Battleborn Review

PC / FPS / Throwback

The Basics

Battleborn is FPS with heroes and some MOBA elements thrown in to mix things up. Players select one of the pre-made characters, each with their own skills and attacks, and get busy living, or get busy dying. There are single player, cooperative matches, or competitive matches to blast your way through, and players can gain experience and level their character's abilities and buffs, plus earn randomized gear and goodies.

Story & Flow 

Battleborn is meant to be a multiplayer game and the story reflects that all the way. While there is a bit of a "story", it's a pretty subpar attempt to make players care about the characters that are unfortunately not very developed, personality-wise. Some of the humorous moments hit, but others fall somewhat flat; it's a pretty mixed bag.

The online play tends to be on the less active side of things, with most player action being in a wave based cooperative PvE mode. The game lost support from gearbox pretty early on due to lackluster sales, so there are (and were) not many expectations left in that category. The gameplay itself is solid enough, but doesn't do a whole lot to innovate on the genre. Aside from this, the “always online” feature of Battleborn can sometimes cause the story mode to lag unbearably which is a huge turnoff for a single player campaign, which was a big disappointment.

 The upgrade feature is one of the biggest in both single player and online play, you play as a somewhat static character that can choose between two upgrade trees and enhance their abilities on the fly, making every fight a pretty new experience and providing excellent variety in the otherwise simplistic genre of multiplayer battle arenas.

Graphics: The graphics of Battleborn are a bit niche, it's a gorgeous game but in a very cartoon like style that not everyone is going to love. Coming from the creators of Borderlands, a more fun cartoon style was to be expected. Battleborn delivered on expectations and executed surprisingly well, vibrant colors and not too many distracting elements to the style make the graphics a solid 8/10

Pricing and popularity: As of 2018 the game has next to no online players comparatively with other games of it's kind. But it's a very solidly designed game save for a few missteps in its functionality. At a pre-owned price hovering $10-15 at max it might be worth picking up just to try out (even the single player mode) at no loss if the concept interests you.


Summary

Overall, Battleborn is a fairly well designed game, arguably released at the wrong time, with a dwindling player base, but the game still holds its own as a concept. I'd recommend it to fans of the genre simply for the experience and maybe the hope that some of the better designed features of the game make it into a newer game.


Comments:
Your comment has been saved!!!
The Captcha element applies the Captcha validation, which uses reCaptcha's anti-bot service to reduce spam submissions.

2019-09-27 02:45:57... - gg

ggg


2019-06-13 21:25:13... - Eren

adwaw


Battleborn