Skagolocial

Wild guns fall to bad jokes in BORDERLANDS 3.

- James Davenport

Borderlands 3 is a game with long, earnest quests about how darn good coffee is punctuated by gore and gun violence. Borderlands 3 walks by dog poo, laughs at it, and then sets it ablaze. Borderlands 3 stays up until 11.30pm drinking soda and looking up crass Flash animations, taking notes. It’s stuck in the late 2000s, when basic vulgarity was enough to qualify as edgy. Borderlands 3 is seriously obsessed with turds.

It’s stuck in a time when memes lasted months rather than days, when referential humour was still a novelty and not exhausting, when you could point at something the slightest bit abnormal or gross and call it a joke. Simpler times, not necessarily better times.

Borderlands 3 feels like a retro shooter rather than alive and present in modern humor and pop culture. It’s simultaneously repulsive and compulsive, an FPS RPG that excels when its weapon generation system spits out guns that feel great to shoot, adorned with broken attributes capable of turning hordes of goons, bugs, and soldiers into clouds of red mist, elemental particles, explosions, and big damage numbers. Then it tells one of its many long, bad jokes and the cloud dissipates. I have horrific whiplash.

With Borderlands 3 a few things have changed, but to little effect. It’s still a Diablo-like masquerading as a shooter, now with new traversal moves, gorgeous gun models, and improved weapon feedback. But Gearbox has done little to build on the Borderlands formula, while chucking the pitch-perfect writing of Tales From the Borderlands in the bin. It’s the best and the worst of the series at once.