While Gearbox’s ill-fated Battleborn had its own slew of issues, you can’t deny that it came out at a really unlucky time. Offering hero-shooter fundamentals just as Overwatch arrived on the scene was a recipe for disaster, and that’s what we got. After the half-hearted partial free-to-play relaunch failed to grab audiences, Battleborn was officially put to rest yesterday, with no future updates planned after the next, as detailed in a letter from Randy Varnell, creative director on the game. Going F2P put Battleborn into a new and unenviable situation, competing with all these gems.

Battleborn treads familiar ground in a new, experimental way. At first glance, Battleborn looks like more of the same from Gearbox Software. A hyper-stylised, witty adventure with big guns and bigger personalities. But gone is the large, open overworld of the Borderlands games. It’s replaced instead by a small series of replayable story missions in which you and a team of up to four friends and/or strangers shoot monsters, defeat giant bosses and escort sentry robots from point A to B.