Seriously, every time I boot up Borderlands 3 I have to take off my headset. As the 2K and Gearbox logos pop up on the screen I’m greeted with insanely loud audio and I have no idea why this happens as the game even on max volume doesn’t blast like the intro does. It’s an opening experience that kinda sums up my early impressions of the game; Loud, crass and not exactly working as intended.
So let’s just say it straight up; the PC version is janky as hell. The game feels like it’s in pain trying to render the environment around you. Textures pop-in slowly, frame rates stutter up and down and playing around with your graphics settings does little to alleviate it. Even aiming down your gun’s scope often lags the game out noticeably, which really drags down the gameplay as you might expect. Now these aren’t consistent issues; sometimes I load into Sanctuary, your spaceship that serves as your mobile HQ and it’s a laggy mess, other times it’s completely fine. It’s simply a poorly optimised game that didn’t have enough time in the oven.
The good news is when the game is working, it’s actually fun. After spending the last few months playing MMO’s, I’m enjoying the breeziness of just being able to jump into something solo to do some looting and shooting. They’ve actually changed a lot of the gameplay for the better. I feel agile sliding and mantling around the map in a way I never did in the previous games. There is also significant improvements to the gunplay; it’s not Destiny level good by any means, but a lot of the guns have some kick to them and less feel like they’re made out of cardboard.
I’m playing as Moze, the girl with the mech you can call down, like a certain Korean E-sports player from that game that rhymes with doverlotch, and it’s pretty engaging. They’ve added some customisation options to how your action skill works, in Moze’s case what weapons her mech come equipped with along with some passives to further personalise it. I do wish they had added a smaller skill you could use more often just to mix up the gameplay even further, but even without that it’s still enjoyable.
Borderlands 3 hasn’t fixed the issue of loot overload. Too often are you asked to sift through piles of whites and greens, figuring out if your blue or purple from 5 levels ago has been outshined by statistical scaling. This is compounded by something that dawned on me while playing earlier today; I have a really hard time telling what guns are good and what are trash. I had this realisation when I came up against an optional boss a few levels above me. I was having a tough time and decided to trawl my inventory to see if anything else could make a dent in him. I found that a green I had initially thought was unremarkable turned out to be my deadliest weapon and helped me take him down. The problem was after the fight I compared it to what I thought were my best weapons and statistically they were pretty similar. Maybe there was something obvious I was missing, but I couldn’t see it. I think it’s a combination of there being a lot of variables guns can roll with, but also the stats being shown to the player being a little too vague. It makes the task of qualifying the sheer amount of loot you find in the exploded corpses of your enemies more of a drag than it should be.
Speaking of bosses, they’re actually lowkey the highlight of the game for me. I always have low expectations for Shlooter boss fights; Destiny has always been extremely unimaginative with them outside of raids, but Borderlands does them justice. I’ve fought a handful and was consistently surprised. So far most of them have been full of mechanics that get you dodging around the area, learning their patterns and how to maximise your DPS against them. They’re by far the most engaging parts of a game where regular enemies usually run around like headless chickens, and that’s not something I was expecting going in.
This is the part where I should talk about the characters and plot, but I really don’t want to. Like the one guy at the party who’s the last to realise everyone is laughing at him not with him, Gearbox has again chosen to fill its world with paper thin characters who crack jokes about punching people’s dicks off and parrot old memes like it’s 2009. I have genuinely cringed at some of the ambient dialogue that’s been sprouted off, especially when you can hear the pain in the voice actors tone as they articulate it. The actual plot isn’t much better. Again you’re off hunting for vaults while a worse version of villain Handsome Jack taunts you endlessly (they’re streamers so you can just imagine all the comedic gold Gearbox is mining there). It’s unbelievable that another company took their IP, showed them how to craft a compelling story while maintaining that trademark Borderlands ‘zaniness,’ and they still opted to scrape the bottom of the comedic barrel like this. But, hey, if you’re into it more power to you I guess.
So right now Borderlands 3 is definitely hitting some highs and lows but if they can fix the jank quickly and get the game running properly, I’ll at the very least get to the end game and see if it’s worth sticking with.
