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Battleborn
PC (Steam)
The Last Server
3/5 stars
“Battleborn” is a space-filler title developed by Gearbox and published by 2K, both companies better known for their hand in the insanely popular Loot & Shoot ‘Borderlands’ franchise. It seems that everyone wants to get in on the PvP e-sports scene in recent years, and the temptation was just too much for Gearbox/2K, who put a guaranteed moneymaker (i.e., “Borderlands 3”) on the back burner to instead spent time and money working on yet another team-based PvP Arena Shooter featuring a stable of quirky-looking characters… because that’s apparently how one does a ‘Hero Shooter.’
Unfortunately for 2K and Gearbox, “Battleborn” released near simultaneously with Blizzard’s “Overwatch,” and for $20 more. Likewise, other so-called Hero Shooters and Hero Shooter MOBAs, like “Paladins,” “SMITE,” and “Paragon” flooded into the market at nearly the same time, even while the primogenitor of the Hero Shooter, “Team Fortress 2,” still enjoyed great success from its Hat-based economy. As a result, like a delicate blossom in an over-crowded flowerbed filled with weeds, “Battleborn” has struggled to gain a foothold, and is widely considered a ‘failure’ as an online PvP e-sport. 2K has even officially announced that after the Fall 2017 update (which will add ‘Borderlands’-themed character skins), the game will receive no more official support.
It’s sad that “Battleborn” ended up on the losing side of the battle of the PvP e-sports, as it actually offers something that no other content-free PvP e-sport wannabe does: ACTUAL CONTENT! Yes, “Battleborn” has a single-player or team-cooperative Story mode, which is really the only reason the MJ Crew played it. You’ll never see a review for “Overwatch” or “Paladins” or “Lawbreakers” or “Gigantic” or any of the other slew of samey Hero Shooter MOBAs out of us because they simply don’t offer us what we want. “Battleborn” does… but due to its nature, it offers it in a rather mediocre way.
Presentation
There’s nothing wrong with “Battleborn’s” looks. It’s a typical modern Unreal Engine game that looks like a typical modern Unreal Engine game. The polygons are smooth, the textures are high-quality, and the framerates are solid: Nothing to complain about with the basics. “Battleborn” features a huge stable of 25 basic characters (with an extra 5 DLC characters) that all smack of Gearbox’s signature quirkiness. This eclectic cast of heroes ranges from a giant slab of man-meat with a tiny coconut head and a huge gatling gun, to a female elf with saggy boobs and a longbow, to a walking talking mushroom, to a baby penguin in a giant mech-suit. No matter what kind of character you’re after, there’s one that will fit your style…
…Unless you’re really, really shallow. I’ve seen people claim that “Overwatch” is drinking “Battleborn’s” milkshake so brazenly due to the quality of Blizzard’s… ‘waifus.’ Yes, apparently the SJW influence at Gearbox lead them to make their female characters too unattractive (except for the tech-rapier-wielding Phoebe, who is smokin’), which scared away all of the people who only play “Overwatch” because of Tracer’s butt. Personally, I don’t buy this argument, but based on the imbalance of erotic fan-art based on these two surprisingly different games, I can see how the uneducated would believe so.
Stylistically, though, “Battleborn” actually reminds me more of a different game that isn’t “Overwatch” and has nothing to do with FPSes… the game in question being the Indie side-scrolling MOBA-thing, “Awesomenauts.” Both “Awesomenauts” and “Battleborn” share an obsession with styling themselves after a 1980s Saturday-morning cartoon, right down to the choices of music and the not-so-hot quality of the cartoon-style cutscenes. Yup, “Battleborn” foregoes using the game engine for its cutscenes and instead uses a flat, traditional animation style that, while it definitely evokes the ‘80s vibe Gearbox was aiming for, kind of clashes with the rest of the game’s visuals.
I don’t particularly care for the metal-and-rock soundtrack in “Battleborn,” but I also can’t say that it irritated me. In fact, I never noticed that there was music at all except during the (unskippable) intros that play before each match and during the beginning and ending cinematics. The voiceacting in “Battleborn” features a wide range of videogame VAs, and of course includes the obnoxious voice of Tiny Tina (from “Borderlands 2”) for one of the characters.
Technical issues are where “Battleborn” loses significant points in my book. See, instead of offering the same type of drop-in/drop-out cooperative gameplay found in the ‘Borderlands’ games, with one player playing host to the others in a Peer2Peer matchmaking system, everything about “Battleborn” is tied to 2K’s servers. Due to the game’s lack of success in the PvP market, it isn’t highly populated by players fragging each other, so 2K has dialed back the servers. While we never found the game to be particularly laggy or unresponsive, we did get annoyed by the fact that there are compulsory timers before every match that allow the servers to allocate resources, as well as noticeable pauses between menu transitions. In essence, “Battleborn” is an online-only game tied to servers that act as DRM even when playing in a private group of Steam friends (and “Battleborn” does just use Steam’s friend list) or solo. When 2K gets tired of paying for server time for 50 people sometime next year, they will shoot the last hamster running in its wheel, and “Battleborn” will be gone forever.
Story
Unlike every other Hero Shooter and/or MOBA out there competing to be the next billion dollar e-sport (all of which should go crawl up each other’s asses and die), “Battleborn” offers a story campaign. THIS IS THE ONLY REASON THE MJ CREW DEIGNED TO PLAY IT!
