Battleborn Preview

The weekend before last came with a downpour of games to try out with Doom, Battleborn and Overwatch having betas. Playing a few matches of Doom’s multiplayer beta ended up being more than enough for me which allowed me to give Battleborn a shot. As you may or may not be aware, Gearbox’s Battleborn is part of an emerging genre that mixes FPS and MOBA. In the same category we can include Blizzard’s Overwatch and Hi-Rez’s free-to-play title, Paladins. I will hopefully cover those in different articles, but for the time being let’s focus on Battleborn.

The Open Beta featured two multiplayer modes, each with its own map, two single-player missions and a handful of characters, some available, some earnable through unlocks. Meltdown, revolved around getting minions to be devoured by a trash compactor suffering from a god complex while Incursion, had teams pushing minion lanes until they reached two enemy sentry; the minions would aid in taking down shields while the players would hack away at health bars. The biggest difference between the two was felt in the sense that Incursion always seemed to last way longer than Meltdown which often gave me the impression that maybe the teams are missing something when playing the mode. Apart from that, each mode had its own map and Incursion also featured recruitable NPCs akin to neutral spawns in Heroes of the Storm.Some elevation was present, resulting in certain multi-level combat encounters. On top of that, players could destroy crystal spawns to gain crystals, a resource which could be used for two things: building turrets and accelerators to defend the base and aid friendlies or activating the gear your character wears. Neglecting the crystals could easily give the enemy team an advantage.

When it comes to gear, Battleborn does not take the classic MOBA approach. Gear is not instrumental to your character’s success, but rather gives a small boost to some of your capabilities. While it does come in various rarities, the rare gear gives not only larger bonuses but also one or more drawbacks. You may wear a sword that gives you more attack speed, but chances are it will decrease the rate at which shields regenerate, to give one example. Gear can be earned by completing challenges or by using ingame currency to purchase it from the market. This means, most of it will be random, which is why it representing only a slight altering to your character’s capabilities is a good. You can take a loadout which holds up to three items with you into matches while having the possibility of setting up 4 different loadouts at one time.

Character levels are divided into in-match levels and overtime experience. The latter, gives you extra skins (actually, different color schemes would be more accurate), taunts and mutations which add to the pool of traits you can select in-game. Every time you level up in a match you can choose one of two traits (or three once you play enough matches with one character). These alter what certain abilities do or simply enhance them. Characters have three passive abilities and three active abilities out of which one is considered an ultimate ability and usually has a larger cooldown. During my playtime, I’ve had limited access to the third branch of traits, as I prioritized trying out as many characters as I could. The roster is very colorful, both literally and figuratively. There’s a character for every imaginable role, which means that you’ll need to get a feel of each in order to learn to play them properly. My first time playing Rath, I expected to be able to walk up to people and chop them up right away. This wasn’t the case, as the character’s frailty requires you to think when and how to enter the fray.

The gunplay felt satisfying, each character’s weapon having a distinct feeling behind it. The game departs from Borderlands’ cell-shaded graphical style, while still reminding of Gearbox’s previous work. Needless to say, it has an aesthetic of its own which gives the game identity. There’s also a character that’s a penguin riding a mech at one point. There are traces of Borderlands-esque humor (the trash compactor threatening to destroy everything unless it’s fed should have given that away) and characters have a lore section which details their backgrounds. Unlocking characters is done either through leveling up your account or by completing certain challenges, which means that you can focus on getting certain heroes faster than others.

Battleborn is not a multiplayer-only game. There were two campaign missions available in the beta. These missions are fully-designed linear levels that have you completing a series of objectives which more often than not boil down to killing every enemy in sight. While I’d like to keep some faith in this mode, the campaign, or at least the missions available in the beta were visibly made for co-op play. I’ve played Borderlands in single player and had a blast with all three games, yet Battleborn’s missions became really tedious really quick. I’d wager it is because of the limited amount of things your character can do, which is made more obvious in single player than in multiplayer due to the lack of dynamism. It is definitely commendable that they did not resume to ripping chunks from maps and feeding them to us as a single player campaign, and, the inclusion of what seems to be an actual story could provide further incentive for playing these missions.

Battleborn did make me raise an eyebrow. I do, however, have my doubts in regards to how fun the single player campaign will be. There’s also the issue of the two multiplayer modes, which are fun, but which after a while became a little too familiar. Maybe it’s because I expect FPS games to have more than just one or two maps, a thing which doesn’t happen with MOBAs, or maybe it’s something else, but the fact of the matter is that without at least two more modes to spice things up, things could potentially get too repetitive after a while for a portion of gamers.  It will be interesting to see how far this emergent genre will go and also which of the three games will be able to last the longest.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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