Borderlands Legends, the latest in the Borderlands saga is available on iOS from October 31st. Check out our review right here.
Image Credit: Gearbox Inc.
To be honest, I’ve said it all with the title, so if you want to stop reading now, I’ll understand.
I’m a big fan of Borderlands, and have devoted many hours (many days even) of my life to Borderlands and Borderlands 2; so upon hearing that a new iOS spin off was coming out, I couldn’t have been more excited. Christmas had come early.
Legends, rather than a loot based FPS-RPG, is a realtime strategy/actioneer starring the characters of the first game (all good so far).
The problem isn’t so much in the idea, but in the implementation. The Vault Hunters it turns out are pretty stupid. The player controls all four at once in a fairly familiar point-and-click style manner. But leave any of them to their own devices, and they’ll stand around waiting for orders. Even when they’re being shot in the face. No. especially when they’re being shot in the face.
Frequently, ordering a character to move from A to B is the kind of thing they’ll ignore; and to be honest, being able to draw a straight path for a character to walk on isn’t that useful when there is terrain in the way.
When it comes to attacking, each character has a different range (with Mordecai being furthest and Brick closest). But since attack and move are both done by clicking, it’s easy to miss a quick moving enemy, and have your sniper walking across the map rather than shooting.
The real trouble with Legends though, is that it’s not all bad. There are brief moments of greatness, where you can almost see what they were trying to do. Each character has three action skills, so for example, Mordecai can summon Bloodwing; double his fire rate; and set traps; and characters also have a skill that can be applied to other characters, so Mordecai can increase weapon damage for one of the other Hunters. It’s a good system, and on the right map, with the right enemies, it’s fun. The cool down on each skill is very short, so presumably they’ve been ramped up to try and cancel out some of the broken mechanics.
All too soon, you’re finding Hunters stuck behind enemies, not going where they’re told, and getting killed because they can’t path find around terrain.
All in, it’s a frustratingly broken game, that doesn’t really bring any of the charm of comedy of it’s big brothers. It seems a little like a cash in.
Hopefully the Dev team will hear some bad feedback, and patch it, but to be honest, it seems a little too broken to come back from.
The Hudsucker 
Leave A Reply [Invalid Emails Will Be Marked As Spam]