Borderlands 3 Video Game Review

Here's what you need to know; in the years following the defeat of Handsome Jack and the downfall of Hyperion, a new threat has spread across the borderlands; the Children of the Vault, a psychotic cult led by the maniacal Calypso twins, a pair of murderous Sirens looking to open the fabled Great Vault. And standing between the twins and the greatest power in existence is the Crimson Raiders and their newest recruits, a fresh pack of Vault Hunters on whose shoulders the fate of the universe and all its loot now rests.
I don't really talk about video games on this blog that much, usually I'm wrapped up in movies and identity politics, which is weird given just how much time I spend playing them; before this game released I pumped literally days into Borderlands and its sequel in anticipation for this latest excuse to kill bandits and make off with some sweet loot. But Borderlands 3's not a game that's made it this far without some issues, chiefly Randy Pitchford being a thoroughly unlikable dude, the Epic Store exclusivity, and the parent company of the game's publisher going mafia on a Youtuber. But this game is months old now, and a few months is forever in internet time. But while Take-Two was trying to intimidate a harmless Youtuber, the game itself just seemed to get better and better, and if its sales figures are any indication, Take-Two being shady dicks wasn't enough of a disincentive for a lot of people, including me. In the first week that this game was out, I'd played twenty-six hours of it, I've finished the campaign twice now and played around with three of the game's Vault Hunters. I hadn't been this hooked on a game since Far Cry 5, which was incidentally the last new game I reviewed, and like that game, I have some things to say, so I'm gonna say them.

The first thing that stood out to me about Borderlands 3 was its presentation, because this game looks bloody amazing. Like the previous games in the series, its visuals are cell-shaded and exaggerated, but what's striking is the amount of detail they crammed into the game even with that visual style. This is the most appealing a Borderlands game has looked to date; a lot of the rough edges of the previous games have been sorted, and character models and environments are as complex and detailed as they've ever looked, though naturally not on the level of photorealism. Like Borderlands 2, there is a lot of variety and diversity in the game's levels, unlike Borderlands 2 however, this game gives you a whole galaxy to play with, kind of. We'll get to this part of the game later but now I'm talking about the visuals, and each of the game's planets are wildly distinct from the others; Pandora's still a dusty, inhospitable wasteland crawling with skags and bandits, but the game will also take you to Promethea, a cyberpunk-esque city planet ruled by the Atlas corporation, and to Eden-6, a jungle planet overrun with dinosaurs. Each of these planets are as fun to explore as they sound, with Eden-6 being the obvious highlight because it has dinosaurs. Even if going to a new planet never promised or delivered something wildly new from a gameplay standpoint, the simple curiosity of warping to a new planet and crashing onto it in a drop pod never got old. Neither, for that matter, did finding new baddies on these planets to kill; whether they were Maliwan soldiers, monkeys, skags or fire-breathing tyrannosaurs, I'm telling you, dinosaurs make everything better.

But easily the most visually impressive thing about Borderlands 3 is its guns, the number of which is incomprehensible. I can't even tell you how many guns Borderlands 3 has because like the other Borderlands games, there's just a stupid number of them, all with different stats like damage, mag size and rate of fire, as well as the various quirks and gimmicks the guns have now; for example, get a critical hit with a Jacobs and the shot will ricochet to another enemy, other guns from companies like Vladof and Tediore have fun little party tricks like some Tediore guns sprouting legs and running around on their own when you reload them, or Vladof weapons having under-barrel attachments of just about every kind; grenade launchers, shotguns, tasers and mini-missiles. The guns I tended to stick to though were the Jacobs and Dahl weapons, though I did occasionally let loose with the handful of Legendary weapons I came across, and it just occurred to me that if you've never played Borderlands, none of this means shit to you. Basically, Borderlands' insane assortment of guns are all made by a bunch of manufacturers, with each one making different guns to their competitors, and Borderlands 3 takes that system even further in a very entertaining way. In addition to the various manufacturers, Borderlands' loot is divided into different levels of rarity ranging from Common to Legendary, with Legendary obviously being the most rare, most valuable and usually most insane weapons you will come across. This rarity and weirdness also extends to other items in the game like shields and class mods, which can do little things like buff your stats and skills, throw up a shield wall when you crouch or let you launch exploding sawblades when you slide, because that's cool, not practical, mind you, but cool.

