Borderlands 3 Review without Sass or Spoilers

Borderlands 3 is the sequel to Borderlands 2 and kicks off with a new vault hunter back on Pandora taking on an epic adventure throughout the galaxy. There is a lot of the same and a lot of new things in this rendition and our review is pretty simple.

If you want an FPS loot game that’s sillier than Destiny 2 and/or an improved version of Borderlands 2 then this game is a must have. The looter shooter has impressive combat, great guns and fun characters to play with some interesting and challenging encounters throughout the world.

If you want a detailed story FPS game then, I’m not sure I would recommend Borderlands 3. The story, while long and very in-depth, isn’t very good. The basic premise is that there are two people who have taken over the bandits on Pandora and formed a cult. You’re basically fighting against the “Children of the Vault” throughout the game and it has a lot of commentary on current Internet culture like influencers and the like.

It’s however very typical, with the villain being two steps ahead of the character until the very end as the reason for forward progress of the plot, making the story frustrating and predictable and spending most of the single player game basically fighting the same war over and over again.

It’s better than Destiny 1 in the sense it has a story, but I found that Borderlands 2 had a more convincing story. So if you’re there for the story only, you might want to wait until it’s on sale and give it a taste before you go too far.

If you want good online multiplayer, then this isn’t Mass Effect Andromeda. The online co-op modes take awhile to load on consoles and can be buggy. I rarely got a queue to pop for me.

If you want co-op, either couch co-op or online co-op then this is probably the best co-op game since Dead Space 3 or Borderlands 2. Lots of options to deal with levels and loot. You can play through the whole game with a friend. Exciting and fun stuff, although multiplayer can make some of the game trivial on the large maps where bosses have to transverse large swaths of the map to fight one or the other.

Finally, if you loved Borderlands 1, 2 and the prequel, then you are likely to enjoy Borderlands 3. As someone who has played all three, outside of the story being weak, I loved the game and was excited to play it everyday after work. I took my time to level up and do sidequests and enjoy the game and rarely needed a walkthrough for anything.

There were bugs, that are now patched, so the longer you wait to buy into Borderlands 3 the better the experience is going to be. It’s not on Steam, yet, so if you want the PC edition on Steam you’ll have to wait a bit for the Epic Store exclusivity to pass.

Graphics, sound, gameplay, etc. were all great in my book so really it’s more or less “is this your type of game” than “is the game good.” Replayability is high, both to try different characters and Mayham mode. I hope the above list should help you with your purchasing decisions.