The Borderlands series has always been a double-edged sword for me. On the one hand, you’ve got an addictive and satisfying shooter set in a vibrant world full of satisfying weapons and interesting enemies. On the other hand, you’ve got a tired, never-ending stream of gags that wears me out just thinking about them, straining your ability to headshot enemies as they constantly reference dated memes in a flailing attempt at wackiness. It’s a series that tries so, so hard to be wacky, and it can be painful.
IGN is doing a bit of a preview month for Borderlands 3, considering it’s the first major release of the fall 2019 calendar and there’s really not a whole lot else going on right now. Yesterday, the site published a look at five new guns in the series that caught my eye in the way that they promise to be outlandish and awesome. It’s an interesting video that you should take a look at, mostly because it’s a distillation of the series writ large. Cool ideas thrown in there with weird gags and a few classic game mechanics wrapped up in a wacky skin. Let’s go through the weapons in the video:
The Burger Cannon: This is billed as a rocket launcher, but I’m going to go ahead and call it a grenade launcher because it sure doesn’t look like those burgers have any sort of self-propulsion. Regardless, the Burger Cannon is just sort of a straightforward grenade launcher where the grenades are reskinned as exploding burgers with a corrosive effect stemming from, I don’t know, ketchup. It’s the sort of gag that you can expect to wear off after using the thing for approximately five seconds, after which it’s just a normal weapon.
Freeman: This? This is cool. It’s a laser-guided missile that you can control after you fire it by pointing the laser where you want it to go. It’s not the sort of thing that’s been totally absent from first-person shooters over the years, but what we can see in the video looks smooth and satisfying, perfect for nailing weak spots with a high-damage weapon, likely making it an excellent boss killer. There’s no gag here, but that’s alright. I’m looking forward to using this one.
Gun Gun: It’s a gun that shoots guns, littering the ground with items for you and your teammates to pick up. So in essence, it’s just sort of a treasure chest with a gun-themed reskin that you control in first-person. So it’s a gag, and not a whole lot more.
Ten Gallon: And here’s my favorite of the bunch. It’s a submachine gun with a fairly unique perk: instead of reloading, you throw your gun out into the world and get a brand new one in your hands, leaving the gun to fight on its own as a drone that hovers nearby. It’s not like we’ve never seen drones in games before, but I love the way that they incorporate into the fiction by having you throw your spent gun out there.
I sort of wish you could litter the field with floating weapons, but it looks like you can only have one at a time: reloading a second time throws out an extra magazine to keep your first gun firing.
Butt Plug: This one is sort of peak Gearbox. It’s a pistol with a knife on the end that comes with a pretty standard perk that you can find in any number of games across any number of genres. It does increased sneak attack damage when you approach an enemy from behind: again, a useful perk with some gameplay implications but in a very standard way. The gag here is that it’s called a butt plug, and that’s about it.
