I wrote a review for a game I played full price on Steam so you don’t have to 😀
It made me so grumpy, I wrote a long ranty review on Steam, which I replicate in full here.
Here we go…
The short of it: This game is very tenuously a Borderlands game. It makes lots of game play changes to broaden its appeal, with hit and miss results, and there’s been a complete dulling down of the narrative this series is famous for.
Long version
The main quest is a slog. Sure it has its moments of fluid exciting battles, but those only helped to get me through the sheer shoot-grind of the experience. Travel across multiple way points in a quest, and in each of which encounter one of the limited enemy types in various configurations. For about 60% of the game its a big big open world, with numerous boring sub-quests, bizarre pop up boss battles in a bubble, and optional capture the point encounters. Then for the last part, suddenly its a very linear,dull, jump, run and shoot-grind to the final boss battle. Final boss is kind of cool and exciting, but then the narrative takes a running jump of a cliff and spoils the end.
Gone are the characters and hand crafted narratives that made the previous games so memorable. Sure there’s returning characters, but they are so briefly in it I wished they hadn’t been. There’s a handful of new characters. I barely remember them. If I do that’s only because they remind me a character from the previous games. As for the main villain? Well I understand they wanted to dial back the “in your ear every five minutes” cringe of Calypso Twins from BL3, but its nowhere near the heights of Handsome Jack (BL2), more the dullsville of Col. Whatshername (because she was so boring) from the first game. Instead of building encounters around memorable characters, its all cookie cutter, fill out a template with hordes of minions, followed by a predictable end of level boss fight.
Mechanically there’s too much complexity now. Except there isn’t. Get the right combo of uninspiring gun, augmentation chip, character skill and you might have a winner that will see you fly through the game. But its the other 80% which will see you junking it upon picking it up. Good job one of the new features is the ability to add a Junk marker when you pick an item up 😀 As I said earlier, some fights are good old run and gun classics of the FPS gen, but the rest are keyboard hammering affairs, full of grenade spamming.
Guns wise, and Borderlands is all about the GUNS, you don’t get anything remotely interesting until the last couple of levels of the game before the ending. I beat the game using a pick double barrelled shot gun that fired rainbows, and bouncy squeaky grenades that spawned more bouncy squeaky grenades. I feel so manly 😀
I’ll stop there. But overall what made the Borderlands games so special, has been gutted in favour of aim to please mechanics, and a dumbed down story, to appeal to a mass audience. I.e. what marketers thinks make a good game, not what actually makes a good game 😉
Oh and all of this was with the game running reasonably well, without all the crashes and optimising issues others are having. I did notice something wasn’t quite right with a bit of stuttering here and there, and a few moments of lag, on what was a good robust medium ranged PC desktop five years ago.
I suppose there’s was enough of a good game to carry through 70+ hours to the end, putting up with the grind and lack of narrative colour. If none of this puts you off, get it in the sales, in a year’s time when they’ve properly optimised it (is that we are calling “squashing the bugs” now?) and responded to customer feedback and added/changed bits to make it less dull.
This review can be read over at Steam.
Compare and contrast with our H’s consise and meaningful reviews on the games he plays via my account on a regular basis 😀
