HMMMMM.

So I really disliked Borderlands 3. It’s the first Borderlands I didn’t play beyond finishing the final boss when 1 and 2 both got a lot of play from me (True Vault Hunter modes and playing different characters), and I even played through the pre-sequel more than once. Not only was Borderlands 3 pretty meh, but Gearbox is also an awful company that does shitty BS all the time and is led by a weirdo… So I figured I’d give them one last chance to impress me before never buying anything they do again… And what better last chance than yet another Borderlands game, this one headlined by the shittiest character in the series!

Well, let’s see how much this sucks!

Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K Games
Release date: March 25th, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version reviewed)
Genre: FPS

Review

So the story here makes no sense. Yay. You’re playing another game of Bunkers & Badasses, that D&D-like thing from that one Borderlands 2 DLC. It’s basically an expanded version of that, with a few of its own systems. So you’re hanging out Tiny Tina and 2 characters that were never in Borderlands before this, Valentine and Frette. You’re playing the game together, though you’re actually the only player, where Valentine and Frette are kinda just talking as you’re playing, and Tina is the DM. You’re going through a campaign that makes no sense and has no real plot beyond “You’re revived the Dragon Lord by mistake, go kill him”. At some point, the Dragon Lord changes the plot by killing Queen Butt Stallion (that’s still a thing, no idea why that one-liner became a thing beyond being a one-liner). It’s not addressed by anyone other than the Dragon Lord, but I guess he’s acting against the will of the DM, but we have no idea how that works in reality because you’re just playing a game and none of this is explained or makes sense. Then there’s the usual Borderlands writing that’s just awful. This meme from 6 years ago remains spot-on with how dialogue in Borderlands just uses a lot of words to say nothing and isn’t funny, but, added to this, you’re also spending the whole game listening to Tiny Tina. The few almost-interesting bits of the story tend to get ruined by the fact that Tiny Tina is a shit character who has no actual personality.

A quick note on PC performance, it was mostly good, a bit of playing around with settings and I got a game that wasn’t quite consistent (as some areas run worse than others), but, at 1440p, I never saw the framerate drop below 90, and most of the time it was around ~140. One weird thing to note, this only happened twice right after I had beaten the game (the first time during the credits, the second time while trying to relaunch it after restarting the computer), but this game just shut down my PC. Not sure if it’s something weird on my PC, I have a nice stable overclock on my GPU that never gave me issues before, I thought that might be it, but there’s no way. So I’m gonna blame Randy Pitchford directly. Another issue I had is with the Shift connection, which is the thing you have to connect to so you can get codes for Skeleton Keys. I think it’s also required for online play, I dunno. The problem here is that the system is shit. Even if you’re playing local-only, if you are connected to Shift at all, it tries to keep you connected constantly. So with the Shift connection being flaky trash, you keep getting disconnected. That wouldn’t be a problem… if the game didn’t freeze for a second each time it disconnected and then again each time it reconnected.

One thing I do want to mention specifically with the PC version is that the menus don’t fucking work. They’re awful. Apparently, the talented individuals at Gearbox have no idea what a mouse cursor is. Because hovering over a thing in your inventory works, once, then doesn’t… So there are 2 columns of items in your inventory. Say you’re hovering over something on the top-right slot and click to sell it at a vending machine, that works. Then your selection moves to the left… My mouse cursor didn’t move, why’s my selected slot changing? If it changes to an item I selected to not sell by favoriting it (so clicking just keeps trying to sell what’s in that top-left slot and failing, rather than what you’re hovering), you need to move your mouse again to select something else. But it’s not enough to move the mouse within the inventory slot it was already in if that’s what you want to sell. You have to move it out of the slot, then back in. Why? I have my mouse cursor right there. Use my mouse cursor as my selection, not like it’s a pretend analog stick or some shit. The map also sucks to navigate zoom in and rotate and shit, and highlighting places on the map by hovering doesn’t work. It’s fucking ridiculous. I have no idea how devs just have no idea how controls work.

The core gameplay is much the same as regular Borderlands games. It’s an FPS, you shoot semi-wacky guns at enemies. You get EXP for killing enemies. Enemies may have different-colored HP bars, each of which will be weak against different elements. I think blue bars are weak to lightning, grey is weak to ice, and a few others. This game has a BIT more focus on melee than previous games, as there are melee weapons that have different stats in attack power, attack speed and can have extra effects… Melee sucks, but maybe a melee-focused class like the Stabomancer will do things better. Alongside a spell, each character class gets a choice of 2 skills they can use. Both skills and spells have a cooldown so you can’t spam them. The few I’ve tried are pretty fun.

Enemies drop loot when they die, but also there’s stuff hidden all over every level that may lead to chests with more loot. There are 11 equipment slots (one of which you can’t even use until the end-game). 4 gun slots, 1 melee slot, 2 ring slots (one is locked until the end of the game), a ward slot (works just like shields in Borderlands), a spell slot (these are basically the same as grenades in the main Borderlands games) and one of the classes gets 2 spell slots, an amulet slot, and an armor slot. Loot is exactly as it’s always been in borderlands, it’s hardly worth talking about. Even the guns are just company-based like in Borderlands, so, for example, all Torgue guns are explodey. Speaking of Torgue, legitimately the only gun worth using in the game is the Torgue pistol that shoots 2 explosives. They do more damage than any other gun and explode so it hits a ton of things at once. Everything else is shit… making the combat a bit of a case of “same shit all the time”. There’s SOME customization here (like whichever equipment type gives some skill points to specific skills), but basically, you just want better numbers for gun damage, and… everything else is just a bonus.

