Battleborn PC Review: Melting Pot

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Let's put aside all the baggage that has built up around Battleborn over the past couple years and focus on the one thing that matters: It's not a terrible shooter in short bursts. I'd even venture to say that the actual gameplay can be pretty fun.

That more than anything tells me that Gearbox had its heart in the right place with Battleborn. At a glance, it's not much more than an ill-fitting collection of borrowed characters and references - a Smash Bros. style tribute bereft of the reverence for the material it's saluting. But dig a little deeper and you'll find an interesting shooter, if a somewhat forgettable one.

Like fellow Gearbox shooter Borderlands, Battleborn is at base a multiplayer shooter with a cartoony aesthetic and over-the-top sense of humor (like, really over-the-top). Unlike Borderlands, though, Battleborn is under no illusion of being an RPG. Instead, it's one part co-op shooter and one part competitive shooter, with Call of Duty-style progression and unlocks mixed in for good measure.

Its strength and weakness is its expansive roster - 25 heroes with differing strengths, weaknesses, and team roles. It includes a penguin in a mech suit, a Sith Lord-like warrior, and a power armor-wearing space marine named "Oscar Mike," in case the reference wasn't on the nose enough for you. Each character starts off with two abilities, with a third unlocking once they hit a high enough level. In addition, each level brings with it a mini-tech tree where you can choose buffs for your character, weapon, or abilities, allowing you to customize them on the fly.

Battleborn's large roster is a strength in that it offers many different styles of play, which keeps it from becoming too repetitive. If you get bored with Oscar Mike, there's always Rath and his swords, or one of the support characters. The large roster also encourages you to get a regular group of friends together and build a team with established roles, giving it some legs as either a competitive or cooperative team game.

On the flipside, Battleborn's roster invites comparisons to Team Fortress 2 and the currently unreleased Overwatch; and with all due respect to Gearbox, it can't hold a candle to either of them. Team Fortress 2 is iconic, and Blizzard has some of the best artists in the business. When it's not outright stealing some designs (looking at you, Montana), Battleborn's collection of heroes is only striking in how generic it is, with even characters like Marquis the Gentleman Robot coming off more as cliche than anything else.

But once the action gets going, most of the objections about its generic art and grating humor fall away. At its best, Battleborn is a fast, chaotic shooter in which 30 minutes feel like 10 - always a good sign in a game like this. Its core multiplayer design is ambitious but messy, combining MOBA concepts like minion escorts, mercenaries, and tower destruction with elements like turrent construction. The arenas are small and limited to ten players, ensuring that you will never go too long without engaging the enemy.

It's actually pretty fun in the moment, but I nevertheless have a couple concerns out of the gate. First, I don't think in-game leveling works particularly well in a shooter, which is much more skill-based than your average MOBA. The helpless feeling that comes with being outleveled is even more acute in a shooter. Second, I don't know that it's great for random matches. Playing online, it seems like one team usually has an idea of what they're supposed to be doing while the other is totally clueless. Role synergy can likewise be hard to come by. This may be a symptom of it being early days yet for Battleborn, but it makes me wonder if the team-based control point mode will end up winning out in the end. One more thing: the three available multiplayer modes only have two maps apiece right now. Ouch.

As for the campaign, it's decent as long as you bring along some friends. It's not impossible to play alone - I just rolled the third level with Marquis - but the huge number of enemies and bullet sponge bosses make it a bit of a drag. The missions themselves are huge, some of them lasting an hour or more, many of them with multiple bosses. You only get a finite number of lives with which to complete each mission, and it is quite possible to fail a mission objective, but they don't feel hard so much as time-consuming. They are clearly meant to be played with a group of friends, Destiny-style. Solo players might be happier focusing on the competitive multiplayer, or passing on Battleborn entirely.

In the meantime, I'm still plugging my way through the campaign and periodically dipping into the multiplayer for some quick matches. I don't have a mode preference yet, but I've been leaning toward Capture, which is a fairly traditional control point mode. I have a lot of characters still to unlock - many of them won't become available until I either complete a particular objective or reach a high overall rank - so that's something to shoot for.

My overall thoughts remain incomplete, though my current impression is a resounding, "It's fun in short bursts, but I don't know if it has any staying power." It doesn't deserve the hate that it's received, but neither has it earned a resounding recommendation. I guess we'll see if that changes.

Part 2

I really wanted to give Battleborn a chance. No, seriously. But everytime I've made myself sit down with it, I've come to the same conclusion: it's got too many problems right now.

