I got Battleborn for cheap a couple of years ago, and since the servers are going down soon, I decided to finally sit down and play through the campaign. I was pleasantly surprised by how fun it was, but there are some pretty frustrating technical issues and the writing isn't really up to par.

The best part of the campaign is the variety. At roughly eight hours long, it's the type of game you can knock out in a weekend, but Gearbox managed to pack quite a bit into those eight hours. There is a pretty wide variety of enemy types, all with different weaknesses and behaviors, and each mission tasks you with multiple objectives such as escorting a VIP or defending an objective. The best missions shift between different objective types, but the later missions tend to lean a bit too much on point defense. Each level also has one or two unique boss fights that make for fun setpieces and help keep the game feeling fresh.

I think my favorite part of the campaign is the fact that you can play through any mission as any character of your choice. The prologue locks you into a specific character, but after that, you're free to play as anyone you choose. I made it a point to play a different character in each mission, and I was surprised at how well melee characters and supports and tanks worked when playing alone. While it's obviously a bit easier to play through as ranged DPS characters, playing more defensive characters was very doable and a fun challenge. It's a great way to get used to playing new characters and adds a lot of replayability to the campaign.

While I did enjoy my playthrough, the game does have its fair share of problems. As of this writing, the game has about three months left before the servers are shut down forever. Since the game is always online, this means that everything, even the single player campaign, will be rendered unplayable. I don't think it's entirely fair to factor in whether the game will be playable in the next few months into whether the campaign is any good, but this does present some issues if you do want to get a playthrough in under the wire.

First, the servers don't seem to be maintained very actively and have some issues. The most obvious problem this causes is lag. Even playing by myself on a good connection, I found myself lagging very frequently, to the point that the game became nearly unplayable at points. A less obvious, but more disruptive, problem is that the game needs to record mission clears to your match history before they actually count as being cleared. Occasionally, the server will fail to respond to your match history, preventing the game from recognizing that you cleared the mission and causing you to lose any rewards you may have earned. I had to play the second mission three times to proceed, despite the fact that I got the Xbox achievement on the first clear.

Another issue caused by the imminent shutdown is that there is no way to purchase premium currency. This means that unless you're willing to grind for the free currency, you're not going to be able to unlock some of the characters. Even after a full campaign playthrough, I was probably only about a quarter of the way to my first unlock. The grind is pretty steep, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a completionist or interested in getting into what's left of the multiplayer community.

The major non-technical issue I had with the game is the writing. This game really wants to be a laugh-out-loud comedy, but basically none of the jokes ever land. It tries so hard to be as wacky as possible at all times that most of the jokes that are actually funny just get smothered by the three additional punchlines they try to tack on to them. The player character lines are just the same as any of the other dialogue; it's basically like they tried to make every character the "funny" one. It gets pretty grating pretty quickly, but fortunately the story is generic enough that you don't need to pay attention to any of it really.

I did enjoy my time with Battleborn, but it required me to look past a lot of frustration. It's an interesting fusion of FPS and moba, which isn't something I think any other game currently offers, and the fact that it works so well as a single player campaign is impressive. Unfortunately, it's hard to appreciate that when the game is constantly lagging out and forcing you to replay missions. It's a fun, underappreciated shooter, but sadly it's also a cautionary tale of the dangers of tying every aspect of your game to a server.