Hey, have you ever heard of a bright and colorful, First-Person POV, Hero Shooter, multiplayer team battle videogame that launched in 2016 on consoles and PC? It had a sort of animated aesthetic with an eclectic crew of zany and memorable characters, expansive lore mostly hidden through audio clips and external websites, and was promoted through animation? It offered hours of content and fun for those dedicated enough to give it their all? Well, have you heard of it?
*insert heavy sigh*
No, I’m not talking about Overwatch.
I’m talking about the oft-forgotten, ill-fated, and criminally-underappreciated Battleborn.
Look, I’m going to cut right to the chase. I’m not so deluded to think that Battleborn was actually a better game than Overwatch. Blizzard Entertainment struck lightning in a bottle with Overwatch, crafting one of the most incredible multiplayer gaming experiences of all time. There’s a reason it became such a huge phenomenon worldwide, leading to a mass of fun comics and Pixar-quality animated shorts, years of active support, and even having its first major tournament broadcast on national television through ESPN!
(To say that my father, a regular ESPN watcher, was thoroughly confused trying to follow the action is an understatement.)
Overwatch was a cultural sensation, and it was the beacon all other would-be Hero Shooters and multiplayer FPS games aimed for, for years! Yes, it’s crashed and burned nowadays, but it does Overwatch a disservice to pretend it wasn’t once amazing. So, yes, Overwatch is clearly the better game than Battleborn.
But, what’s important to note is that Overwatch being better doesn’t make Battleborn worthless. After all, if you threatened the life of an Xbox gamer, I’m sure they’d confess that old-school Halo was better than Gears of War, but that doesn’t mean Gears of War is bad! Not at all! There’s allowed to be multiple types of the same thing in the same entertainment medium, because everyone has different tastes! That’s why we have Marvel and DC, Star Wars and Star Trek, Mario and Sonic!
Sadly, back in 2016, it seems as if most gamers didn’t get the memo. When it became apparent through marketing and previews that Overwatch was shaping up to be the better game than Battleborn, gamers turned to (at best) ignoring poor Battleborn and (at worst) outright hate and vitriol. Battleborn almost immediately tanked upon arrival, and it’s a miracle that it had enough of a passionate fanbase to last as long as it did.
Gearbox Software, the developers of Battleborn, certainly didn’t do themselves any favors, to be sure. They chose to release the game in the same month as Overwatch despite all logic arguing otherwise. They marketed their game as a direct competitor to Overwatch, creating an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality that never needed to exist considering Battleborn’s myriad differences from Overwatch. The head developers also acted like jerks on social media.
I’ll even confess to buying into the hate-train, though not quite as aggressively. I happily purchased Overwatch, and turned my nose up at Battleborn like it was some lesser product. Millions of gamers acted the exact same as me, contributing to the gargantuan commercial failure of the game. And, while I and others would come around to Battleborn after it received a few years of cool new updates and features (and a hard-to-resist 5$ price tag at GameStop), it was too late.
On January 25th, 2021, Battleborn and all of its servers shut down. The game is now completely and utterly dead, with no way to ever play it again.
And that, without question, is a huge shame.
In the rest of this article, I’ll cover a sort of review/ode to Battleborn, the incredible shooter that you can no longer play. Apologies in advance if this only makes you want to play it more. I assure those of you who haven’t, you did miss out.
So, what’s Battleborn even about? Well, in the far-distant reaches of space centuries in the future, an invasive alien parasitic species known as the Varelsi have forced almost all sentient life to a single star system, Solus. These remaining people form various factions and groups that don’t particularly get along, but are forced into cooperation when the Jennerit Imperium faction’s leader, Rendain, went rogue and partnered with the Varelsi to destroy Solus and wipe out all remaining light in the universe.
There are five primary factions in Battleborn, and a grand total of 30 playable characters. There are the nature-attuned Eldrid, the elite army of the Jennerit Imperium, the war-profiteering Last Light Consortium, the stoic and aptly-named Peacekeepers, and the unruly and unpredictable Rogues. Across the single player and multiplayer modes, players take control of these characters and explore and battle across tons of unique biomes and planets in the Solus star system, taking down the Varelsi and Rendain along the way.
Before I get into the cast (which is probably this game’s strongest suit), I should mention the biggest thing that sets it apart from the FPS crowd, which is the gameplay. I touched on this above when I mentioned how poorly this game was marketed as an Overwatch competitor, when it’s unique qualities really should have been praised. See, Battleborn isn’t your typical team-versus-team Hero Shooter, but it is, in fact, a marriage of traditional FPS and the MOBA genre (multiplayer online battle arena). So, think games like League of Legends and Smite.
This, as you might expect, takes the shape of a game that is similar to tons of games you’ve played before, but isn’t quite like any one game. You play from a first-person perspective, run around and shoot enemies, use abilities just like a normal Hero Shooter, and take down the enemy team. But, you also level up with experience points while playing and choose your upgrades and perks on the fly, purchase items for your loadout when you die, and escort minions to the enemy base to destroy their tower, all MOBA standards.
