Borderlands 3 (2019)

The previous games of BL earned a fair share enough to play through, especially with (and because of) friends being in on it. I concede that Borderlands stand strong in the looter shooter niche gameplay-wise but in the end, that's about it. There were well-written characters that are quite colorful and gave this franchise a warm, explicitly tongue-in-cheek charm. The system with the classes and weapons had a wide range to keep your loadout fresh and up-to-scale with the challenges you come by.

But BL3 has its glaring problems in the middle of the road... The weapons and loot help me breeze through the combats, although the battle scenes are getting samey to the point of tedium (a familiar flaw in the previous games). And fighting your way to progress the quests and the main story has an underwhelming payoff, because the stories are forgettable and tries too hard to be funny. I have tried to carry on after my playmates dropped in the middle of it, but my time worth judgement has talked me out of it when I realize that I spent 20+ hours just getting half-way through.

For the above reasons, I fail to find an incentive to look forward to the progression and therefore consider it checked off. Since the experience has been barely up to standards in the previous games (BL2 comes as relatively the best), I decide it's time to break up and leave the main franchise in the rain. (But if there's a 'worthy' follow-up to the Tales From The Borderlands coming up in the future, I will raincheck on that)

getting back to grouvee and cleaning up my collections. limited review.

My title says it all. It's a Borderlands title. It's very much in the same vein of all of the other Borderlands titles. If you liked the others and are looking for more, look no further. If you didn't like the others, don't bother here.

To me, and where I am, it was very much a middle of the road experience. The mindless killing and humor falls a little flat these days in the world the way it is, but you can make that judgement for yourself.

~David.

Finally finished all the DLC. Ended on 1,000 gamerscore. I doubt I'll go back to it unless I get a major itch. Towards the end it just felt like such a slog and I'm grateful my class was kind of OP as it took away a lot of the grind. For now, I'm going to uninstall the game and move on.

I think Borderlands 4 is going to need to add some new systems (vaulting, double-jumps, tactics button mapping, additional melee etc) to justify its existence. The 'billion guns' angle kind of falls flat when the vast majority are near useless. I hardly changed weapons by the end game. Give us a dismantling system, an upgrade tree, transmog - anything. The game is stupidly fun but it needs to make a few changes to stand out as many fps have started to do what they started but a lot better.

[MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BASE BORDERLANDS 3. CAN'T BLUR THE VIDEO SO YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED]

Holy shit. Gotta say fuck crunch because of what we got in the release cut because that felt like a first draft compared to this. If the game were delayed just enough, the story would've left less of a bad taste in our mouths for us with this scene. I could give a million reasons why this is better than what we got. Maya's death wasn't swept under the rug. The reactions towwrds her death were given a lot more time than the awkward speech. KRIEG HAS AN APPEARANCE IN THIS SCENE! How she feels like she could've done more. The tone is a lot more serious and heartfelt instead of unfunny jokes in between and after. And it makes Ava less of a whiny prick and more synpathetic. I yearn for this to be the actual scene in the game.

Не так уж много отличий от второй части. И не все в лучшую сторону.

В целом стало намного удобнее: сравнение лута нагляднее, фастревел в любой момент и прочие мелочи, которые не упомнишь, но почувствуешь, если проходить игры подряд.

Но прокачка по-прежнему медленная, левел-дизайн стал кишкообразным, а сюжет скучный настолько, что хочется забить на него даже при первом прохождении. А забить не дают. Игра постоянно заставляет слушать очень длинные и скучные разговоры. Поэтому и дрочильни приличной не получается. Хоть стрелять мне и понравилось, но по второму кругу эту тягомотину терпеть не хочется. Я пробежал сюжетную кампанию и забил, хотя это как в «Диабло» — только начало.

The gameplay is fantastic, much more polished than previous entries in the series. New characters with new skill trees, hundreds of guns, and more. Overall an improvement for the series as a whole.

The writing, on the other hand, was weak. The characters fall flat (particularly the villains, who are a far cry from Handsome Jack) with little to no development. But the real kick in the teeth was your character barely existing in canon. Every cutscene acts like you just aren't there. And the former playable characters, people who have taken down Vault Monsters, seem to forget how to fight more than 1 or 2 bad guys at a time.

This does pick up a bit with the DLCs. Two are out at the time of this writing and both are solid with good self-contained stories and much better characters, including old returning characters and brand new ones.

Borderlands still holds first place among looter-shooters for me, but narratively there is nothing remarkable about this installment.

What a dumb, fun game. There is nothing amazing here, but the basic loop is really good: mow down enemies, get loot. I love all the weird, wacky guns with strange reloads, funky mechanics, alternating fire modes, and different feels. This is what the series does best and it satisfies almost enough on its own.

The story is serviceable; better than Pre-Sequel. The characters are almost all repeats from BL2 and that is fine. Although the game goes to different worlds besides Pandora, the maps still feel very familiar. All of this feels like video game equivalent of comfort food, but I don't care.

I can pick it up for a while and enjoy that loot-loop. I don't feel the need to ever complete it, nor will I feel bad if I just put it down and don't return.

I'm finally writing about Borderlands 3.

It's not a review (too late for that), but a short essay about the irrelevance that the main characters of the game have in the plot. That's something not limited to 3 that affects the entire franchise (well, except the amazing Tales of the Borderlands).

It's in spanish and you can read it here.

I finally finished Borderlands 3 so have a final collection of screenshots.

Looking for something to listen to while you play just one more round of Tetris 99? In this episode, we're giving away a copy of Borderlands 3. Give us a chance, and maybe some day you can say you got in on the ground floor of the best D-list podcast you've ever heard. We are also on Spotify, Google Play, and Apple Podcasts (although I'm being told that there's some kind of issue with Apple Podcasts that has to be fixed, maybe?).

https://bomberspodcast.podbean.com/e/the-one-with-the-giveaway/