesting, and the game takes a lot of time to set up its characters and world to be interesting. And at least on that level, it succeeds. Pandora and the planets that surround it can be really fun places to me, especially after the acute attention to detail shines through. The problem is, there is a constant barrage of jokes, and unless those jokes are really, really funny (which Borderlands 3 is not), it grows tiresome. Still, just enough of it lands that I’m almost more impressed with the effort than I am disappointed by the lack of writing chops. Not that it’s totally foreign to the franchise, but even though I’ve grown up, it feels like Borderlands hasn’t – and maybe that’s okay. At least it’s unabashedly itself.

The cast of characters is immense, it’s just a shame how little time you spend with some of the best ones. For instance, Mad Moxxi, the smooth-talking bar owner, is both perverse and alluring. Her small handful of side quests give way to some of the captivating moments in the game, but because there is such a wide swath of characters, these moments get spread around a little too much. Perhaps this feeling can be chalked up to the endless pages of dialogue cramming their way into each mission, but the characters still manage to leave a lasting impression. So much so that I wish they had each gotten more meaningful moments in the game, and the already long Borderlands 3 had given me something more than I got. 

The world is so expansive that it seems as if it would have been ripe with some interesting choices to make. Each character has tangled relationships that I inevitably found myself in the middle of, but very rarely were any of my choices involved in how the outcome unfolded. There are brief moments, like deciding whether or not to steal money from an innocent cashier, that ultimately amount to very little. If the future of Borderlands is to take a step forward, I don’t think it’s going to be by adding more guns; it’s going to be by letting you have a real impact in the way that the world unfolds. 

There is, however, quite a lot of replayability in the role-playing elements of each playable character. I chose Moze, a mech-suit wielding gunner. The playable characters don’t have a lot of personality (and for that, I was almost thankful because of how much exists elsewhere), but the upgrade system is vast and impactful. Each playable character has three branches to sink skill points into, all of which are earned at a steady and fair pace. For Moze, I went all in on the grenade branch until I was firing off nuclear missiles from the mech suit. Combined with the near-perfect balancing of enemy difficulty, I felt like an absolute powerhouse by the end of my playthrough. There is no doubt that I’ll be revisiting Borderlands 3 to play as other characters. 

There are a couple of things that should be mentioned about Borderlands 3, if not absolutely celebrated. First, the game has one of the best hub areas I’ve encountered all year in the moderately sized ship dubbed “Sanctuary” (a reference to the game’s predecessor). Inside of the ship exists many NPC’s, short side quests, a locker room that includes collected decorations and a storage bank, shops, and a thriving ecosystem of characters babbling to one another and telling stories. I spent a lot of time in Sanctuary, and that’s partly because it felt like the only space in the game where the script relaxed a little bit.

Borderlands 3 remains the last notable game of its genre to be almost entirely devoid of microtransactions. This really contributes to the immersiveness of the game, which wasn’t pulling me in and out of its world by noting how I could bypass the “grind” by paying a few extra bucks. Instead, it wound up not feeling like a grind at all. Looting weapons, slaying bosses, and cruising my way around Pandora is fun – and I can’t help but feel like part of that fun is intrinsic because of a design that focuses on playing instead of purchasing.

Borderlands 3’s entire purpose is to be fun, and even when it’s too busy telling jokes it probably got from a retired blogger’s meme bank, it largely succeeds. There was never a moment I spent in Pandora wishing I wasn’t there, or that I could just skip my way to the next best gun or set piece. I was there for a wild ride, and that’s what Borderlands 3 delivered.

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