The king is here.

It’s here ladies and gentlemen.

No flashy intro from me.

Let’s get right into Borderlands 3.

What You Need to Know

Borderlands 3 is the sequel to Borderlands 2 (pretty obvious no?). Back in June, Gearbox released “Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary” DLC for BL2. The DLC served as a bridge to connect Tales from the Borderlands to their upcoming title, since it’s been many years since we last saw the original Vault Hunters.

Borderlands 3 follows a new group of Vault Hunters as Lilith and the remaining Crimson Raiders battle a fierce new group known as the Children of the Vault (COV). Expect to open a few vaults while you’re fighting.

Gameplay

The best way to describe this is if you’re a Borderlands veteran is this is Borderlands 2 on steroids. If you have played the series before, you can skip to the sixth paragraph of this section to see what’s new.

If you’ve never played the series, let’s educate you.

Borderlands is a loot shooter, RPG experience. Think of Bungie’s Destiny, but Borderlands is what created Destiny.

You control a Vault Hunter, a character whose on a journey to discover Pandora’s greatest treasure. There are four to choose from with each offering unique abilities and play styles.

As you level up your characters, you unlock points that you can use to upgrade your character with different passive and non passive abilities. Characters have three different skill trees which can offer tons of customization and allow you to create a character that specializes in what you want. Each character has an action skill (aka ultimate ability), that recharges over time. As you kill enemies, loot will drop in varying forms such as grenade mods, different shields to protect your ass, and guns. By the game’s end, you’ll most likely have a hilariously strong/broken character, and you can do it all again in True Vault Hunter Mode, which ups the difficulty and gives you better rewards.

While there is a campaign, there are plenty of side quests to go on. You’ll gain loot from completing side quests, money for which you can purchase items for your character, and have a grand time. The Borderlands series is a really good series made by humans with a great sense of humor.

Borderlands 3 builds upon what has made the series good offering a deeper character customization. Vault Hunters can now augment their characters with two different action abilities. For example, I choose Moze and her companion Iron Bear. Iron Bear can equip two different weapons to use including a rail gun, grenade launcher and a mini gun. It’s gnarly.

There’s also a ton of new side quests and activities. Ellie, Scooter’s psycho sister, asks you to collect vehicles in the world to get better parts, Sir Hammerlock has you hunting creatures, Claptrap is looking to make his perfect companion and much more.

Player movement is also a lot more improved. Players can now mantle objects to offer a much more solid platforming experience, and you can slide. It’s the little things in life.

Gearbox has also given us an end game experience in the form of  Mayhem Mode. Once you complete the campaign, you can choose to iniatie Mayhem Mode which offers a chance to get better loot while fighting tougher enemies with mods on them.

New content is set to come as well as it’s now easier than ever to give us new content in this day and age.

Impressions

I’m a Borderlands nut, so again, I’ll try to be as not biased as possible.

I’ve seen some complaints about the story, but Borderlands 1 had no story and people loved it. Mind you I haven’t finished the game either. To be fair though, how could you make a better story than BL2 is a tough question.

I think Borderlands 3 is everything you could’ve wanted. The fact that it came out 7 years after BL2 and is good is an impressive feat (I’m looking at you Duke Nukem Forever).

The loot is fantastic. Guns are a plenty and come with secondary firing modes like an RPG on a sniper rifle or a tracker dart that makes your bullets home in a target. It’s so creative and offers variety to the loot you’ll see since there’s supposedly over thousands of guns (they’re all pistols that’s why). Radiation is a new element, and it’s pretty cool. This is probably the deepest customization the series has ever had since your can drastically change your character’s actions skills. Iron Bear starts out with a grenade launcher, railgun or a minion which can change to a flame-thrower, rocket launcher with homing rockets, and chain lighting with the railgun. I’m going to run through it multiple times to see how drastically different each character is.

Player characters actually have full interactions when in conversations and have actually made for some hilarious encounters. We’ve come a long way from the silent protagonist vibe the series started off with. Tons of cool references like one to the popular tv series Rick & Morty litter the game. The villains, Tyreen and Troy are douchey, oddly focused on social media, but hilarious. They take so many cues from the current social media trends and willingly make fun of them. Classic. Troy looks like Dante from the DmC reboot by Ninja Theory too.

There are tons of cosmetics as well. Crazy Earl will sell you emotes for eridium, you unlock weapons charms for your guns, and gun skins (even though I never used these). My only complaint is that the charms are way too small to see. Other times I would equip a charm, and it would be on the right side of my gun which I couldn’t see.

Graphically speaking, the game looks good. When I first loaded up the game, the art style reminded me of the difference in style between Sly Cooper 2 and Sly 3. It’s hard to explain, but it looked very different from BL2’s style. BL3 looks comic book like, but still phenomenal.

One thing I will mention is bugs at least on console. When you open your inventory, the game struggled. Two seconds into the first mission, I died and the game crashed. The typical Borderlands load in textures still have not fixed, but I digress. A viewer of mine on Twitch told me he experienced a bug involving his Bank that made him lose all of the items in it. Not cool. Gearbox has been working on bugs and some nerfs, which is interesting but appreciated.

In my opinion, the reason why I feel like this is a good game is because it’s more Borderlands. The series is phenomenal when you’re playing with friends and just as good when you’re solo. Gearbox is going to be giving free content too with the Bloody Harvest event set to start soon. Cross play may (?) be a thing since Sony has finally wrapped up the “Cross play” beta. We’re living in the age when the series can finally receive the support it deserves to make it last a long time (even though the older games are still pretty popular).

The king is here, and it delivers. What are your thoughts on Borderlands 3?