Reviews
[Review] More of the Same is Just About Good Enough For ‘Borderlands 3’
Playing Borderlands 3 is a little like studying the American Civil War.
Let me explain.
When I was in high school, one of my classmates trotted out the old Confederate canard that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” during a history class. Our teacher challenged him. There was a natural arc, he said, to studying the Civil War. At first, when you knew almost nothing, you knew, at least, that the Civil War was about slavery. Then, when you began to understand a little more, you started to see the complexities of the conflict, the economic factors at play, the nobility, the sense of duty, the desire for self-determination. And then, when you had studied the Civil War in great depth, you understood, once again, that, yep, it was about slavery.
The third mainline entry in Gearbox Software’s loot-shooter series has inspired a similar bell curve since its initial reveal in March. The gang was all there in that reveal trailer. Lilith, Brick, Claptrap and even Rhys from Telltale’s spin-off, Tales from the Borderlands. The advertising once again, trumpeted the inclusion of “over a billion guns.” The trailer revealed four new Vault Hunters, all of whom neatly slotted into the roles the first game established a decade ago. As so many critics, fans and casual observers noted back in March, it looked like more Borderlands.
But, when I got hands-on with the game back in May, I was impressed by the differences. A story that took players beyond the lawless desert planet, Pandora (or its moon)! A space station hub reminiscent of Eva’s Hammer from Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus! A new pair of baddies poised to potentially provide interesting commentary on the dangers of the influence “influencers” wield! That, plus a ton of quality-of-life changes, had me excited to see the nuances of the new direction Gearbox was taking with the series’ biggest entry yet.
But, now, with 40 hours of Borderlands 3 under my belt, I can tell you that that initial gut reaction was correct. It is more Borderlands. But, for the most part, it’s also better Borderlands.
So much of what Borderlands has always done well has reached its pinnacle here. The series’ comic book aesthetic has never looked better. In fact, on PC, with the settings cranked as high as my Predator Helios 300 could handle, this game looks jaw-droppingly good. The lines are finally crisp enough. The art is finally detailed enough. This is the first game in the series that you might actually mistake for a comic book panel (and a great photo mode ensures that you’ll be able to capture the best moments for posterity, from a more cinematic third-person perspective).
Even more importantly, the combat in Borderlands 3 is the best the series has ever delivered. In part, this is due to Gearbox’s excellent decision to allow players to replace their grenade slot with a second action ability. So, as Zane the Operative, I could summon a drone and sic it on an enemy, then hide behind the safety of an energy shield, laying down suppressive fire all the while. Or, I could create a double of myself, call up the drone, and stay out of combat entirely. Each of these abilities has its own skill tree and, as the game progressed, I unlocked new skills that tweaked each ability in interesting ways. Eventually, switching places with my body double would create an explosion AND regenerate my shield. Borderlands 3 is the most impressively deep RPG that Gearbox has created yet, and the combat soars as a result of the increased specificity.
The improved art plays a role here, too: the guns look fantastic, especially in action. They rattle as they fire off a barrage of bullets, smoke as they overheat, shine with an impeccable detail that simply wasn’t possible in 2012. The number of gun manufacturers this time around has expanded to nine, and each produces weapons with interesting strengths and weaknesses. As always, you’ll need to equip weapons and shields with certain perks to give you an edge in the tougher battles.
And there are plenty of tough battles. Borderlands 3’s boss fights vacillate wildly between the best and most creative in the series, and the most frustratingly badly designed — fights that, on solo, will leave you with no recourse but to overlevel them and brute force your way through. The best fights are thrilling dances that task you with dealing consistent damage to the heavy-hitters while managing a variety of smaller enemies. You’ll run, gun, use your abilities, stop very quickly to open crates and retrieve health and ammo. All of this feels more frenetic and smooth than ever because Gearbox has added the ability to mantle, slide and slam down on enemies heads from mid-air. These fights are frantic, but strategic, requiring split-second decision-making, that still manages to feel like important decision-making.