So I'll start with the good - I actually think the single-player missions are fun to play in a group. It's got that touch of Borderlands to it, which unfortunately means that the humor is still there but the loot and customization isn't, but co-op (mostly) cures all ills. Even playing with a random group of people online, it's fun scything through waves of enemies and multiple bosses.

The missions play a bit like MMORPG raids, with each level breaking down into a series of challenges such as defending a pillar against waves of enemies or activating an object to open a door. It sounds mundane - and in some ways it kind of is - but the unimaginative levels are compensated for by the sheer weight of enemies to kill. The bosses, too, are old-school in their own way, with most of them having some weak point you have to shoot to expose them to concentrated fire. It's all rote and boring when playing alone; but in a group, it's a fun enough way to pass the time and unlock some characters. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to a group looking for their next co-op game, though - Battleborn's levels are neither numerous nor all that challenging.

With that said, the eight levels do have both a hardcore mode and advanced difficulty, which may prove enticing to some. If I'm being honest, though, I don't think that Battleborn's solo campaign is really intended to be its main selling point - it feels a little too perfunctory for that. Still, it was the part of Battleborn that I ended up enjoying the most.

I guess that probably says something about how I feel about the multiplayer, which is ostensibly what Battleborn is all about. As I've said before, Battleborn will inevitably be compared to Overwatch because they both have that slick animated look and rapidfire humor; but from a gameplay standpoint, they could not be more different. Of the two, Battleborn is much more deliberate and tactical, putting a huge premium on team composition no matter which of the three modes you play. Characters level up and have to choose which abilities and stats to buff on the fly, changing their role in the party as they do. As with the MOBA genre, if one player doesn't understand their role in their party, it's pretty tough to win.

That's kind of where the similarities to League of Legends and its ilk end, though. MOBAs, as you may know, are defined by phases: there's laning, there's the big push, and there's the endgame. Good players can take advantage of mistakes or be very aggressive and maybe speed up the process, but otherwise pretty much every match stays within that specific framework. Battleborn, by contrast, has no such framework, which makes its MOBA matches feel chaotic and disorganized. Without lanes, matches inevitably boil down to a heated battle around the chokepoint where the minions pass through, which soon becomes tedious. Good, well-organized teams will understand when to push through that chokepoint and when to play defense, and the tactics are bolstered by a side corridor and NPC Thrall Mercenaries who can enhance your attack; but in random groups, such strategy tend to get lost in the shuffle. Because Battleborn is a shooter, random players tend to want to go off and shoot things, which almost always ends poorly. Moreso than any MOBA, Battleborn is just not that fun to play with random people.

That feeling is exacerbated by a few other issues. Battleborn initially locks its roster, making only a handful of the 25 heroes available at the outset. On the face of it, this gives players something to work toward so they'll keep playing, but there's a reason that both Smash Bros. and Street Fighter have abandoned that particular model - it just feels too constrictive. Unlocking the roster feels like busy work, and it ultimately just keeps you from the characters that you actually want to play.

Beyond that, Battleborn's tiny selection of maps is a real problem. When a battle begins, everyone gets to vote on which map they want, and they inevitably pick the same level every single time. There are only two maps per mode to begin with, and none of them stand out as being particularly interesting or noteworthy in their design, but playing the exact same map in each mode gets tiresome in a hurry. The lack of maps makes it feel like 2K left far too much content to post-launch patches and DLC.

Mostly, Battleborn feels constrained by its initial vision of being a MOBA FPS. It's a real drag, for instance, to not be able to change characters in the middle of the map. True, you can't do that in League of Legends either; but it would have been nice to be able to do that in, say, Capture Mode given how a bad team comp can completely screw you. On that note, Battleborn hides a lot of the character info on the roster screen; and even if you have a decent grasp of the characters, it can be tough to tell off the bat what each character is good for. The fact that you can't switch around and experiment in the non-MOBA modes makes it that much more frustrating when you get stuck in a bad team comp, and it makes it less likely that you're going to take a risk and experiment with a character that you're not familiar with.

So with that, I find Battleborn pretty tough to recommend in its current state. I think there's a glimmer of promise to it - it can be legitimately fun when two well-rounded teams who actually communite with one another go at it - but its lack of maps and the frustration of playing with random people makes it a turnoff for those who don't really want to throw themselves into it. As with so many other games, it may be much better down the road. Right now, though, the negatives outweigh the positives.