On the 3rd May the long awaited new title from the makers of Borderlands arrived, but you would have been hard pushed to find a review on release day, as the multiplayer servers weren’t up for reviewers prior to launch, leading to a delay in reviews, even by the big players IGN and Gamespot. Those who were eagerly awaiting this release, will already have snapped up their copies regardless, but for those, like me, who are on the fence and waiting for reviews to gauge whether it’s worth picking up, is there anything to go on?
Well, I’ve been trawling the Steam reviews and the in-progress reviews to find out all I can. First, it’s agreed across players and reviewers alike that this is no Overwatch twin and that the two games despite sharing the team based shooter genre couldn’t be much more different, so if you were only planning to get one or the other, then this rather muddies the water. The humour and art style is said to be very similar to the Borderlands games, so if you enjoyed those then the general consensus is that you’ll enjoy this one. However, further than this, opinions are more divided. While a lot of gamers are praising the range and style of gameplay mechanics across the 25 available hero characters, there are also many who feel the game quickly feels repetitive due to a lack of maps/ areas and ease of falling into a fixed rotation of primary attack, secondary attack and active abilities, which once established rarely needs to be altered, particularly when facing AI enemies in solo or co-op modes.
Opinions seem to be divided on this game at the moment. A lot of the professional reviewers seem to be rather conservative in their enthusiasm and waiting on more experience of the multi-player versus elements before giving a final verdict. On balance, the reviews by players on steam are, on the whole, much more positive. The main complaints are some possible performance issues with AMD GPUs but praise its deep and diverse gameplay and the quality of the graphics.
So will I be picking up a copy? Money is tight for me this month and my enthusiasm for this game is tempered by the fact that while I didn’t dislike Borderlands 2, I did get bored halfway through and never reached the end, so I question if I would get my money’s worth out of this title. For the moment, I’ll remain on the fence and wait for the reviews to hit before I take a chance on this title. I’ll admit this isn’t the most helpful verdict to reach, but you can be sure that if I do decide to take the plunge that I’ll be posting a full review.