So when you start the game you choose a class. 2 of them have “lol we’re so funny” names, and the rest have normal names. When you unlock abilities, you can choose between their 2 abilities which is fun. Later in the game, you can assign yourself a secondary class (that you can later change), and you can choose any of the 4 abilities you now have access to. Each class also has a “Feat”. For example, the Clawbringer has a Wyvern companion that flies around and helps in battle, and the Stabbomancer… has a higher crit chance… Yeah, obviously not all classes were created equal. Once you get a secondary class, you get the class feat for that one as well. So a Spore Warden with a Clawbringer secondary will have both a mushroom companion and a wyvern companion. Leveling up gives you one skill point which you can put in either of your skill trees (which are all basically passive skills, some that give more stats, some that augment your action skill, some that augment your class feat). You also get a Hero Point, which you can put into one of the stats. The stats are Strength which gives crit damage, Dexterity which gives crit chance (so yes, this game does have statistical crits in addition to getting headshots), Intelligence which improves spell cooldown, Wisdom which increases status effect damage, Constitution which increases HP and shield, and Attunement which improves action skill cooldown. Overall I find the class system pretty okay.

However, the max level is 40, which isn’t very high (Borderlands 2 had a 50 max level, and could go higher after DLC but let’s not count that). 40 ends up not giving you all that much as far as skill points and hero points, though you’ll likely at least be able to max out one of your hero stats and maybe get to the last skill of one of your skill trees. But you still get stronger after level 40, as you unlock Myth ranks. Each myth rank lets you put one point in a specific skill tree (basically a constellation). There are 4 skill trees placed in a square, so when you place one point, your next one HAS to go in the next constellation in clockwise order. Some skills in those trees go up to 10 points, some are infinite. Some of these are hero stats, some are passive increases that don’t matter, and only one of them is gun damage so it’s the only one that matters (so basically it takes 4 myth ranks to get an actually useful point). So there’s seemingly infinite Myth Rank, thus infinite strength…

Which is gonna be useless because, once you beat the final boss, the game is essentially done unless you’re a completionist and really want to find all the lucky dice and poems and other random pointless collectibles in the game. You’d think this game would have a form of New Game+, since all the other Borderlands games do, bringing to a tougher version of the game with better equipment… nope. There’s nothing notable to do once you’re done. There is a dungeon that opens up which is semi-roguelite. I did a run and didn’t feel like doing anymore. The overworld features these boring, stupid, annoying semi-random encounters (enemies pop up randomly when you’re in tall grass, then if they touch you a random battle begins). They’re not particularly interesting to do because they’re always the same boring things, and the “roguelite” elements feel like a bit of an afterthought (you can increase or lower the difficulty of future battles, in hopes of increasing your loot rewards at the end of the run). I dunno man, I’m not doing the same boring combat scenarios over and over to get rewards I don’t need.

I haven’t really talked about the Overworld. And there’s a good reason for that. It sucks. I’m not even gonna expand on why it’s a stupid waste of time that adds nothing to the game. Source: trust me bro.

And this game is bafflingly easy. Like, one boss killed me I think. And all the bosses and minibosses died extra fast. Nothing that calls itself a boss should lose more than half their HP from just spamming my action skill. Add to this Torgue’s Insanely Broken Pistol, most bosses end up near-death in seconds. The only reason some survived longer is because of having extra phases. This game is just pathetically easy. I don’t know if that’s on purpose, but I can say it’s not fun, at least. The final boss was so easy I barely had to move to kill it.

And that’s kind of it. Everything else is normal Borderlands fare. Wait for stupid dialogue, do sidequests with even more stupid dialogue, shoot things with the same OP torgue pistol the whole way through, beat bosses, open the next map, wonder why you’re playing this, and finally beat the easiest final boss in the series. Anything else to note… Oh, there are a lot of weird random references, that are so shallow I have no idea why they bothered. Like, there’s a skeleton pirate with a name similar to Guybrush Threepwood… that’s the joke, his name is similar to Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island, the only actual resemblance is that he’s a pirate (nowhere near as mighty as Guybrush). It doesn’t go any further than that. I keep saying the dialogue sucks, but there are some times where it really shows. And the awful voice acting doesn’t help.

Overall

Yeah, this game sucked, but less than I was expecting. A big issue (something that’s always been a problem with Borderlands) is how much waiting you end up doing while waiting for shitty dialogue to go by, or for NPCs to walk to a spot (there’s one part where there’s literally 2 minutes of just waiting for a dude to walk to an altar). The overworld feels completely pointless. The dialogue is absolute trash that tries too hard to be funny and never lands, and the game would improve massively if you cut, like, 95% of the script. The menus don’t work. The game is a mess. AND if you like Borderlands partly for the replayability… there’s pretty much none of that here since you can change your secondary class so you can try every class in one character, and there’s no “True Vault Hunter” mode so there’s nothing to do once you’re done with it other than the randomized “dungeon” shit that just gives you the same boring combat scenarios over and over for no reason… At least you can get infinitely powerful if you grind enough… not sure why you’d want to do that, but… eh.

Shooting things is still fun, I kinda like the dual-class system even if there should be a bit more to it, but in the end, so much of the game is just “listen to our awful dialogue”, and this game is so freakishly easy I feel like I’m not really doing anything during it. That Torgue pistol that shoots 2 explosives is so strong you never need to use anything, making every combat scenario feel pretty much the same, and the bosses have no HP.

Just get Borderlands 2. That one was okay. I would absolutely never recommend this one. In fact, I don’t recommend playing any future Gearbox games.