Battleborn Review

Battleborn looks fabulous, and has a great set of characters, but with a dull story, few maps and average gunplay, it doesn’t quite love up to my expectations.

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Battleporn?

Apart from stepping in on Duke Nukem Forever, Gearbox has been pretty focused on the Borderlands series for the last few years. This time they’re trying to hybridise a MOBA into their signature FPS style, but does it work out? Find out below!

Story:

I’ve never really been into the whole MOBA thing. I like to experience lots of different games every year, and they’ve always looked like a huge time sink, and a great place to get abused for being new and not knowing the systems. But BattleBorn looked like a more accessible intro, and a place where I could perhaps get an early advantage due to transferable shooter skills. It’s also got a story mode, which I assumed would basically be a glorified tutorial and introduction to the various characters, levelling, and skills. It’s not.

After a pretty basic tutorial prologue mission, which has a few unskippable movies around it to try and introduce you to the universe and the reason for the game existing, the story missions are then unlocked as one of the game modes. There’s no real order to them, and therefore, unsurprisingly, the story makes no sense whatsoever. It also, therefore, doesn’t act as a tutorial or practice arena, leaving you to figure out how to play as new characters in a live environment, no doubt to the chagrin of your team. I expect it will also mean that long-term, many of the characters that take a while to unlock remain unused as a result of not having any kind of sandbox environment.

Gameplay:

BattleBorn describes itself as a hybridised, ‘hobby-grade’ (whatever that means) FPS & MOBA. It’s not quite true, because in making itself more accessible for console audiences and the first-person perspective, I’d argue it takes the themes of MOBAs and plugs them into a straight-up multiplayer shooter. So, you can expect waves of creeps; levelling systems which only apply to the match you’re playing, and a number of cool-down based abilities to manage.

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What you don’t really have is the necessity to manage lanes, whilst the three game modes that have shipped at launch don’t really map to the traditional push-and-pull MOBA match which ends with one team destroying the other’s static base. Instead, you’ll have to either escort minions to specific points on the map (almost like a competitive tower defence), protect a large, moving sentry bot, or go destroying a number of power generators, whilst protecting your own. Whichever mode you choose, there’s a disappointing two maps per game type; hopefully any future locations will be free so as to not split the player base.

The variety and spice comes, therefore, from the cast of 25 heroes, from which each team will choose 5. There’s a variety of basic classes which will be familiar to MOBA players, like tanks, buffers, healers and rogues. Each has a unique set of stats, abilities, and levelling pattern which you get to choose from each time you get enough XP in a match. You also have an overall ‘command level’, which is used for whole game unlocks, such as new characters.

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Whilst the characters all look cool, and the abilities sound great on paper, the game is balanced to make death seem like a significant penalty. In my opinion, everyone has too much health, and the re-spawn times are too long, because it makes the gunplay average, at best. Clearly, you need to work together to bring down enemies, but the amount of effort it takes, with multiple reloads, uses of abilities etc. to eliminate a single character makes your arsenal feel grossly underpowered at all times.

Good

  • Good cast of characters
  • Excellent presentation

Bad

  • Lengthy matchmaking
  • Dull story missions
  • Very few maps
7.3

Good

Story - 6.5
Graphics - 9
Sound - 8
Gameplay - 7
Value - 7
Editor - Reviewer GamerKnights

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