A Mini Game… and Maybe More?

And now we come to maybe the weirdest optional content in Borderlands 3: a tile-matching puzzle mini-game called Borderlands Science! Available to players once they reach the spaceship Sanctuary III, there’s an arcade machine in Tannis’s workshop, with a side mission icon available. Open the machine, go through a quick tutorial and then you’re in, able to play the side mission and start making your puzzle matching dreams come true. Yes, really. In a BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. game.

We’ll get to the why in a bit, but let’s first discuss the game. The introduction, which explains the why and how, is voiced by actress, author, and neuroscientist Mayim Bialik, but once you get into the game you actually will be playing against regular Borderlands characters, like Claptrap and Brick. The game itself is pretty simple. You are presented with a set of stages, each featuring a different Borderlands character that chats at you. Each stage consists of a well of tiles, and your job is to match tiles to fill your completion bar at the bottom.

This isn’t like your standard tile-matching game, though. You’re not matching up to destroy tiles (like in, say, Puyo Puyo). Instead, you are given an uneven well of tiles that have the various Borderlands 3 Vault Hunter faces on them. There’s also a row of icons on the left side of the well, with one (or two) corresponding faces on each row. You then have a bank of yellow “reserve tiles” that you can place anywhere to raise the tiles in the well. Match enough tiles to the faces on the left side, the bar will fill. Fill the bar to complete the level and move on to the next stage.

And, really, that’s it. That’s the whole of the game. It’s a little puzzler experience tacked onto Borderlands 3 and, yes, it is a weird fit. You could ignore the mini-game almost entirely (playing just enough of the early stages to get a completion for the mission and take it off your roster) and lose nothing from the main Borderlands 3 experience. But if you do decide to play through it for a while, you could end up earning bonuses for your gameplay.

Players that earn up points within Borderlands Science! and use them to buy boosters for the main game. These boosters are limited in use, giving an hour or two bonus to the play experience, but they could convey things like extra experience, extra money, faster movement speed, and the like. I wouldn’t call them essential to the overall experience, but if you need a little leg up in a particularly awful area or a nasty boss fight, these boosters could help. It’s a bit annoying that they’re temporary, but presumably that’s to prevent people from getting into the game, playing the mini-game for a few hours, and then stomping through the main game afterwards. So, annoying as it is that the buffs are temporary and the mini-game doesn’t add something more complete to the experience, I do get it.

Really, the weirdest part is that this mini-game is in Borderlands 3 at all. It doesn’t fit the tone or gameplay (even for a Borderlands game), and that’s because it’s really something else entirely. Borderlands Science! is more than just a mini-arcade game; it’s an entire science experiment that the players are helping to run. In the real world. For real. You’re actually doing real science (at least, supposedly) when you’re playing Borderlands Science!

As explained by Mayim Bialik (which is why, strange as it is to have a real world person, referenced by name, in a Borderlands game), Borderlands Science! was put together by Gearbox in conjunction with McGill University, Massively Multiplayer Online Science, and The Microsetta Initiative. Play in the game actually has real world benefits as your tile matching and bar filling helps research on microorganisms and bacteria. By matching tiles in the rows of the well you’re actually brute forcing the sequencing of DNA fragments from these microorganisms. The more you play, the more fragments you process, and then the more science you do.

At least, that’s what the various groups say. Some players online actually doubt that and think it’s all just a way to get people to do menial labor on basic data management and the science aspect is a ruse, but we’ll just assume there’s real scientific benefit. The various groups, anyway, report that real science is being done when you play Borderlands Science!, so we’ll take their word on it.

Regardless, whether it has scientific benefit or not, the basic mini-game is fun enough. I spent a couple of hours in it once I unlocked the game, and I did have to admit that there was something fun about matching tiles and finding solutions. It tickled a part of my brain and I did want to keep going, at the very least to see just how far the game went and if there was an ending. After two hours, though, I did get tired and wrapped up my play session for the night… and then afterwards I went back to playing the main game in Borderlands 3.

And I think that’s the biggest knock against it, really. While it’s a fun mini-game, there really isn’t that much to it. Once you’ve played an hour or two in the game you realize that all you’re doing is the same thing over and over again. Different puzzles, different sequences, but the same functions the same way. Because it’s based on real science there’s only so many twists and turns the puzzle sequences can take before you’ve seen them all. I found the puzzles engaging, but not super difficult, and it did feel like I hit the bar on how difficult it was going to get pretty early. After that, I had to decide if I really had to see it all… and I decided against it.

You have to care about doing science to want to play Borderlands Science! If all you want is a tile-matching minim game, the experience here will wear out pretty quickly. And, frankly, if what you want in Borderlands is Borderlands, well then this mini-game sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s amusing for a time, but hardly a complete experience I think players would want to stick with for the long haul. Not unless they actually wanted to contribute to the scientific aspect of the game.