Borderlands 3's gear also has a host of elemental effects; with some guns doing bonus elemental damage, be it fire, corrosion, shock, cryo or radiation, with different elemental types being more effective against certain targets, and other items like shields and mods can give you damage boosts and resistance to certain elemental attacks, but unlike Borderlands 2's elemental system, I generally just stuck to the gear with the highest stats. But anyone who's played this series before knows that the loot is only part of the puzzle, because Borderlands 3 throws four more Vault Hunters at you, each one with their own strengths, weaknesses and action skills. What makes this game special though is that each character now has three different action skills. The guy I played as the most; Fl4k, can spawn Rakk to attack enemies from the air, turn invisible for a short time or teleport his pets and cause radiation damage to enemies. The one I used the most was Fade Away, the invisibility power, and I've heard some people say it's the strongest action skill in the game, an assertion that I'd probably agree with. While invisible, Fl4k can fire three shots with any weapon, with the pro being that those three shots will all do critical damage, and the con being that this cancels the action skill and makes him visible again. However, invest in the Fade Away skill tree and you can unlock a mod that lets you fire critical shots for the length the action skill, with the catch being a damage and skill time reduction, invest in it further and you can unlock another mod that ups your critical damage, at which point you can melt pretty much anything, or at least you could until they nerfed him, which isn't nice.

Fl4k's pets are also really cool with each one having its own strengths; the Jabber can use guns while the Skag and Spiderant give you damage and health boosts respectively. Fl4k is easily the most fun of the three so far for me, with Moze and Zane being the others. Moze, the gunner's action skill is spawning a mech, unlike the other characters and their wild abilities, the gunner's abilities are loadouts she can put on the mech, ranging from simple machine guns to flamethrowers, grenade launchers, homing missiles, railguns, as well as different mods like the machine gun doing fire, explosive or cryo damage. There's plenty more to dig into; the Siren has crazy magic powers like trapping enemies in the air with a phasegrasp and phaseslamming the ground for area of effect damage, while Zane, the Operative can project shields and spawn support drones and holographic decoys, as well as being able to use two action skills at once at the cost of a grenade mod, I've heard you can make some mad builds with this guy, but I haven't played enough with him to know yet. They all sound like fun to play around with, so just like the previous games, you're getting a solid amount of game with Borderlands 3; an easy hundred hours, not including any of the endgame stuff, and even three entire days into the game, I know I've only just scratched the surface. I've also spent a lot of time with the game's Mayhem mode and can confirm that it is insane; enemy damage and health is increased, but the rewards are also increased; more XP, more money, better loot, and this mode makes farming Epics and Legendarys almost comically easy if you can survive the grind. And if that wasn't enough, there's two more mayhem modes, so you can make the game even more extreme if you're that kind of masochist. Mayhem names lives up to its name and I could honestly play it for hours, as if I wasn't already doing in the normal mode to begin with.

