A dark portal opens, and out of it rises a spindly nightmare. Inky purple skin, tentacles leaking black ichor. It roars, I think, though that might just be my imagination. "What the hell is that?" my character's mission control exclaims.
He's alone in his confusion. My team and I have dealt with this thing before; another mission ends with the same boss. It's a Varelsi Conservator. It floods the screen with a horde of minions, and within moments, my four teammates and I are battering it with power, fireworks, and concussive blasts of energy and gunpowder everywhere, all at once. I can barely see my enemies, but I don't really have to; I just point my gun somewhere and hold down the trigger.
Battleborn, the latest from Borderlands developer Gearbox, is a paradox. Available now on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, it's one of the busiest games I've ever played, stuffed with characters and jokes and noise and chaos—and yet, the more I play, the more it feels like there's nothing going on at all. For all its theatricality, it lacks the payoff. It's like being at a rave with the speakers turned off.
All the Sound…Your first experience with Battleborn is likely to be confusing. After a short tutorial level and an intro cinematic that's really just a Deltron 3030 music video, you're thrown into the thick of it. The game is built around multiplayer: there are story levels to play co-operatively, and three types of sprawling competitive modes. The first foray into either is a conflagration of explosions and special abilities, minions and NPC soldiers squabbling with player-controlled heroes of all shapes, sizes, and ability sets—it's bedlam on every inch of the screen.
You and your fellow players are the titular battleborn, fighting in a desperate attempt to protect the last vestiges of life in a universe where but a single star remains. This all sounds much more serious than it actually is practice; Battleborn is a happy-go-lucky game, space opera as a Saturday morning cartoon. The one relevant part of the premise is that players have 25 characters to unlock and play as, each with his or her own style of play and a detailed backstory you probably don't care about.
Yet, the game doesn't do an effective job of introducing these divergent characters or what they're capable of. Instead: noise. Particle effects and character abilities are so expressive as to make it difficult to see what you're doing, and the game's first-person perspective prevents you from ever getting a full sense of your character's relation to the world around them. Picture anywhere from five to ten characters, all wreaking Technicolor havoc.
