I played the Battleborn Beta, was very impressed. Like seriously impressed. I had endless fun on the mere two levels that were released, and eagerly awaited the full product. I even considered preordering the game via Xbox Live with the season pass.
Thank god I didn't (I rented in case you are wondering).
Don't get me wrong, at it's core Battleborn has the potential to be an epic game. When it works well, it works WELL. Hence my excitement over the Beta, The problem is, if you played the Beta then you played the game, pretty much.
The main story of the game is a mere 8 levels long, and they are pretty similar, However, they do play well. The problem is you are given very little reason to care about the story as it is barely told. When you finish it, because it took only 8 levels and because there was no real story told, you start to question how valid this "threat to the universe" actually was, as you barely break a proverbial sweat to nullify it.
Then, once you are done, there is very little reason to go back and play with the other 20 odd Battleborn characters. There are a few notable exceptions, but most of the characters have essentially a reskinned duplicate. Essentially, only Montana (the heavy gunner) and Rath (the vampire samurai) seem to be totally unique, at least in my opinion.
There is further frustration when you get into Vs matches. The servers (or game, whatever you want to call it) have NO concept of team balancing. In my final three matches before I decided to return the game, I was on teams of 5 with levels between 3 and 16 (rough idea), and the team we were up against were all levels between 28 and 45. This leads to a very un-enjoyable experience as you get pounded into the ground by more experienced players with better gear.
On top of that, I could barely play the game for the first 2 days as the servers couldn't cope with the overload and kept kicking me. I also couldn't play a solo game as it requires being connected to the servers all the time, so even solo play ended up with me being kicked mid level and having to start all over again.
I don't know if it makes it better or worse that you can feel the core of a truly great game in there, but it has obviously been rushed out to beat Overwatch. If they had spent more time balancing characters, preparing the servers, establishing proper team balancing, fleshing out the stories, giving the colourful characters anything like a back story of their own, and for GAWD'S SAKE added at least another 12 levels, then this could have been a game of the year contender.
As it is, it is an unfortunate case of "what could have been."