And then there's Borderlands 3's bosses, which can often be about as nuts as the rest of the game. The bosses in this game aren't just bullet sponges, they are bullet sponges for sure, but they actually remind me a lot of the bosses in DOOM, with attack patterns that can be learned and avoided, making the boss fights themselves very intense and a lot of fun to beat as you dodge and avoid lethal attacks while exploiting the boss' weak spots for critical damage. Some of the game's bosses are also huge, easily as big as the Warrior from Borderlands 2, and while only a few live up to the Warrior, The Agonizer 9000 certainly does, There's only really one fight I didn't enjoy, and if you've played the game, you probably know which one it is; Killavolt, his floor trap attack is bullshit. In addition to bosses, Borderlands 3's levels are full of challenges to complete, from scavenging parts for Claptrap's girlfriend to sniffing out the weapon caches of Typhon DeLeon, not to mention the hunting and assassination challenges that function essentially as mini boss battles. All of this gives you even more stuff to on top of the story missions and long, long, long list of side quests. And before I forget, Borderlands 3 has cars too. In previous games, driving was always little more than a way of getting around faster, and in this game, that's still the case, except now you can customize your vehicles far beyond just a crappy skin, you can put on new wheels, armour and guns, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and you unlock parts by hijacking enemy vehicles with the parts you want and returning them to the Catch-A-Ride, which is a novel way of getting vehicle parts, if a little tedious.

Customization extends to characters and guns as well, with the game giving you the usual options of funny heads and skins for your characters. But the guns though, you can now give your guns skins to spice up their appearance, giving them rainbow colours, corporate colours, black and green, black and red, black and white, pink, sand and blood, blue and orange, and probably the funniest one I found or bought, poop, yep, you can give your gun a poop skin and it's a nasty as it sounds, and I bet that isn't even the funniest one in there. More cute than the skins though is the trinkets you can put on your guns, they're completely pointless and completely adorable; because why wouldn't you want a tiny Claptrap or a tiny Helios Station dangling from your gun, just so you can watch it swing around and dangle there pointlessly, who cares, it's cool. It's the little things that matter anyway, tiny improvements to make the game just that little bit more convenient, like now being able to resupply health and ammo from a vendor with the push of a button, or how Legendary and Epic drops are made easier to distinguish thanks to useful sound-ques and Legendarys being marked on your map when they drop. How about being able to fast travel to anywhere in the galaxy from anywhere in the galaxy with your Echo device. It sounds cool, but it comes with problems like the fast travel system trading simplicity for convenience; sure, it's more convenient to fast travel from your Echo device, but navigating to other levels means you have to navigate through the planet and galaxy menus, which is two more menus than it used to take, and Borderlands is famous for its crap UI.

Speaking of crap UI, why can't I see the stats of a weapon in my backpack compared to the weapon I have equipped like I could in Borderlands 2, that would have made sorting through the junk loot a lot quicker because make no mistake, Borderlands 3 may have some sick loot, but you'll still be selling or dropping plenty of useless guns, that hasn't changed. But on the plus side, Borderlands 3's map is now 3D, which would make challenge and secret hunting easier if using your Echo device wasn't so tedious, and being able to track more than one mission at once would probably be nice, and with all the other little improvements in Borderlands 3, that's an odd omission. But as far as problems go, the headache of a UI is the tip of the iceberg, because while Borderlands 3 is a very fun game to play, it tells a story that is a let down at best and a colossal failure at worst. The first big problem the game faces is its villains, and this is the easiest issue with the story to pin down because the Calypso twins suck. It's easy to say that though as Handsome Jack was so good, but I've heard it said once of the Far Cry series that after Far Cry 3, every villain was trying to be Vaas, I don't think that's true of Far Cry, but in Borderlands, I absolutely think it's true. Handsome Jack was a very memorable villain; he was evil and sadistic for sure, but he was also very funny and charming, frequently insulting and mocking the Vault Hunters, at first in a playful manner before letting the mask slip (pun intended) after the death of Angel.