However, those boss battles are often hamstrung by design that feels downright hostile to players attempting to hunt Vaults by themselves. The series’ “Fight For Your Life” mechanic — which gives you a small window of time to revive yourself by getting a kill while down — is at it’s best in this game, with a movement speed that’s been helpfully increased since Borderlands 2 (and will make it even harder to return to the original’s frozen-in-place “Last Stand”). But, certain boss battles — specifically, the optional fight against the electric-charged scumbag Killavolt and a very-not-optional late game battle — hit you with unavoidable AOE attacks and fail to reliably provide the enemies you need to kill to bring you back from the brink.
These design issues are exacerbated by bugs. When I searched for help on the Killavolt fight, I found that some players seemed to encounter the version of the battle that I did — one with an unavoidable, lengthy AOE and scant enemies — while others had no such problem. Two guides I checked made no mention of these major issues, and message board threads were divided on whether these issues are even in the game. During a different battle, a boss who can follow the player out of the primary arena, disappeared from his chamber, and I had to search the surrounding area until he turned up. More than once I had to abandon a mission because the waypoint disappeared, or because an object I needed to collect vanished from the world. This wasn’t game-breaking — whenever I returned later the missions were working fine — but it was annoying.
The writing in this game will likely grate on you, as well, unless you have a very specific sense of humor or play with the sound off. Borderlands 3’s script has been widely panned by critics (and on Twitter) but the team behind the writing had the unenviable task of maintaining Borderlands’ identity in an era that feels, and in many ways is, utterly different from 2012. Some critics, and I’m among them, have outgrown a taste for humor that punches down. Others have circled the wagons around this kind of offensive humor with a ferocity that suggests they believe that their right to make fun of marginalized communities without any consequences is enshrined in the Constitution. Borderlands 3 has scrubbed slurs from its script. You won’t encounter a “Bullymong” and “Midgets” have been rebranded as “Tinks” (so named, according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, because they tinker, constructing turrets to do their fighting for them on the battlefield).
That’s good! I’m glad they took those slurs out! But, now that genuinely offensive humor is no longer risk-lessly financially viable, the writing team behind Borderlands 3 has opted to double down on dick and poop jokes. The goal here seems to be to retain the semblance of edge while removing any chance of actually offending anyone. The result is a game that is unceasingly puerile, still offensive but in the way that a 12-year-old’s loud burp at the dinner table might offend their parents.
Humor is hard to pull off, and that’s doubly true in a game as massive as this one. But, Borderlands’ penchant to turn every character into a one-note gag has never been more clear than it is here. It doesn’t help that Rhys and Vaughn, two characters making the jump to the big time after starring in Tales from the Borderlands, feel smaller this time around. In Telltale’s hands, they felt like fully realized characters. Here, they’re just jokes like everyone else. Same goes for the new villains, Tyreen and Troy Calypso, who are more ideologically interesting than Handsome Jack, but less three-dimensional.
However, Borderlands 3 borrowed something else from Tales: that game’s planet-hopping wanderlust. While previous Borderlands games were mostly confined to one dusty/moon-dusty/snow-dusty desert planet, Tales was a hero’s journey, sending its characters on a trip around the stars. Borderlands 3 has likewise broadened its scope, beaming players down to a mountain monastery, a neon cityscape, a swampy jungle and more. Each feels legitimately distinct and while they sometimes feel like glorified corridors, they mostly succeed. The Louisiana-inspired Eden-6 is a particularly memorable, and even evocative, open world sandbox.
Well, kind of. Borderlands 3 still is basically an open world game — you’re free to ignore the plot, explore the world and tackle side quests at your leisure — but continues to divide its world into levels. When the first game launched in 2009 you could chalk this segmentation up to technical limitations, but in 2019 it feels bizarre for the galaxy to be cordoned off by pale blue barriers and load screens. It’s one of many ways, some good and some bad, that Borderlands refuses to change. You still spend a third of your time opening crates, comparing stats and managing an unwieldy inventory. You’ll put up with an onslaught of meme-y humor. Despite recent innovations in loot-shooter enemy design in games like The Division 2, you’ll still fight an army of bullet sponges.
Most of what this game has to offer hasn’t changed since 2012. It’s more Borderlands. Decide how you feel about that.
