The game that I'm going to be going over today is the third entry from a series that I've been jamming on since I was a wee turbo virgin, tweaking my nipples with a car battery while gloating over how I fucked some guys mom on Halo 3, it's called Borderlands 3. In case you're some sort of sentient trilobite who has been hiding under a rock for the past 10 years and doesn't know what Borderlands is, let me give you a brief run down. The Borderlands series are a set of first person shooter games that have some RPG elements sprinkled in, with looting being a large part of the game as well. The games are developed by Gearbox, and are pretty much their only games that don't smell like some stinky shit. (Seriously, I think this company would be utterly butt fucked into a dark oblivion if not for this series. Looking at you Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever.)
Now, I have sunk quite a considerable amount of time into this game since it dropped, probably around 150 hours if I had to guess of the top of my head. And, while I can say this game is a good entry into the series and has a lot of fun aspects to it, it also has a hell of a lot of problems that need to be taken care of. But, we'll get into those later on in this review. For now, lets just stick to talking about Randy Pitchfords love of cam girls and how he thinks squirting is a beautiful magic trick. Lets just start off with the positive parts of the game that I really enjoyed.
The Good:
Lets start with talking about the gameplay for Borderlands 3. While it's nothing revolutionary, it's all done extremely well. The gunplay is solid, definitely better than what we saw in the previous two games. The skill tree element has been improved allowing you to do some really fun builds that are drastically different from one another with whichever character you've chosen to play as. The diversity of the guns in the game is a huge improvement from the past games as well, with a lot of guns having interesting/crazy effects instead of just shallow differences that make everything feel the same but slightly different. There are so many good guns in this game that I found myself constantly tossing out everything to take in a new set probably every 5-10 levels. Even while being level 50, I still find myself swapping things out because I continue to find insane guns or just guns that are super rare.
One thing that has always been a big selling point for this series is that it's super fun to play with friends, which I have always thought was a very weak point. While it's true that the game is more fun to jam on while playing with friends, that doesn't mean much. Literally anything is more fun to do with friends. You could go downtown and watch a homeless guy rub his dick on a rusty storm drain with a group of friends and it would be fun. My point here is playing any video game is more fun with friends, so why should it matter more with this game? Borderlands 3 is pretty fun to play while just on your own, in fact, I basically played through the campaign all by myself the first time around to make sure it didn't suck shit in single player mode. So, if you're anti social or an incel too busy talking about how much you hate women and writing your manifesto to make friends, then you're in luck. Because, this game is pretty fun just on its own.
You'll definitely notice a huge improvement as well on the map designs for this game compared to the past games. The art design gives a totally different tone and setting for each world you go on, and really adds to the world building of the game. There are tons of areas to explore with a lot of collectible items/logs to collect as you play. I honestly was super happy with all the level designs for the game, save for the Athena area which I thought was underutilized and could have been added to. I will say graphically the game doesn't really blow me away, as it just looks like Borderlands 2. However, I can't really take a steaming shit on them for that because there's only so much you can do with graphics when everything is heavily cell shaded, which is the biggest part of the aesthetics of the game. The game still looks good, and the world and maps just boost it up quite a bit.
On top of the world changes, I also was pretty happy with all of the enemy designs for this game. Especially in comparison to the past 2 games where not many enemies were very memorable. This game does a good job making the bosses stand out with how they look, as well as how they attack to have the fights stick with you instead of just being forgettable garbage. It's also pretty fun going back and grinding through bosses on Mayhem mode to try and get the super rare gear for your character, which is where a lot of my 150 hours of playing has went. Even the lesser enemies has a nice design to them, and usually have a few special attacks that only they themselves are capable of. While none of the fighting mechanics require much of any strategy to get through, it's all pretty fun and satisfying so I have to give them some points here for doing a good job.
The Bad:
Now, lets start getting into the negatives of the game. And, oh boy, is there a shit load of stuff that I have an issue with in Borderlands 3. For anyone who is a stan fanboy of the series, you should probably close out your hentai video with your soft cock in hand and prepare yourself, because baby, I'm coming in pretty god damn dry with the things I have to say about this game.
