Battleborn Review

With a roster of bizarre and brilliant characters, a bright and colourful, yet terrifying universe and the chance to level up and upgrade, you’d be fooled into thinking Gearbox had tiptoed past everyone and dropped a brand new Borderlands, but don’t let that sway you. While there is certainly influences from Gearbox’s beloved loot-based franchise, Battleborn is a much more complicated beast, failing to fulfill expectations, and leaving me more confused once I was finished, than I was before playing it.

Famously, Randy Pitchford took to Twitter to describe what Battleborn is...

Battleborn is: FPS; hobby-grade coop campaign; genre-blended, multi-mode competitive e-sports; meta-growth, choice + epic Battleborn Heroes!

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) July 8, 2014

While that cryptic tweet took a team of linguistic professors to solve, it perfectly captures Battleborn in its true form; an overly complicated cartoon shooter, struggling for a single identity. Is it an FPS? Well, sort of. It’s from a first-person perspective but not every character has a gun. Are there multi-modes for competitive e-sports? Yes, but there are only three game modes, and all feel pretty similar. Choice? If by that you mean simply choosing a character at the start of a mission, then yes. Luckily though, the characters and settings salvage what could have been a long slog of a campaign.

If you’ve played any previous Borderlands title, then the story and setting will be instantly recognisable, so much so that it could be set in the next solar-system along. The Battleborn are a team of badass’ from different backgrounds, races and planets, all with one goal: To stop evil forces destroying the last star in the galaxy. Think The Expendables in a Pixar-style universe, and you’ve got the idea; a menacing yet hilarious villain and characters of every build, and personality you could imagine. While the story falls short and is pretty forgettable, it is the characters who keep you coming back thanks to the brilliant voice-acting and some stellar dialogue. Particular highlights including a spider-mech who wants to be known as Geoff and an over enthusiastic walking tank with the mannerisms of a dumb puppy.

The roster is as rich and diverse as you could imagine. Spanning from Rath, a futuristic Samurai or Marquis, a well-spoken robot butler, to Miko, who is basically a mushroom, or my favourite, Isic, a sarcastic skull inside a mechanical body. As you progress through the campaign, you can pick who you want to play as at the start of each mission, as you play, you level up your command rank - your overall rank - and your character level which allows for individual upgrades and loadout changes. While it's great to get a feel for a large chunk of the roster, ultimately you are going to settle for one or maybe two characters, focussing on leveling them up only, rather than spreading the XP across numerous heroes. It becomes clear though, that there will be stand out heroes used by the majority, and some that will likely be pushed aside. For instance, I felt there was little benefit using Boldur, an angry, axe wielding dwarf who fights his way through enemies using his fists, particularly when up against enemies using projectiles.

This is where augments come into use. As your slay enemies, you’ll gain XP for your augment level. As this increases, you are given what is essentially a mini-upgrade to your character, picking one of two each time the level increases. Do you want to increase damage or increase defence? No recoil for less damage or worse recoil for more? You can mould your character in a way that suits you best. These augmentations only last as long as a multiplayer match or a single story mission though, resetting as you start another. This means that if you weren't happy with a decision you made earlier, you can change your decisions, or try out a different blend, refining the changes that suit you best, encouraging you to try out different characters.

The campaign follows the relatively shallow narrative as your Battleborn travel the galaxy, recruiting new members and shutting down enemy advances. Essentially, what this boils down to is the type of gameplay seen in Tom Clancy's The Division, Destiny, or the previously mentioned Borderlands. Fight your way through waves of enemies, numbers flying out of there bodies as their health depletes, advance, take on another wave, but this time with a mini-boss for good measure. Do the same again a few more times and you’ll eventually be faced with the final boss, a battle which can, at times, take an extremely long time. It’s a dull gameplay loop, and one that not even the charm of Battleborn’s heroes can save. The same can be said for the maps themselves, the bright colours of jungles, or the obscure labyrinths of laboratories are restricted as you are forced down a single path, despite looking huge with lots to hide, there is very little to get excited about when you get off the beaten path aside from health, armour and limited perks such as movement speed.

And then there’s multiplayer. As it stands, Battleborn currently has only three game modes in multiplayer; Capture, Incursion and Meltdown, all variations on standard 5v5 FPS multiplayer modes. Capture sees the teams battle over three points on the map, Incursion has teams trying to take out the opposing side’s mech and Meltdown relies on teams guiding their minions through the map stopping the opposition’s, nothing original there. Each match starts as if it’s the latest episode of Battleborn: The Animated Series a 2D opening credit sequence, followed by the introduction of each hero; player X as Oscar Mike etc, make each mission or multiplayer match feel unique, but it’s nothing more than a gimmick, just giving you a bit of a background of the guy who is about to give you hell for the next 30-minutes.

While Gearbox never confirmed nor denied Battleborn was a MOBA, it was a word that kept creeping up on me during my excursion online. Five differently skilled heroes taking on five opposing ones, a map filled with NPCs used as cannon fodder and lengthy match times consisting of battles within the war. It’s perhaps a dirty word in the console market, MOBA, but there’s no denying that Battleborn’s multiplayer is anything else, resembling League of Legends much more so than Call of Duty. It takes a lot more skill to wipe out an opposition hero then it does to kill your rivals in CoD or Battlefield, having to perfectly time special attacks, and standard ones while evading those headed in your direction. Something your standard FPS player will have to take time getting used to.

It’s hard to tell whether Battleborn has the legs to keep people interested. On the surface it’s a cartoon shooter with wacky characters, brilliantly executed in various ways. But once you pull off the wrapper and get deep into the bowels of it, Battleborn is extremely obscure. An FPS here, a melee combat game there, a shaking of MOBA and a pinch of RPG, but none of it seems to work. Ultimately it feels like Battleborn was testing the water for a change in the Borderlands series, though all that it revealed was that Borderlands 3 can’t come soon enough. A short campaign and even less to get excited about online means not even the hilarious voice acting can keep Battleborn afloat, not without some huge gameplay updates.