The first Borderlands is one of my favorite games of all time. I know the story was barely there but I hadn't play a game like it before and I ate it up. The second game gave us an interesting story with a great villain and doing everything with all the characters would take you hundreds of hours. I was really looking forward to the third game but didn't get it when it first came out cause I just didn't have the extra money. So here I am being cheap and playing it 6 months later haha! I have mixed feelings on this game. On one front it might be the best playing game in the series but on all others it seems like a bit of, not set back but not enough. Let's talk about it a bit.
I played this game on a PS4 Slim in HDR but I wanted to play on my Xbox One X. I played it during a free play weekend late last year and it caused my Xbox to overheat twice. They may have fixed that by now but didn't want to risk my console messing up so I just got it on PS4. I thought it looked and performed great. I could tell it wasn't in 4K but that was fine. I think HDR helps out a lot with games in making colors pop. I did get some frame drops when stuff got crazy but again, it still performed fine.
I want to talk about the gameplay first. The shooting in this game is damn close to being Destiny and Call of Duty level good. It's not quite there but it feels better in this game than the others. I played as Amara(the Siren) and I loved her abilities. The thing I really liked about the changes to them in this game was giving us three different varieties to use depending on the circumstance. Like she has the thing that Maya had in the last game of a bubble grabbing an enemy in place, she also has a slam that slams down four arms, and a projectile version of it that is perfect to use on bosses. And each one of those has variations you can mix and match in a pick three type system. It's very well done and I hope this how they handle skills from now on. They also added a slide and hurdle option which sounds a bit "so what" but the other games didn't have them and it's just a nice quality of life thing. So I overall think the actual playing of this game is the best in the series!
Let's go into the story and villains of the game next. I think they are both pretty weak with the villains maybe being my least favorite in the series. The story goes down the same path as the others while also continuing the end of the second game. I'll give them credit with how many vaults you actually go to. The end of Borderlands 2 showed a lot of them and you go to several and they are all cool even though they all look similar. Other than that the story was very forgettable. I did like the very end though, I got a bit emotional. All the other emotional moments just felt flat and felt like they came and went very fast without hardly anyone saying anything about what just happened. You do go to a lot of planets and that was cool and different. Something all these games have done is take the player out of the big story cutscenes. Like we aren't even really a part of the story, just the other characters. I have no idea why they kept doing that in this game too but I really didn't like that. We are the main character and we have a voice.
Now, the Calypso Twins...I didn't like them. They have some cool moments but they are all ruined by some really cringe lines. Like I get having them be streamers and annoying was meant to be annoying but it wasn't clever annoying just bad annoying. And them being streamers doesn't really play into anything big, they just play the same two dumb videos throughout the story. The end fights were kinda cool and I'll be honest, I didn't see the twist with them coming but even that was handled flat when it could've been an emotional scene. I consider Handsome Jack to be a top 25 video game villain and I know following him was always gonna be hard but it seems like they knew that and just said "Whatever, just make them streamers and have horrible lines"
To stay on the subject of writing, it was pretty bad all around. Now I know I'm not a professional writer and I've never written a video game before but I barely cracked a smile playing this game. I did laugh some but a dick joke needs to be more than just saying the word dick in 2019-2020. I did really like Baylex though. Ice-T voices him and most of his lines were really good. There are some other big people but only a few stood out. I was so let down that Tiny Tina is barely in the game. She was a highlight of the last game to me and when she's on screen in this game she owns it!
I feel like I've talked a good bit of negative so let's talk about a positive. This game has two of the best boss fights in the series in my opinion! One is one of the creatures you fight in a vault and the other...man it's so good. So Penn and Teller voice a boss in this game and it might just be the best boss fight of the series. It's two stages and they are both so cool. Honestly the area you meet them is amazing and I'll leave it at that. If you haven't seen these fights yet and plan on playing this game then I highly recommend avoiding them cause they are great!
There a few things I'd like to hit before we wrap this up. The worlds you go to are all cool and varied and huge! I liked exploring them and was always rewarded for exploring. And speaking of rewards my God this game showers you with legendary guns unlike the previous game. I like that but it also made them feel a little less special. I also want to give a shoutout to the score/soundtrack of this game! It's a banger! I also thought it was cool that the light on the PS4 controller changed depending on what element my gun had. I wish more games did stuff like that. I think the second game did it as well but still, it's cool. The last thing is the endgame. They added a mode called Mayhem Mode which you get after beating the main story. It puts everything at your current level and makes the enemies a bit harder and the rewards are much more frequent. It's a welcome alternate to playing Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode(New Game Plus) to reach max level like in the other games.
So what did I overall thing of this game, I liked it! I was disappointed with how lame the story and writing was but the gameplay made up for it. There is a lot to do and most of it is worth doing. Yeah a lot of the side quests have lame lore but they are fun. I picked it up for $20 and it was well worth it. It's on sale all the time now and if you think you will like it then I'd recommend it if you are in the mood to loot and shoot. Just don't expect and good story or care about the characters much.
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