I’ve now played Borderlands 3, which means I’ve played every shooter-looter in the Borderlands series. I haven’t played either Tales From the Borderlands game, and it turns out those are actually fairly important to the series, so this isn’t really a complete series retrospective. The shooter-looters do still stand on their own, but characters from the shooters have major character beats in Tales (Scooter died, apparently), and characters from Tales show up with major roles in Borderlands 3. Like, apparently some guy named Rhys took over Atlas Corporation to rebuild it after it somehow got completely deep-sixed on Pandora (a Soviets-in-Afghanistan situation, I guess? Atlas’ headquarters certainly wasn’t on the planet and it didn’t seem like Commandant Steele and General Knoxx was their entire command staff, even if it did seem like some of their most elite forces were being poured into the debacle). Borderlands 3 presents that straightforwardly enough that I didn’t feel lost, but it also definitely seems like this was the plot of Tales From The Borderlands.
Borderlands 3 is, for the most part, a worthy successor to Borderlands 2 – although that statement comes with the qualifier that I wasn’t as impressed with Borderlands 2 as a lot of people. Just like 2, some of 3’s jokes landed, about as many of them missed, and I don’t think it really lives up to being a “comedy game” so much as a lighthearted game, but that was always true and being a lighthearted, mechanically fun shooter is exactly what I wanted from the series anyway. The plot is little more than an excuse to string together gun battles, but the gun battles are fun, so that is sufficient. The villains are really annoying and non-threatening which is jarring to people who were hoping for another Handsome Jack, but the NPC allies are much better at expressing personality and feeling like they’re actually doing something, so I’m calling it a wash.
Don’t get me wrong, the Calypso twins have repetitive dialogue and their constant act of being too cool to care even when they’re being repeatedly handed significant defeats is, yes, in-character with being self-absorbed streamer narcissists, but that still leaves them with garbage dialogue. I can’t even tell if the way they’re aggressively unfazed by the loss of one corporate ally after another is supposed to indicate that they’re detached from reality or if it’s an ineffective attempt to make them seem more threatening by blowing off the significance of their setbacks. But, like, they clearly demonstrate investment in those corporate allies before their respective schemes go tits up, and it’s not like the protagonists or their NPC allies are the ones trying to convince the Calypso twins that these setbacks are a big deal – the Calypsos go out of their way to belabor how totally unaffected they are by the defeat of their latest ally. Given the level of subtlety the average Borderlands writer operates on, I’d expect a friendly NPC to be very explicit about how the Calypsos are bluffing if that’s what was meant, but they absolutely do come across like they’re bluffing.
But the Borderlands series had exactly one good villain and even Handsome Jack’s writing is overhyped. If you decided from that one guy that Borderlands is a series with cool villains, then I get why the Calypsos were a huge disappointment, but Borderlands is fun because it is fun to shoot a Jason Voorhees cosplayer so hard that guns and money come exploding out of his ribcage, and Borderlands 3 continues to serve up cool characters with cool powers to play as and cool locations with cool enemies in them to fight against.
The monster designs are still good, and going to lots of new planets meant lots of excuses for cool new monsters, especially on Eden-6. “Add dinosaurs” isn’t extraordinarily creative, but it still works. Dinosaurs are super cool, adding them improves the game. The variety of different planets makes it easier for the game to hard-cut between very different moods, from Borderlands-classic on Pandora to knock-down corporate warfare on Meridian to remote, monster-infested wilderness on Eden-6. Borderlands 2 was also good at having much more environmental variety and atmosphere compared to the very same-y original, and this is only enhanced in Borderlands 3.
The character design of the protagonists and the more human enemies is also really good, the characters are all really distinctive, they have a simple but well-expressed personality, and they have distinctive skills some of which are gobs of fun to play with, while others are kind of lame. Every Borderlands game has a character whose unique powers are kind of lame – Maya in 2, Aurelia in the Pre-Sequel, everyone but Lilith in the original – and this time it’s Amara. I guess after Lilith was the only character with fun powers in Borderlands 1, sirens are now banned from having cool powers that do anything. On the other end, Moze demonstrates how to do a straightforward guns-and-grenades character right: By giving them an awesome robot suit to stomp around in (or more broadly, by turning some part of their standard soldier kit up to eleven).
