It’s as if no one at Gearbox has played a game with character progression. Either level me up more quickly, or make each level matter more.
I rarely level up, and when I do, it hardly matters. But once again, Gearbox makes the two exact wrong choices. When a loot chase is uninspired, character progression can carry some of the weight. Never have so many ignored so much for so little. What a weird irony that these are the most vividly imagined and implemented guns in a Borderlands game, but I’ve never cared less about loot than I do in Borderlands 3. It’s as if no one at Gearbox has played a game with loot. Either give me less loot or give me more room. Each of these is the exact wrong way to do loot. With the possible exception of Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank games, no one gives guns personality like Gearbox.īut why are these guns spewed from a firehose? And why is the interface to manage them still so convoluted? Why do I have just 15 inventory slots when the vending machines are so few and far apart? The ground is littered with so much stuff I don’t care about, and yet I have so little room to carry it. This gives them even more personality on top of the wonderful animation, imaginative art design, and muscular sound effects. These latest guns in Borderlands 3 have more meaningful gimmicks in terms of how you actually use them. They understand the appeal of how a gun fires, how it reloads, how you hold it, what noise it makes, how the sights look, what color it is. They have understood all along how much firearms matter in a first person shooter, where the gun is front and off-center. Gearbox has the best opportunity yet to make loot matter. The joy of the moment-to-moment action is all good and well, but the (perhaps unfortunate?) truth of modern game design is that we expect a psychological hook, and this is where loot comes into play. A fundamental part of an action RPG is making me care about the loot. In fundamental parts of Borderlands, they pair two exactly wrong choices.
It’s as if Gearbox doesn’t understand the balancing act that comes with good game design. Why are all these things so bad in a game where the gunplay is so good? And why do all these things so clumsily, stridently, and frequently get in the way of the gunplay? The writing, the characters, the thudding humor, the fiddly loot, the unconscionable interface, the glacial character progression, the familiar and dated geography, the blatant pandering to social media, and then even more of the writing. Everything I don’t shoot or shoot at is a source of irritation. But as a game, Borderlands feels remarkable in the wrong sense of the word. This is what Gearbox has been doing so well all along, and they continue to do it, except this time even better. Did I mention the make and model? It’s a 2019 Gearbox Borderlands 3.Īs a shooter, Borderlands is remarkable.
So I routinely have to pull over and arrange all the confetti into piles by color, and then sort those piles by small numbers printed on the shreds of confetti. If I ignore the confetti, the engine seizes up from time to time.
Worst of all, the air conditioning vents spew gray, green, and blue confetti, with occasional shreds of orange and purple. For some reason, the car’s maximum speed is 10mph. Every so often, it blares out-of-tune polka at maximum volume, and I’m never sure how long it’s going to be doing that. Well, it would be if it weren’t for a couple of features. It’s a dream to drive this thing, to sit in it, to take it across town, to admire it. And the interior! Plush seats that feel like they were made to fit me, fancy leather, lots of cool lights on the dashboard. The steering wheel under my fingertips, the responsive grip of the tires on the road, the graceful suspension, the throaty purr of the engine. I just got a new car and, let me tell you, it is something else.
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