Borderlands 3 is the fourth game in the Borderlands series, and as such it should be excellent, benefiting from the combined experience of a team that's made and polished essentially the exact same game four times. In one respect, the visuals, it is. But in every other, notably story and gameplay, Borderlands 3 either makes no improvements on its predecessors or outright fails to live up to them.

The story of Borderlands 3 is easily summarized: a brand-new group of Vault Hunters need to stop some evil twins from ending the universe. Unfortunately, this never happens. The player characters never, ever interact with any story character in any cutscene throughout the entire game. While you're playing you can talk to story characters and take missions from them, but the second anything of import happens the Vault Hunters disappear and the story characters walk in, leaving the player feeling like they aren't even involved in the story.

As for that story... It doesn't know what it is. The antagonists (refered to as the Twins from here on out) are played completely straight, even though elements of their backstory are totally ridiculous. The Twins want to literally destroy the entire universe. Why? Their dad wasn't a very good dad. Not abusive, not awful, just 5/10, mediocre. So they want to destroy all life. In previous Borderlands games this would be played as comedy; a motivation this ridiculous would have jokes made about it. Here, in Borderlands 3? This stupidity is treated as deadly serious.

The game goes for explaining the Twins' legion of obsessed followers. No real thought is given to justifying a limitless horde willing to destroy the universe - where they live - so the answer is handwaved. The Twins are popular streamers and their viewers are willing to die for them. End of story. Again, this wouldn't be a problem in a comedy, but this is treated just as seriously as their motivation.

Further compounding the frustrating aspects of the story is the fact that our protagonists (but not player characters; remember, we never see the player) are all idiots. Not fun idiots, comedic idiots, but frustratingly stupid characters. Our main protagonist, Lilith, can teleport at will, move anywhere. She knows the only thing she has to do is not be within touching distance of the Twins or they will sap her powers. What does she do? You guessed it.

But don't worry. Everyone learned from Lilith, right? No one would do that twice. Enter Maya, a character that can place a bubble around someone and prevent them from acting. She would definitely use that power to subdue one of the Twins rather than, say, put him in a headlock, right? Wrong.

And so on and so forth. The entire plot feels either frustrating or boring, and is interspersed with as many annoying characters as the writers could possibly think of (which is a lot). Sadly, most of the Vault Hunters the player can play as are also boring, but special mention needs to go to Zane. Zane is impeccably voiced by Cian Barry and is, without exaggeration, the only reason I finished the game. His dialogue is hilarious and is so much better written than anything else in Borderlands 3 that I suspect Cian Barry may have improvised it.

But enough about story. You aren't playing a looter shooter for the story! You're here for the gameplay.

Oops, there's no gameplay.

Or rather, gameplay is this: walk into an area. An NPC yells some dialogue at you and enemies spawn. Kill them until they stop spawning, move to the next area, and repeat. Every zone, all game, no variations, no mechanics. Sure, the guns feel good to shoot, which is nice. There are absurd variations and a huge number of unique guns with unique effects, but all you're doing all game is killing in an arena and moving on. You never have to be reactive to anything, never have to dodge, never have to think. You shoot and aim at the weakspot (if you feel like it). Bosses are exactly same, but usually have one ability that puts a red circle on the ground you need to not stand in. Or you can just stand in it, who cares? Every character has regeneration or leech, so you'll be fine.

But what if you want a challenge? What if you want to fight enemies at 10,000% strength? Well good news: someone at Gearbox played enough Diablo 3 to steal the Torment system directly from that game and call it Mayhem.

Mayhem works by scaling both enemies and item drops up as you increase Mayhem level, starting at 200% at Mayhem 1 and increasing to 10,000% at Mayhem 10. In Diablo 3, the game they stole this from, you need to slowly climb in difficulty because your character's damage is all scaled off weapon damage; you need to farm new items with each increase in order to not die. Borderlands 3 scales your shooting damage off weapon damage, but not your Vault Hunter's abilities; these scale with Mayhem level. This means that, for Vault Hunters with pets or long-duration abilities, you can immediately set the game to Mayhem 10 and watch your abilities kill everything with little difficulty.

There's also nothing stopping any Vault Hunter from setting the game to Mayhem 10 and simply running around looking for chests full of guns, hoping to find something good and trying not to die. The entire system is so easily trivialized that I have no idea why it exists; it basically just makes everything a bullet sponge. (And it makes every enemy scream all the time. Things have large enough health bars that ailments you apply to them last a long time, and every mob screams its head off when it has certain ailments. There is no enemy noise adjustment. Get used to it, you'll be hearing it a lot.)

Mayhem is not the only system that seems to exist for no reason. Every character can melee, but it's never used mechanically. Every character can slam by jumping off a high place and crouching, but slam is literally only used once all game: when it's introduced. There is a post-max-level skill that allows you to slam from a normal jump, making it possible to use it in combat, but that skill takes 100 post-max-level levels. Absurd! You'll never, ever use it, but it exists and could have been used mechanically to add variety and challenge. The same goes for running, sliding, and crouching. All exist, all unused.

There are arena sections in the game, but they don't feel different from normal gameplay because normal gameplay is just arenas already. There is a battle royale mode which is fun once or twice, but it disables your Vault Hunter's abilities, so every run just feels like a generic character shooting, and it has to be balanced around a naked character with no skills and bad guns, so it's pathetically easy.

All told, this lack of synergy between systems and the shallowness of each of them is, sadly, what defines Borderlands 3. The best way to summarize the game is simply that it's just messy. It feels like it was designed by 5 or 6 different teams who never spoke to each other, and only met for the first time to combine their seperate projects into one huge, jumbled mess of a game.

Oh, and the DLC sucked.