Borderlands 3 Review Review

A decade has passed since the release of the initial Borderlands game which made a name for itself by its amazing co-op, gameplay and many other aspects. The players have now been greeted by the third instalment. Borderlands uses it’s own original art style called cell-shaded and takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. After the astounding success of the first two games, Borderlands 3 has brought down the curtain. But is this really a good finale? Is Borderlands 3 good enough for its price?

Borderlands 3 Review

Borderlands has a way funnier outlook on post-apocalypse as opposed to most other games with the same approach and the third game once again starts in the planet Pandora. The game is centred around Tyreen and Troy, called the Calypso Twins and the game contains plenty of references to our pop culture. Tyreen is internet famous in Pandora and also one of the six Sirens of the universe, a critical part of the story. Another Siren is Lilith who Tyreen has a rivalry with.

The story’s breaking point starts at Promethea, another planet. You are introduced to characters who will show up throughout the story through a series of missions. Aside from the main story, the scenarists have done a great job with the side missions, ensuring that the player has not a single dull moment. Although the side characters are all original, the quests are not exactly revolutionary. It can get repetitive at times but the humour involved in them salvages the problem quite well even though the type of humor may not seem funny to every type of player.

Aside from the storytelling and humour, the game is very familiar to the first two titles and a returning player would feel right at home. When we started up the game, it felt so familiar that we played it like we’ve been playing it for years. Although this may sound a bit negative as if there is nothing new, we just meant how polished the game feels. You start off by choosing one of four Vault Hunters: Amara, FL4K, Moze and Zane. Just like the other games, the characters are all extremely well done and the developers are innovative yet again. The characters all are effective on the battlefield. Moze will turn everything to hell and FL4K will bathe the battlefield in blood.

The game supports four players online and local co-op, incredibly fun in this aspect like both of the older games. The gameplay mechanics are phenomenal in both singleplayer and co-op, the main reason that got us hooked aside from the story. Although the game feels like its a completely open world, the map design can often consume unnecessary time. The game is sadly slightly lacking in detail which is very noticeable towards the later hours. For example, Pandora is like a wide desert only given flavour by bandit camps on the outskirts. Aside from this, however, the landscape repeats itself and quickly becomes stale.

The combat, however, is right as it should be. They especially gave attention to weapon diversity and each weapon feels like a whole another mechanic on their own. Like the two previous games, it is obvious that the team spent a long time thinking on the weapons. Aside from weapons, they worked on a lot of cosmetics but when there are all these amazing weapons to discover, that becomes the second priority for most players.

The most frustrating part of our experience was probably the optimization. The game was played on PlayStation 4 Pro and had serious performance problems. Frame rate drops in menu screens, delayed loading and visual problems during combat. Let’s also add that these problems become twice as bad if you are playing local co-op. We hope that these problems will be addressed in later patches.

In conclusion, Borderlands 3 has managed to follow up from the two original games extremely well. Although the game doesn’t bring too much new to the table, it is still very much worth buying. Also, a great buy if you are looking for some high-quality co-op.