Lets start with how poorly optimized this game is, and how it's littered with copious amounts of game breaking bugs. Seriously, this shit is horrendous. There was literally one morning where I played for around 3 hours, and during said 3 hours the game hard crashed my Xbox 3 seperate times. On top of that, in that same time frame, the game froze up twice while I was fighting a boss, requiring me to restart the game. On one of those restarts, I spwaned into the game and found myself falling through the map in a white void for about 3 minutes before my character finally died. Now, mind you, this all happened with 3 hours of playing this game. I'm probably up to around 7 times the game has hard crashed my Xbox, as well as a dozen times where it has either frozen or soft crashed me to my dashboard. This doesn't include the several times where a boss got stuck in a strange spot and couldn't be beaten, or the dozens of times where the game started melting because of how laggy it got for whatever reason. The game absolutely needed at least 3 or 4 months of testing and work before it was released.
A large aspect of the game that I really did not enjoy was the writing and dialogue, which was absolutely unbearable 95 percent of the time for me. There were a few jokes that did make me have a small laugh here and there, which I guess is a positive. But, this game keeps on with the 2009 area of "RAWR XD I'M SO RANDOM, HAHA. I'M GONNA POUNCE ON YOU AND NUZZLE YOUR ASSHOLE WITH MY SPORK. HAHA, SO RANDOM", and it is so god damn irritating. This is obviously a subjective thing, but the humor just did not work for me. I'm not really sure who it works for, honestly. It feels super dated to the late 2000's, and I don't see kids these days busting a gut over hearing someone say Dude, that's Amazeballs, brah! 17 times in a row. But, hey, more power to you if for some reason you pop a fat boner at insufferable writing.
On top of the bad writing, I have to say this game has some of the weakest villains I have ever seen in a video game. The calypso twins who are the main big baddies are absolutely awful, and part of that is due to the shit writing/jokes and and narrative that was made for them. I saw a lot of the twists coming in the story where I honestly just rolled my eyes until they fell out and landed under my taint to hide from the shitty narrative. Honestly, the narrative stuff for all the villains in the game were pretty ass. I definitely feel like Borderlands 2 had a stronger villain in Handsome Jack, who had way better motivations and backstory than the two villains in this game. None of this would have been too bad if you could have had the option to skip cutscenes or dialogue, but they're so up their own fartbox with terrible jokes and writing that they say fuck that shit and basically assault all your senses by slapping you in the face with their soggy scrotum.
There's also a large problem with the pacing of the game. Most of it feels like it wants you to be fast paced and when it does that it's fucking great. But, then all of a sudden everything comes to a screeching halt because you have to wait 2 minutes for an NPC to get through a chunk of exposition and walk across a room to open a door, just for it to go back to being fast paced as you clear out all the enemies in that area...And, then it happens again. The game does this a lot, and it really ruins some of the experience for me. This has always ruffled my nipples in games, when you have to deal with a slow NPC. But, in this game it is extra frustrating, especially since some NPC's can be buggy as hell or just stop functioning at all requiring a restart.
Finally, there are a few other small things that I had an issue with in the game that I'd like to drizzle on top of this succulent review. The driving mechanic is not very good in this game, and again can be very buggy and fucked up. Some of the quests are so god damn tedious that I feel like the developers want to irritate the shit out of you for no reason. Not all of them are bad, but some are dreadful, honestly. Another issue with the quests is sometimes they, too, are buggy as hell. There were several times where my quest marker just up and vanished so I had no idea where the hell to go.
But, overall, what do I think of this game? I think it's pretty good, almost entirely thanks to the fun gameplay. There is so much fucked up with the game that needs work, or stuff that just is ass to me that can't be fixed. But, there''s also quite a bit of good stuff here with enemy designs, boss fights, art design, gun variety, the skill tree and gunplay. The gameplay is just flat out fun, and offers a lot. Rating wise, I would put this game at a 7.5 out of 10 with it being closer to a 7 than an 8. Though, If they fixed all the horrible bugs and game crashing issues, then I would probably put this a bit higher up at an 8 out of 10. But, yeah. Would definitely recommend this one if you want a fun loot and shoot game that will make you decently moist.
All right, until next time. Later, slutterbutts.