Welcome back to another EXP Share post. This month, I asked the community to write a post about a new game that they have never played before and talk about the experience. I originally wanted to do Resident Evil VII for this post since it is a game that I would never play, but wanted to give it a chance since RE8 looks interesting. I could not get past the opening of the game. I am weird when it comes to horror games. I hate being in control, but I will pop some popcorn and watch others play. I don’t like playing games that keep my anxiety on high levels all the time. I play games to take my mind off my anxiety and feel good at the end. Since then I have watched a let’s play of the entire game, so one day I may go back and play it since I know where all the jump scare BS will happen.

So instead, I will commit this EXP Share post to Borderlands 3. Prior to this, I have only played Borderlands 2 a few years back, but never finished it due to losing my save data. I remember liking Borderlands 2 with its absurd gameplay of finding guns to find better guns to annihilate crazy maniacs and the like. What made me enjoy it were the characters and writing of the story. You can get me to laugh and enjoy dumb humor, and Borderlands is packed full of that. I was hoping for more of that silly goofiness in this game as well. What I got was something familiar, enjoyable, off-putting, and annoying all in my two and a half hours of playtime.

For full context, I played the PC version of this game through Steam. I don’t know if different versions have different problems, but wanted you to know that my experiences came from this version.

I was smart enough to decide that I should play this game with other people. I teamed up with Kat and my good friend Eric to explore this new wasteland with. This is when my first issue came up. Launching the game for the first time froze my game. After having to force it to shut down, it booted up normally with no problem, but then the game was confident that my computer was not connected to the internet….which it was. Third time was the charm however and I was able to get into a group with Kat and Eric. After realizing that we had to go into the settings to switch voice chat from “Push to Talk” to open comms (no game should ever default to Push to Talk), we could finally start the game. In most circumstances, I would have probably given up and reinstalled Borderlands 2 since that gave us zero issues in the past.

From there it was time to select our characters. I went with the big boy Beastmaster since I liked the idea of summoning monsters to do some dirty work for me. Shout out to my first companion, Mr. Chew. Once we got into the game, everything felt smooth from there with each of us facing a technical glitch here and there. Kat had framerate issues, but we think it is because her computer is due for an upgrade in the near future. Me on the other hand had the most petty things happen to me. For starters, Kat and Eric’s names kept disappearing on screen, so I had to rely on the minimap a bunch of times to help me find them. I thought it was a setting issue, but Mr. Chew’s name was always above him, so I think the game just hated me. Another issue I had was that the notice to go into my skills menu would not go away no matter how much I pressed or held the Tab button. Again, little issues that shouldn’t amount to much, but got annoying when the game would fix itself and then break again. Eric was the lucky on among us who had the least issues with the game (if he did he didn’t really tell us).

All this makes it sound like we had a bad time playing, but that wasn’t the case. Once we could actually got past the technical issues, we had fun blasting our way through the two areas that we got to. My favorite weapon that I found so far was a shotgun with a stupid blast range that sent enemies flying if I was close enough to them. Eric was able to summon a D.VA mech with his Gunner class and mow down enemies before Kat and I could do anything. Kat was having a good time despite slowing down at certain points. I think our commodore helped us get through the frustrating points and enjoy ourselves loot and shoot gameplay to follow.

Even though we were having fun, I felt like this game is not as good as the second game was. For starters, I didn’t find Claptrap as annoying in the second game as he is in this one. It feels like he just never shuts up. I know that is his character, but our patience with him started to drain real fast. The worst is when you have to find him a new antenna and he gives you hints on new moves like the slide and power drop. It might have been our fault for splitting up to tackle the tasks individually, but when one of use were at this tutorial moment, he would just keep repeating the same dialogue over and over until the person did what was needed. Again, this could have been our fault for splitting up, but it was nevertheless annoying to hear him over and over again. Another thing that feels meh is the story and setting. It feels…like the same game, but worse? You meet up with Lilith and underpants dude (who’s name I don’t remember and too lazy to look up), but their dialogue and the hub world feels bland compared to Borderlands 2. It could be that we never made it to the actual hub world, but nothing felt interesting or exciting about each area. That might all change later in the game, but after two and a half hours, it was a struggle to continue that night. I want to continue playing the game to see if my frustrated mind was clouding my judgement that night, but right now, it feels like another game in the series that doesn’t do anything too new to make me excited to play.

Thanks for reading,

DanamesX