Battleborn Excitingly Revamps The MOBA With Incursion Mode

Gearbox Software's Battleborn has already been described as a cross between Borderlands and the ever-expanding MOBA genre. So far, Gearbox has shown various multiplayer modes, including Capture mode which is exactly as it sounds for a domination-based ruleset and Meltdown, where teams must sacrifice minions as a sacrifice faster than the opposing team. Incursion, the third multiplayer mode that was shown at a private event at 2K's studio in Novato, works similar to Meltdown and provides an intriguing twist to the normal three-lane MOBA that we've seen too often at this point.

While Incursion is still about protecting minions as they advance toward the enemy base, the Overgrowth map we played has a single curvy lane, a narrow map that funnels players toward chokepoints with several opportunities for flanking strategies. The main objective is to destroy the enemy's two sentries, which effectively act as living versions of “towers” in other MOBAs. Getting too close to a sentry, which looks like a giant robot turtle, will decimate you quickly. But any surviving minions that reach a sentry can destroy its shields, allowing you and your team to whittle away at its health.

If you can manage to destroy the enemy's first sentry, your team can then reach the enemy's base sentry that will be tougher to take down due to having a defensive boost and, of course, since the opposing team respawns close by. But if you can take out both sentries before the thirty-minute time limit expires, you'll score a complete victory. Otherwise, the team with the most remaining health wins, which is actually what happened in all three instances I played.

While protecting minions and pushing at the right time form the core strategy in Incursion, recognizing secondary goals are equally as important. Playing as the robot Englishman sniper Marquis, about half of my time was spent firing headshots and destroying turrets while the other half was spent adding friendly support and collecting shards that act as currency. Neutral mercenaries roam the outskirts of the map and, if defeated, will turn into hulking distractions that will decimate enemy minions. Destroying large shards that periodically respawn on the map will allow you to activate and upgrade fixed turrets for protection and area control, create healing stations, and spawn elite minions on occasion.

After shedding off some of the rust in the first match, the strategy became clearer and easier to follow. I stayed off the main path and found good sniping spots, taking out turrets from afar that the core DPS team couldn't reach and then fleeing quickly, sometimes by teleporting back to base, if I encountered a melee character since Marquis is as squishy as Play-Doh. Every once in a while, I would activate Marquis' time bubble to slow enemies and accelerate allies, and then after improving the skill to add AoE damage over time, destroy groups of minions.

Staying alive becomes more important as the match goes on, as dying in the last five minutes leads to lengthy respawn times that can be 35 seconds or longer. By the end of the third match, I was able to get an incredible kill to death ratio, all while supporting the team with turret support and a steady stream of mercenaries.

The Battleborn event also focused heavily on the co-operative story mode, and I will be able to speak more about it in several weeks. So stay tuned in the coming weeks for more coverage of Battleborn from GameRevolution. Battleborn releases on May 3, 2016 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.