Borderlands 3: Guns, Love and Tentacles Review

"A Tentacle Kind of Love"

Campaign

April 5, 2020 at 6:34pm
By Jason Stettner

This is the second DLC expansion for Borderlands 3 which follows the joyous celebration of Sir Alistair Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs tying the knot. That’s right, it’s a marriage done the Borderlands way which usually involves some wacky sort of wild action. This time the series embraces its inner Cthulhu for some eerie scenes and weird situations involving tentacles.

It also contains the most poorly designed, and generally worst boss in the history of the franchise. That is the “Empowered Scholar” which was an absolute nightmare. The developers behind this creation should be ashamed, it was ridiculous. I had to drop the difficulty, change up my weapons and I was still getting slaughtered.

I don’t see how a regular player could handle that without help of some sort. On top of that awkward sponge amount of health it has, there’s awful parkour segments within it and no checkpoints. Everything else was fine on normal, but damn that was one terrible segment.

That aside, it was a fairly typical sort of expansion for the series. You’ll go around blasting enemies in a more linear set of environments while enjoying small bits of the narrative. I thought they could have taken the whole wedding thing further considering how ripe that material would be for either jokes or even a deeper emotional connection but it’s very light here.

They could have also leaned into the hunting aspect since both are somewhat known for that, but they don’t. The story just wasn’t as strong as it could have been, same with the general environments. The creepy towns and tentacle filled areas were really cool, but super linear. There are of course some side quests, hunts and other typical things you would expect from this game.

The Conclusion

This is a generally solid expansion to the game, but one they could have taken further as it does seem to just be an alright playthrough. The material here could have definitely provided a more interesting, or dynamic adventure. They nailed the creep aesthetic, from the wretched town layout to the super weird tentacle filled locations.

The eerie looking people with problems, and the funny toilets for special loot. The narrative and linear style of the pack just don’t provide a very interesting sort of situation. I felt there was a lot more they could have done with this one, as it feels like just more mindless blasting.

I was hoping for something new, or different and this setting lent itself to that so much. It almost feels like wasted potential quite honestly. That all aside, the Empowered Scholar sucks a lot. That was a horribly designed boss sequence, I’ve never had issues with a boss in the series until I faced this thing.

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Borderlands 3: Guns, Love and Tentacles Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by 2k Games

Rating Overall: 6.8