The loot colors were completely detached from the actual quality of the loot, though. Gold drops mean basically nothing in this game because there’s no reason to believe they’ll be particularly better than the blues or purples. You have to compare the stats yourself and ultimately trying the new gun out is the only way to know for sure. This was always true to some extent, the AI/RNG couldn’t reliably tell you which weapon was better than which, so sometimes a gold drop would be crap because it was a whole much less than the sum of its parts. Not usually, though, you could use the color scale to sort your weapons on a first pass and 99% of the time, it would work. Sure, if you auto-sell every white weapon you find then once every 100 guns you will sell one that’s actually good without even looking at it, and over the course of a campaign that might happen 4 or 5 times, but it’s a huge time savings to only look at blues and purples. But in Borderlands 3, you have to at least glance at everything because the colors will lie to you. I wound up using a strategy of selling everything unless one of my weapons was starting to feel weak, and then looking only at weapons of that type to replace it, and that worked out, but the color grading system is supposed to solve this problem, it worked fine in previous games, and in 3 it’s ineffective.
Vehicle gameplay is pretty limited, which is a problem every Borderlands has had. Over the course of the entire series, they’ve got tons of interesting vehicles, but they only ever have three to a game. In gun design, Borderlands is happy to go absolutely gonzo with more guns than you could ever make use of, giving you a constant stream of new weapons to suit any playstyle, but for some reason they’re much more stingy with vehicles. The vehicles can be custom-modded now, but finding vehicle parts is so rare that I found less than half of them by the end of the campaign. None of them make massive changes to the vehicle, anyway. You can get different types of bombs to lob out of your technical, but you can’t get a missile launcher or a tank cannon, so it never feels like heavy armor to me despite fulfilling that role mechanically. The cyclone is really cool, at least, but that came up on the second planet of five and then vehicle gameplay didn’t really evolve past that. No tanks for the corporate warfare on Meridian (like they had in the General Knoxx DLC), no speedboats or hovercraft for the jungles of Eden-6 (like they had in the Hammerlock DLC). Every Borderlands game is like this, but over the course of all the games and DLCs they’ve made more than enough vehicles to solve this problem, they just refuse to put all of them into one game. Is it really had to add vehicles to these games for some reason, to the point where adding in another three or four would be a major investment of resources?
Lilith’s sacrifice at the end was also pretty meh. Felt like it came out of nowhere, Lilith using siren powers she didn’t have up until that moment to solve a problem that only cropped up in the last ten minutes of the game and which apparently cost her life. Her whole character up until that point was about not having her powers and being stuck purely in a command role, and using her powers so hard they kill her as soon as she gets them back doesn’t really pay that off. Like, Lilith doesn’t like being depowered, but then the very first thing she does when she gets her powers back is kill herself with them. To save the world and all, it’s a heroic sacrifice, not a suicide, but it still grates against what her character arc had been up to that point.
Ava’s bit about being an apprentice vault hunter has a few good beats, but never really goes anywhere. Lilith kind of implies she has command of the Sanctuary III (the starship that the Crimson Raiders are flying around in to have space adventures), which, like, Mordecai, Axton, Salvatore, Gaige, Moxxi, Ellie, and any of the player characters would’ve been a better choice for that, along with probably Zer0, although he’s hanging out in Meridian, not the Sanctuary III, so he might not be available. Even Brick might be a better choice, he did lead a bandit clan in Borderlands 2 and while he wasn’t especially effective, he was able to hold things together, which is still plausibly putting him ahead of the kid who went on her first full-fledged vault hunter mission last Tuesday. Ava is almost literally the worst person in the roster to give command to, although she is at least an obvious improvement over Krieg, Claptrap, Tannis, and also Marcus, though in the latter case only because I get the feeling he would turn it down anyway.
Ava hasn’t had any major character beats since the death of her mentor Maya (there’s some side quest stuff that fleshes her character arc out, but doesn’t advance it), so I guess we’re just supposed to assume she grew into a command role offscreen at some point in the three and a half planets’ worth of content we’ve had since then? She just kinda hung out on the ship for pretty much all of that.
But Borderlands’ writing has always been hit-or-miss, and its greatest strength is that comedy comes in threes, so it’s easy to build a side quest around a joke, and Borderlands 3 is still good at that. The jokes average out to decent but not amazing, but building side quests around jokes means that the side quests have a reliable setup-repetition-twist structure that can be stamped down anywhere and as long as you use a different joke for each one, it doesn’t get repetitive.
I think Borderlands 3 wasn’t as well-received as Borderlands 2 pretty much purely because it had been 7 years and the culture had moved on. Borderlands 3 is good at the same things Borderlands 2 was good at, and it was bad at the same things Borderlands 2 was bad at. The saturation of magenta games had just rendered Borderlands 3 a pretty completely unexceptional entry in the genre.
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