Borderlands 3

After a 6 year break from the last game in the series, the biggest first-person looter shooter is back! Borderlands 3 brings back the charm of the originals while pushing to a whole new level. Pick one of four vault hunters and roam through different worlds, tackling enemies, leveling up, and obtaining scores of new guns in a gorgeous cel-shaded adventure. Use your skill points to fine-tune your play-style and take down the Calypso Twins from claiming the galaxy's ultimate power. With millions and millions of different guns and gadgets, as well as coop, there will be no shortage of chaos here.

Borderlands 3 is a fantastic evolution of the series and added some awesome simple mechanics I fell in love with. From the refinement of the gunplay, addition of sliding and climbing, more skill customization for each hunter, and late game modifiers (Mayhem system), there is a lot to enjoy here. There's even a decent amount of aesthetic customization you can do for each character, which is always a nice touch. But will someone be able to enjoy this all on the Steam Deck? Well...kind of.

The game starts out running quite well, especially with my goal of 40 FPS. But as soon as I got into the open space and some heavier battles, it started to drain more and fluctuate the framerate. It was able to handle the smaller spaces, but this didn't last long. After some testing though, I found that forcing the resolution down to 800x500 and using SteamOS FSR to boost it up helped significantly with these.

Overall this made the game much more stable and able to keep 40 more times than not. There were still some drops I found, like when going to new areas, but for the most part, it was pretty stable. I also discovered a couple settings I was able to increase that didn't affect performance much.

While switching to 30 does reduce the amount of drops there are, I felt 40 was significantly smoother and worth the minor drops that I encountered. There are still some at 30, they just don't impact smoothness much due to the framerate being lower already. Borderlands 3 also has simultaneous/mixed input support, which means you can set the gyro to "As Mouse" and it won't interfere with moving around.

My biggest concern is text size. Borderlands 3 has some very small text that I would consider tiny on native resolution. But forcing resolution down makes the text completely unreadable. There is a popup next to it that explains what is being highlighted and that is more readable, but it is still quite bad. If you plan on changing settings, I would start the game at native resolution, change the settings you would like to, leave the game, and then force the resolution down when opening next.

Other than this, Borderlands 3 plays pretty well. I will admit I am really surprised at how well this runs in general. Apart from the text size and the minor stutters when going to new areas, it's really wonderful being able to play the game this way. And while turning the game to 30 FPS would help with stability, 40 FPS feels significantly better and hangs there most of the time!

Our full review will have a 30 FPS quality build at native resolution and a battery focused one. I also want to see if I can push to 55, which would be the closest feeling to 60 that is possible.

Borderlands 3 Screenshots:

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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