Borderlands 3 review code for PC provided by the publisher
Borderlands 3 is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC
Anyone who’s ever been a full-time caregiver, either professionally or voluntarily, knows that a strange intimacy emerges in even the coldest, most emotionally detached circumstances. There’s an agreed-upon mutual vulnerability, an acceptance that you’re going to know each other not just intimately but in a mundane way, and it breeds some strange reactions.
Night Nurse, the feature debut from writer/director Georgia Bernstein (best known as a producer on things like All Jacked Up and Full of Worms), thrives in this strangeness, and it’s at its best when it embraces it wholly and without judgement. Despite some narrative stumbles, particularly in the third act, this is an emotionally precise, compelling psychological thriller with layers to spare.
Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) has just taken a job as a nurse at a luxury retirement community, the kind where each patient has a private villa and receives 24-hour care from a pair of nurses, one for daytime and one for night. As the newbie of the group, Eleni gets night nurse duty and ends up paired with Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a charming, strangely alluring man battling dementia. With input from Douglas’s day shift nurse, Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), Eleni quickly becomes fascinated by the man, who might be a high-functioning old guy with memory issues or might just be a master con artist.
Soon, the latter impression takes hold, as Douglas ropes Eleni into his ongoing game of phone scamming other members of the community for cash. The danger of these scams, and the risk Eleni feels when she gets on the phone to pretend to be a distressed granddaughter in need of money, is intoxicating, but the longer the game goes on, the more she has to wonder: Who’s taking care of who, and what happens when the relationship starts to fray?
Bernstein approaches this narrative with an intense intimacy, a closeness to the characters and their contained little world of Douglas’s villa that hums with menace and uncertainty. From an opening credits sequence that feels worthy of Brian De Palma to a breathtaking moment when Eleni first discovers what Douglas is really up to, Bernstein leaves us no distance from these characters, and that’s by design. The closeness, helped along by inventive and painterly cinematography from Lidia Nikonova, builds a universe within Douglas’s villa, and probes Eleni’s persistent loneliness while she gets closer and closer to her charge and his schemes.
While it does function as a psychological thriller, with all the requisite darkness, tension, and destructive behavior, Night Nurse works best when it’s patient, something Bernstein and editor Alex Jacobs underscore at every opportunity. The film refuses to spoon feed its audience the details of each character’s motives and judgement, leaving us instead with the often impulsive, often intuitive decisions of Eleni, Douglas, and Mona as they move through this strange space they’ve created for themselves.
It’s a filmmaking method that leans heavily on the performances to communicate emotional subtleties, and while Bernstein’s craft is on-point, it’s the work of Paksoy and McKenzie that makes the movie. Together they’re a duo we can’t look away from, their interactions sometimes erotically charged, sometimes tender in a way that recalls a father-daughter bond, but always laced with something darker. Paksoy can make entire scenes of silence into compelling drama, and McKenzie is a relentless bomb of charm and danger.
As all of these elements swirl together, Night Nurse becomes a meditation on the strangeness of the bond between a caregiver and a patient, and how far each will go to hold up the other. Eleni enters Douglas’s world and finds a home there not because she’s innately suited to criminal enterprise, but because she finds something thrilling and genuinely satisfying in meeting the old man’s needs, even if they are sometimes nefarious. Douglas, for his part, takes satisfaction in manipulating those around him, but he also relishes the tenderness that comes from Eleni and Mona’s devotion. These elements dance around each other so delicately that it genuinely feels like just about anything could happen next, and for most of its runtime Night Nurse milks that feeling for all it’s worth.
The only place it falters, unfortunately, is in the final act, when characters move into place for a conclusion that feels only partially earned. One of the dangers of building a film so firmly on top of intuition, intimacy, and patience is what happens when you let all of that fall away in service of plotting, and Night Nurse never quite makes that transition. Rough-edged though it is, though, the ending can’t take away from the solid filmmaking foundation that built this movie, and by the third act that foundation is so firm that the film still mostly holds together.
There are stumbles in Night Nurse, as there are in basically any directorial debut, but those do little to diminish the promise at work in this movie. Georgia Bernstein is a star in the making on the indie scene, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Night Nurse is in theaters July 10.
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