Game-A-Week Episode 38: Battleborn

Originally written on 1/24/2021 

  Game-A-Week Episode 38: Battleborn 

 Battleborn was a MOBA seen from a first person perspective. Did I say was? Oh yeah, at the time of this writing, the game is still available to play but when Game-a-week will be going live, it will be long gone. I am writing this Game-a-week while I'm still in the middle of covering Dark Souls III. The game actually shut down its servers on January 25th 2021. I took a week off from Dark Souls in order to write this Game-a-week before that date. Orginally, the plan was to cover Battleborn AFTER Dark Souls but Dark Souls ended up taking a lot longer than a month. The date as of this writing is January 24th 2021. I'm waiting until Dark Souls is finished before posting this. If you are reading this now, that means Dark souls has been finished and I have posted this. Isn't time travel amazing? (This is future Christian. Dark Souls has not been finished. Its just that the length of time this has gone unposted has become ridiculous) Anyway, the reason I wanted to try this game at all is because before it released I had a friend in college who was REALLY looking forward to the game. So much so that its all he'd ever talk about for like a month. Loved that guy. My only other memory of it was Lazy Peon saying Overwatch was better than it. So I said "You can't really compare them because they aren't even in the same genre" And he responded with "They're both games seen from the first person with stylized graphics, of course you can" Except you can't because one is a hero-based first person shooter and the other is a MOBA. That's comparing apples to oranges. Fucking idiot. Let's just compare every game that has an similar art style while we're at it. HEY GUYS, DID YOU KNOW THAT POKEMON IS BETTER THAN PERSONA? THEY'RE BOTH RPGS WITH ANIME STYLE GRAPHICS SO YOU CAN COMPARE THEM! See how dumb that sounds? Heck, Pokemon and Persona are at least in the same genre despite being wildly different so they're actually closer than Overwatch and Battleborn are. Lazy Peon is a fucking idiot. Anyway. So I coudln't find a place to download the game. Turns out, it was taken off of Steam ahead of its shut down. So I turned to Reddit for the answer The most upvoted comment? "Yep, it's removed from store. Only ones who already have it in their library can install/play it. Super Elite Private Club. Sorry, no pass for you." Another, more helpful user hooked me up with a direct link to the steam download, allowing me to play the game. When I thanked the nice man, the same douchebag from before chimed in "Welp, you've got an invite, welcome to the club then! Apocalypse is set on Monday 25st. Enjoy your time!" What an asshole! The tutorial was pretty bad. It told you how to play the game but not HOW to play it. It would say stuff like "Shards are your currency. They don't carry over between games to make sure to spend it!" But it wouldn't tell you HOW to spend it. Like what button do I press? How do I spend them and what does it get me? "The enemy captured a thrall camp!" Okay cool, what does that mean? What's a thrall camp and what does it do? Why do I want to capture them? These are questions the tutorial never answers. it tells you stuff but it doesn't tell you anything ACTUALLY important. I usually never mind tutorials but by god, this was a waste of time. Probably the worst tutorial I've ever experienced After that, I dived into the story prolougue mission which opens up with an awesome Samurai Jack-esque animated cutscene and a killer track which sounds like its sung by Del the Funky Homosapien

The mission actually taught me more about the game than the actual tutorial. Like how shards are used to build traps in lanes or erect automated turrets and additional minions instead of purchasing gear. Thralls? Yeah, they're extra powerful minions that you can recruit into your minion wave if you capture their camp by defeating them. The game operates on the Borderlands' style of humor which at its best is legitimately funny and at its worst makes jokes that stopped being funny after I entered college and instead make me roll my eyes. High school me would have loved it though. Back when the word "badass" was actually funny to me and didn't make me cringe. I thouroughly enjoyed this mission, not only did it teach me how to play the game better than the actual tutorial did but it was also a lot of fun to boot. Unfortunately, there are two versions of the game. The free to play version and the full version. The free to play version only lets you play the first story mission but gives to full access to PvP. So that's where my time with the game's single player ended. Out of curioisty I looked it up, and it seems 50% of the game's fully animated cutscenes are only in the first mission anyway.

There's the entire story mode for y'all. Doubly unfortunate, that was also where my experience with the game ended as I coudln't get match going because there are less players that play this game than there are players required to play a match. So that's it. That's Battleborn. Was this a good game? I saw potential in its single player but as for the PVP? We'll never know. I give Battleborn a ???/10. I loved what I DID play of it but what I played was so little, I can't say I actually played the game for reals. I can't believe I'm saying this but the honest game trailer is actually more qualified to review this than I am. They do touch on the helix system which I actually like a lot. Basically, every level-up you pick between two passive buffs. You can only pick one and you can't choose a buff from a previous level so it really is a choice. Its a neat idea. At the very least, the game has a lot of cool character designs. My favorite is Thorn with Miko: The Mushroom Ninja being a close second. Alani and Pheobe are also pretty good. (And cough have impressive jiggle physics) P.S. I was also going to play S4 League for Game-a-week since that game was also shutting down but I downloaded it two weeks before the shutdown and it kept saying "An older account is required to play this game". I am now writing this one day before shut down and it still says my account isn't old enough to play. I asked on Reddit and it is believed they are locking out all new players from the game entirely for whatever dumb reason. So if you saw I had an S4 stream lined up that just sort of never happened until it suddenly disappeared, that's why. I was literally locked out of the game until it shut down.

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