Borderlands 3 video game review: Weapons are ‘bonkers’ but save your money

It’s been five years in the making and while the latest instalment in the Borderlands franchise offers some “bonkers” weapons, it has some major flaws.

It has been five years since the last game in the Borderlands series, so fans have naturally been very excited to get their hands on Borderlands 3 — but has it been worth the wait?

The answer to that really depends on how much you love the series and your fondness for the loot-shooter genre.

Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Borderlands 3can, like its predecessors, broadly be described as an action-comedy looter shooter with a distinctive comic book/rotoscope-inspired art style

Your character is one of four vault hunters — Amara the Siren (a sort of mage), FL4K the beastmaster (and also a robot), Moze the soldier, and Zane the special agent operative. You can play alone or co-op with your friends, which provide different experiences.

The series humour is back and in greater quantities, although it isn’t to everyone’s taste. Picture: Supplied

The plot of the game involves looking for a vault full of alien technology while fighting a cult known as the Children of the Vault, led by a twin brother and sister who draw a lot of their style and mannerism influence from, well, influencers and streamers.

Achieving your goals involves shooting pretty much everything that moves, reloading, then shooting it again — and picking up different guns accessories from the debris to facilitate the process in the next area.

Plenty of fan-favourite characters from the series make a return this time around, including Lilith the Siren from the first game and the beatboxing egomaniacal robot Claptrap, which is just as well because the other characters in the game — besides the two antagonists — aren’t particularly memorable.

One of the key elements of the loot-shooter genre is the loot and Borderlands 3 does not disappoint in that regard. The promo materials for the game made mention of there being something like one billion firearms in Borderlands 3 — thanks to an essentially random generator that creates a vast combination of gun parts to generate the bang-sticks in the game.

Players can choose from four classes with different abilities, including a soldier, a siren, a beastmaster and an operative. Picture: Supplied

The hardware available is absolutely bonkers — among other things, I found a sniper rifle with an alternate-fire mode rocket launcher, a double-barrelled pump-action shotgun with a detachable magazine that fired incendiary buckshot, and a machine-pistol with an underbarrel taser.

While the series has traditionally been set on the wasteland planet of Pandora, Borderlands 3 takes the action to an interplanetary scale, with different levels set on different worlds, all accessed via the “hub” of the space ship Sanctuary.

The Borderlands series has long been known for its unique brand of humour, and I have to admit I quite like it, so it’s good to see plenty of it here, although admittedly it isn’t to everyone’s taste.

While the actual shooting and gunplay is a lot of fun, and the humour appealed to me, the game has some issues in other areas.

Claptrap the off-the-wall robot makes a welcome return in this instalment of the Borderlands series. Picture: Supplied

For starters, its user interface and in-game menus aren’t always very clear; in particular, it took me a while to work out the character skill tree and some of the other functions. For example, you might get a note saying you’ve received a message from one of the in-game companies, but I had to go and open the controls menu to find out I needed to press F4 to read it.

Quite a few of the guns I picked up were above my level, meaning I couldn’t use them at the time, and by the time I’d levelled up enough to the point where they were accessible (which took ages), I’d generally ditched it to make room in my perpetually full inventory.

While the game is playable solo, I encountered at least two bosses that were a nightmare for me to get past on my own, dying over and over again thanks to a combination of the boss being a bullet-sponge armed with homing weapons that I couldn’t avoid, splash damage from the same weapons and swarming minions.

The combat in the game is action packed, but enemies can be quite tough to deal with. Picture: Supplied

I eventually had to backtrack and complete some side missions before I could level up enough to unlock the good equipment I’d salvaged to take them on, but doing so brought the flow of the game to a juddering halt and dragged the pace backwards.

On a similar note, I felt there were just too many enemies to contend with at times. This sounds like an odd complaint in a first-person shooter (especially one that’s about causing as much chaos as Borderlands 3 is), but instead of feeling like an awesome badass mowing down waves of enemies, I just found their constant attacks tiresome and frustrating; I was constantly running out of ammunition because the enemies (even on the easier difficulty setting) were shielded bullet sponges who soaked up small arms fire and generally outstayed their welcome by several magazines.

Then there were the bugs, including characters not triggering missions, enemies standing there while I shot them repeatedly in the back, enemies walking straight past me and not noticing I was there and health bars still showing up on defeated foes.

For a game that markets itself as being about mayhem and fun, I thought Borderlands 3 seemed to get in its own way regrettably often.

There is often a lot happening on screen in Borderlands 3. Picture: Supplied

I really, really wanted to like the game — there were parts where the fun did shine through and I had a great time blasting my way through the levels — but I just found myself coming into issues that dragged me out of the moment and reminded me the game wasn’t actually doing anything particularly new — not that there’s anything wrong with “More Borderlands”, but it’s not the only loot shooter in town anymore.

It’s not a terrible game, and for fans of the series there’s a lot to like here — especially in co-op with friends — but it’s pretty clear to me Borderlands 3 still needs some tweaking, especially in regards to difficulty, loot drops, and overall polish.

Once those issues are sorted out, then the game will be worth wading into, but right now I’d suggest waiting a bit until some patches have been deployed before loading this one up.

Are you playing Borderlands 3? Continue the conversation on Twitter @RoyceWilsonAU

Originally published as Borderlands 3 video game review: Weapons are ‘bonkers’ but save your money