Unfortunately, the “Battleborn” campaign is incredibly short, with a meager 9 missions to play through, including a compulsory Prologue that forces every player to go through it solo using Melka, an angsty female Eldrid (read: Elf). Other than the Prologue and Episode 8, the other 7 Episodes all feel like they could be done in any order (but they can’t, as completing each in sequence unlocks the next), and feature an eclectic crew of allies-of-convenience fighting against the scourge of light-devouring Lovecraftian aliens known as the Varelsi during the end of the universe. This conglomerate group, known collectively as the titular Battleborn, must prevent the Varelsi from destroying the Last Star in existence. These allies come from 5 different factions: The Last Light Consortium (LLC) consists of robots and tech fanatics who are incredibly wealthy. The Eldrid consists of Elves and Dwarves and other mythical creatures, and are decidedly low-tech. The Rogues are a bunch of generally crazy mutants and aliens. The United Peacekeeping Republics are basically the game world’s generic Human-centric Federation. The Jennerit Imperium is a more authoritarian, less Human version of the UPR (think of the Klingon Empire vs. the Federation in ‘Star Trek’), and also provide the game’s main villain in the form of a turncoat named Rendain.
Most of these missions don’t feel very relevant to protecting the Last Star, usually involving some minor deal, like stopping a rogue AI, closing a portal that the Varelsi are using to mass their forces, or protecting a library. Most of these missions last about 40 minutes, with the Prologue clocking in noticeably shorter and Episode 1 clocking in noticeably longer. Thus the single-player/coop story portion of “Battleborn” only lasts about 10 hours, which isn’t great for a game that launched at $60, has a $30 season pass, and has since gone Free2Play-ish, providing free access to the PvP portion and a rotating handful of characters, but still requiring players who want the Story Mode to shell out $30 for the “Full Game Upgrade.” Of course, that season pass, which is now only available for purchase with in-game Freemium currency, also provides a handful (five) of new missions called Operations, which we were, unfortunately, not able/willing to play due to the ridiculous Freemium price of the season pass.
While, ultimately, the story in “Battleborn” is fairly straight-forward and weak, it does positively ooze Gearbox’s strange and somewhat dark sense of humor, as found in the ‘Borderlands’ franchises. Each of the huge cast of characters also has a significant amount of back-story. Unfortunately, this back-story takes the form of unlockables, which require a player to use each character in battle an ungodly amount of times, while also trying to perform certain arbitrary, Achievement/Trophy-like tasks. Replaying the same 9 story missions over and over and over and over and over for character Lore unlocks stops being fun fairly quickly, so anyone who doesn’t want to touch PvP at all (like the MJ Crew) will probably only unlock all the Lores for 2-3 characters as most.
Gameplay
“Battleborn” is basically what happens when you put “Awesomenauts” and “Borderlands 2” in a blender together. The game is a fairly straight-forward FPS (though there are plenty of melee characters that don’t shoot at all) with linear mission paths and a series of mandatory sub-objectives on the way to the final objective/boss fight. Where “Battleborn” differs from the ‘Borderlands’ franchise and takes strong, overwhelming influence from “Awesomenauts” is in the fact that all character progress is temporary. Every mission, characters start at level 1. By killing enemies, picking up level-up power-ups, and completing objectives, a character can gain power all the way up to level 10. Every mission allows the player(s) to hit the level cap by the end (and all experience and loot pickups are shared with the whole team). Each level provides a stat bump and also allows the player to pick one of a pair of perks from their development helix that add special features to their character for the duration of the mission. By ranking-up characters (by using them a LOT), players can add mutations to their portfolio, providing a third perk option at certain level-ups.
Loot is also handled very differently from ‘Borderlands.’ Instead of hunting after randomized guns and shields, characters simply come with a specific setup that never changes. Loot is relegated to a loadout of three accessories that provide passive bonuses… but must be activated during each mission in order to receive these bonuses. Loot, as well as in-mission buildables, like turrets and drones, cost Shards to activate, which drop from enemies and can be found scattered around the missions like candy.
Each character in the huge roster not only comes with their own specific set of weapons and defenses, but comes with three special skills as well. The first two skills are available from the start of each mission, while the third uber skill unlocks automatically partway through the level-up helix. Characters come in a wide variety of roles, from healers to pushers to DPS, and as a team-based game, team composition is incredibly important, as well as each member of the team finding a character that meshes with their personal predilections. I found myself drawn to, and easily falling into the role of, the dedicated sniper with the Hobo-Eradicating Robot Butler/Titanium Dandy, Marquis, while I found most of the dedicated support characters to be borderline unplayable. After an entire evening of failures on Episode 1 the first time we played as a group, the MJ Crew stuck to what seemed to be a winning combination (Rath on melee, Marquis on sniping, Orendi on DPS, and Gault on… missing things at close range with his shotgun), so we didn’t really get to experience the full breadth of the character roster as a group, but some solo play (which is much easier, as, like every Gearbox game, the enemy scaling for coop is a bit too much) revealed to me a nicely balanced group of characters that each require some practice and dedication to master… something that has been present in Fighting games since the beginning.
Overall
Ultimately, “Battleborn” is a decent amount of fun when playing the story mode with a group of friends. Unfortunately, the always-online nature/DRM of the game, and the aim at becoming the next big e-sport sabotaged what could have otherwise been an excellent pick-up-and-play, grind-free take on Gearbox’s signature style of First-Person Shooting. “Battleborn’s” Story Mode is also too short for its own good, and the removal of retail season passes (which might drop to a comparable price to the meager $10 we paid for our retail copies of the basic game) in favor of a Free2Play Freemium currency means that the ‘rest’ of the story – the Operations – are unreasonably priced. With the game scheduled to stop receiving updates within the next few weeks, I can’t advise anyone to pick it up unless they plan to race against the destruction of the Last Server much like the Battleborn must race against the destruction of the Last Star.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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