In Borderlands 3, you once again have a nearly limitless array of guns to collect, sell, and use in combat, which makes every pickup potentially exciting. Finding a gun with a unique or enjoyable collection of modifiers and abilities is one of the series’ greatest joys.
You have a stylized, cartoonish world in which the rich and powerful are self-centered, malevolent jerks. And there’s a punk rock-like distrust of rules and authority from everyone else.
This world and its weapons are designed to be best enjoyed with friends. As with Borderlands 3’s predecessors, it’s easy to invite up to three friends along to shoot everyone and everything you see. The franchise’s loud, nihilistic backdrop has always been a playground in which you can kill everyone and watch the numbers go up.
Borderlands 3 introduces four new vault hunters — kind of like soldiers of fortune, questing for vaults that are said to contain untold riches — with new abilities and new, deeper skill trees to build up and explore as you play.
I’m personally a big fan of Moze, whose ultimate ability brings in a walking, two-legged mech that can be customized with a variety of weapons. Zane is a hitman with drones and a deployable hologram-like copy that can confuse and attack the enemy, while FL4K is a robot that can summon one of three pets to fight with them. Lastly, Amara is a siren with a variety of telekinetic techniques that let her grab enemies with a psychic fist or send them flying by pounding the ground.
Each vault hunter comes with three skill trees, allowing you to mix and match your upgrades as you level up to create custom loadouts and play styles, or just have fun messing with your abilities.
Oddly, I found the powers more pleasurable than the guns, which, this time, are ... fine? The weapons that run around, homing in on enemies and blowing up, add a bit of freshness, but every Borderlands game has a massive variety in firearms. Gearbox didn’t kick it up a notch here; everything is just a new kind of slightly different, delivered in the expected way. The weapons are enjoyable, and varied in the same way they were in the previous games. Again: no more, no less.
The Calypso Twins ... don’t. They taunt you, but their words and actions seem strangely toothless. The fact that they’re manipulating the media for their own ends is quickly forgotten after the first few hours of play, and instead they become sneering, forgettable baddies who add little to the game.
Even returning characters, like Ellie and Lilith, feel bloodless and limp. I remember so many endearing people from Borderlands 2, but both the returning cast and new background characters struggle to make any kind of impression in Borderlands 3. Characterization in Borderlands 2 was often handled by a character’s actions or even in the mission structure itself, but in this game, people are much more likely to just tell you who they are instead of showing you. If someone is bad, they’ll let you know. If someone likes cars, that’s what they’re going to talk about. It’s all very blunt, leaving little room for the player’s imagination.
The sparks of joy and malevolence that helped past Borderlands games sing are hard to find. What’s left is a photocopy of the earlier entries that’s missing the attention to detail that made those games so special.
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