But I think what really makes Jack so memorable was how compelling he was; his retconning into the events of the first game and relationship with Angel helped to give him a sense of presence, and his insistence that he was the hero of the story, contradicted by his apparent joy in hurting and manipulating others, and his desire to cleanse Pandora made for a surprisingly complex character. Borderlands 3 follows a lot of these beats with the Calypsos; dabbling in their pasts and the events that made them genocidal psychos, but their motivations just aren't as strong as Handsome Jack's, and the twist about where they come from wasn't nearly as effective as the Angel twist from Borderlands 2. But the biggest weakness of the Calypsos is just how unlikable they are; Handsome Jack was funny, but these two are insufferable, taking the piss out of the streamers and influencers they're mocking a little too well and embodying all of their most annoying characteristics. Like Handsome Jack, they're constantly bantering and making jokes, but unlike Handsome Jack, it's not endearing or funny, and the moral conflict of Jack thinking he was the hero is completely gone here, they're just dicks who do dickish things for the fun of it, which would be a least a little scarier if they weren't so annoying. There was a lot of potential in them as well, which is another reason they annoy me; their relation to the Vaults could have been a fun twist, them rallying Pandora's bandits into a "family" of zealous cultists could have been very intriguing.

The relationship they have with each other could have also been expanded upon in a more engaging way, with Tyreen hogging all of the glory and Troy being under her thumb for most of the game. They could have made both of these guys more sympathetic, especially Troy, but they didn't, and they fail as compelling villains as a result. Again bringing up Far Cry, Far Cry 5's Eden's Gate cult is what I have in mind when thinking of what the Children of the Vault could have been; an army of broken people rallied around a higher purpose, be it saving the world from nuclear hellfire or opening the Great Vault, but whereas Joseph Seed was a twisted but genuinely well meaning man of God, something New Dawn expanded on by the way, the Calypsos are just arseholes who want to become gods by opening the Vaults. But unlikable villains isn't actually the worst thing about Borderlands 3's story, the biggest issues are the way it's told and how it prioritises certain characters. Firstly, let's again go back to Borderlands 2, specifically its final moments; you slay the Warrior by dropping a Moonshot on it's head after a long and epic battle, and then the game gives you the choice to let Lilith kill Jack or do him in yourself. Throughout Borderlands 2, the Vault Hunter doesn't feel like an afterthought and in the game's final moments, it actually gives you the credit for saving Pandora. The game is also a lot lighter on cutscenes, because Borderlands 3 has a lot more of them and it's almost comical how the Vault Hunters just do not factor into them.

It at least isn't that silly when Lilith loses her powers, which is naturally shown in a cutscene, but not that much later in the game, a key character is killed by the twins in a room that the Vault Hunters were in just seconds before, so while a key character was being killed by the twins, what were they doing, were they, the biggest badasses in the galaxy, just standing off camera doing nothing while their friend was being killed. This happens again and again and again throughout the game; big character cutscenes involving the heroes and villains, cutscenes that drive the story forward, and the main characters of the game aren't there, it's like they just disappear every time something important happens. This even happens after the two most important boss fights in the entire game, no points for guessing which, which is just bullshit. But to really make it worse, while Borderlands 2 gave you the credit for saving Pandora, Borderlands 3 gives it to Lilith instead, which wouldn't have pissed me off so much if my actions as the Vault Hunter didn't feel so disconnected from the game's story, far from feeling like a planet saving badass, Borderlands 3 turns you into a minion, a passive onlooker as everyone else saves the world, while you're the one doing literally all the work. And who are the characters leading the charge while doing fuck all work? it's a bunch of women, of course, which sounds very random, I know, but let me explain. The game focuses on four central characters; Lilith, the first game's playable siren, Maya, the second game's playable siren, Tannis, an autistic Dahl scientist studying the Vaults, and series newcomer Ava, a bratty kid and Siren to be. 