It’s hard to truly describe how liberating this level of customizability for each match is. Truly, you could pick the same character for three games in a row, and build them completely different each time. The perks, upgrades, and items you can choose for every round lead to wholly distinct options that massively enhance the fun factor and replayability of Battleborn. If you play Overwatch, your Widowmaker isn’t going to be different from round to round. Nothing will change during the round. In Battleborn, the battlefield is constantly shifting, keeping you on your toes.
As an additional way to assist in illustrating this point, it may be helpful to point out that Battleborn was created by the same developers responsible for Borderlands. So many classic Borderlands game mechanics and design philosophy can be felt throughout Battleborn (and a healthy heaping of shared musical stylings and voice actors). The freedom to make each character your own unique variant of them according to your playstyle preferences is something Borderlands prides itself on, and I love seeing that reflected in Battleborn.
30 characters can be a lot to choose from at the start of each game, though. Let’s take a look at some of my favorites, shall we?
Phoebe (Elizabeth Audelia Hemsworth IV, if you’re so inclined) was my original main when I first started Battleborn. She teleports around the battlefield with a bevy of telepathically controlled fencing sabres she uses to slice her foes and launch at distant targets. She’s got an officious posh accent and a haught demeanor, but that doesn’t stop her from having fun while fighting, as she views battling like a dance (often humming along with each slice). Her darting movements and almost childishly silly insults that she hurls at foes quickly endeared me to her.
Orendi (as discussed in an older article from about two years ago) is the best character in the entire game. Especially once the player-versus-player multiplayer matches turned into player-versus-bots (to account for the rapidly dwindling player base). There’s not a single soul that can survive against a late-game Orendi, who can kit herself out with items and upgrades that allow her to cast her devastating Shadowfire Pillar ability no less than six times in the span of five seconds. I quickly found it almost impossible to stop myself from picking Orendi for each match simply because of how excruciatingly destructive she was to the enemy forces.
Oscar Mike is, as is common in Hero Shooter games, your typical Call of Duty character. He’s a soldier who runs and guns like the best of them, blasting with his assault rifle and lobbing grenades. It’s simple, but it’s very effective, and his ease of play is the primary reason why he’s the tutorial-mandated character. Plus, he’s an affectionate parody of Call of Duty characters and the gamers who play that series, spouting off ridiculous quips and dude-bro rhetoric. He reminds me a lot of Axton from Borderlands 2.
There are plenty of other characters I enjoyed playing as in Battleborn, such as the stealthy assassin Deande, the rambunctious rebel Mellka, or the mystical water healer Alani, but I’d be writing about my love of this game all day if I didn’t cut myself off!
As alluded to above, Battleborn (unlike Overwatch, and another huge point in Battleborn’s favor) includes a substantial amount of single player content alongside its multiplayer offerings. Yes, you’ve got your typical player-versus-player/player-versus-bot shenanigans, like deathmatch, king-of-hill, and the standard MOBA mode. But you’ve also got a silly big-head-mode and a rockets-only map. Single-player is fit to bursting too, containing a full campaign with explorable maps and secret loot to find, and a series of repeatable mini-missions with their own self-contained stories that also provide unique narration and dialogue depending on who you play through the mission has, encouraging much replayability.
Befitting its unique gameplay and mechanics, Battleborn has a presentation style all its own, reflected in the visuals and audio. The art style is a mix of the cell-shaded comic book look that the Borderlands series has mastered, but with a healthy dose of anime and Saturday-morning-cartoon on top. That, plus the crazy sci-fi underpinnings make for a great look. The user interface is sleek too. The soundtrack is pretty top notch, especially the main theme, and the voice actors all do a great job embodying this world and its zany cast.
(Here’s that main theme, if you wanted to give it a listen: LINK)
Battleborn even had a mobile tie-in game to promote it! Granted, the game isn’t super great, but considering that (somehow) it is still active to this day, it’s literally the only way to engage with this world and these characters in game-form anymore. Sadly, from all that I’ve heard so far, there are no plans to make a sequel, or to try and re-upload content separate from the now-defunct servers, like an offline-only version of the campaign or something.
Battleborn wasn’t perfect. Poor marketing and leadership aside, the game launched in a weird state of only having a few maps for each game mode (three, to be specific). And, in the years following launch, that number never increased, which really hurt the variety and fun a big map pool can bring. There were also far too many microtransactions for things such as rare skins and in-game EXP boosters, and the game made a somewhat messy transition to Free-to-Play in its final years as a last-ditch effort to drum up support. Also, battles could get almost overwhelmingly hectic at times, and it isn’t surprising that hesitant new players bounced off after a match or two and never realized what they were missing.
Still, all of this certainly didn’t mean that Battleborn deserved such an ignoble death. It didn’t deserve to vanish into the void, with only myself, my best friend, and a few other hundred people (at most) logged in during its final hours.
In summary…Battleborn is (or was) really good, and I’m consistently upset that this game will never again be playable, and will exist only in my memories and in videos online.
8.5/10
But hey, that’s just my opinion!
The Contrarian Corner 