This wouldn't have raised my brow were it not for a few things, firstly; the game really focuses on these four, to the extent that it side-lines practically everyone else, including the Vault Hunters, secondly, the song Girl on Fire by Alicia Keys plays over the end credits, I wish I was kidding but I'm not, I've even checked I'm not imagining it a few times, thirdly, the game's full of weird writing choices like renaming the Midgets Tinks and leaning hard on Hammerlock's sexuality. Add to all of this the fact that I've heard the phrase non-binary thrown around with regards to Fl4k and the needle on my progressive meter starts twitching a bit. Take for example the fact that key characters from Borderlands 1 and 2 like Brick and Mordecai are completely side-lined, as well as the likes of Tiny Tina, Rhys, Zero, Hammerlock, Markus, Moxxi, and Claptrap, while other characters like Zed, Axton and Salvador don't even show up. To be fair, a lot of these characters serve small roles in Borderlands 2 as well, but it feels so much more noticeable in this game with how detached you're made to feel from the story, as well as how story heavy it is. And the last cutscene's and end credits' deifying of Lilith to the soundtrack of Girl on Fire is laying it on thick with the girl-power, immediately after you killed the final boss, it's kind of ironic when you think about it. What's even richer is Ava, who I imagine will be a big player in the inevitable Borderlands 4, the only problem is I don't want that because Ava isn't a good hero. She's a brat; a whiny, inexperienced child whose actions get people killed, yet she never develops past that as a character, she blames Lilith for her own failures and never self-reflects, and in the last cutscene, Lilith effectively gives her the Crimson Raiders, as if she's earned that in any way, as if she's proven she can handle that responsibility, as if she didn't get someone very important to Lilith killed.

Then there's Tannis, who gets a big twist some way into the game that just doesn't work, there's coincidental, and then there's bad writing, and what is revealed about Tannis in Borderlands 3 is the latter, without question, though I'm sure there's some lore somewhere to explain it away. It highlights another issue I have with Ava as well, but to explain why would spoil the twist. This thing though, the other issue I have with Ava, it's another one of those girl-power things that ends up feeling really forced and contrived, which is the primary issue I have with it, it doesn't feel genuine or natural, rather, it feels ideological. Hammerlock being considerably more gay this time is another example of what I'm saying, but it's not enough to undermine what made him lovable in the first place, here's hoping Hammerlock remains the galaxy's finest Gentleman in Borderlands 4, and I ended up really liking Wainwright as well, the two make a good pair, and will hopefully be more important in the sequel. Then there's renaming the Midgets, which was apparently because they can build turrets and were nicknamed tinkerers during development, but I doubt that, what with them explicitly saying that Fl4k, who's an AI, is non-binary, which is a very progressive thing to point out about a sentient AI, especially when it doesn't factor into the game in any way, almost like it's there for the sake of it. It's entirely possible that I'm reading too much into this, as one like me who spends a lot of time talking about Social Justice would, but anyone who's seen contrived girl-power and forced identity politics knows what it looks like, and Borderlands 3's story really, really looks like it, and that on top of its weak villains and downright broken way of telling its story, really brings this game down, even compared to previous games in the series, because at least Borderlands 2 had a good villain.

Blood Feud

Borderlands 3 is a game that's hard to talk about in its totality; as a game, it's amazing, it was easily my favourite game of 2019, the combat is fun, the loot and levelling up is addictive, and the four new Vault Hunters are all really cool and inviting for new ways to play the game. On top of that, the game looks gorgeous, sounds awesome, and with a lot of the post-release bugs patched out, it's almost mesmerising to look at at times. As far as sequels go, it doesn't change much in the grand scheme, it's still just Borderlands, but it's Borderlands at its absolute best and with only two of my guys max-levelled, my time with the game is still far from done. As a piece of storytelling however, this game falls apart; its villains are infuriating, it completely shafts many of the series' most likable characters, and it does so seemingly for the sake of a contrived girl-power narrative that's so on the nose and undermines the player's role in the story, which is bullshit. And it's easy to say that it's a video game and the story isn't important, but when there are games out there like The Last of Us, Spec Ops: The Line, Halo 2, Bioshock and Spider-Man, what excuse is there for a game as story heavy as this one to have a bad story, one that's final moments undermine the heroism of the Vault Hunters and leave a bad taste in your mouth. But with as disappointed as I am with the game's story, I can not deny that I loved every minute of the game that I had a gun in my hands and like Borderlands 2 before it, I can easily see myself coming back to this game year after year, it really is that fun, and it's definitely worth playing.