Do you like Borderlands? Do you want a game that is somewhat better than Borderlands 3? Then Borderlands 4 may be for you.
There is nothing particularly revolutionary about Borderlands 4, it’s not elbowing its way into the heated 2025 GOTY race for one, but six years of feedback and tinkering have led to a game that has added a number of good things to the series and subtracted a few bad ones.
We are on Kairos, a Vault-filled planet we cannot leave, one in the grasp of the powerful, immortal Timekeeper. To reach the Timekeeper, we need to extract things from three bosses around the open world map and helped the oppressed citizens in the region. Perhaps not the most novel concept, but the open world itself is a new addition to the franchise.
And it’s good! It’s a lot better. In no way do I miss the 20 different segmented zones that require endless loading screens to travel in and out of. This creates some performance issues (more on that later), but it’s a surprisingly well-populated landscape full of things to do and collect. No, it’s not unique in gaming, but it’s unique to Borderlands, and it’s definitely an improvement, especially paired with a Destiny-type Sparrow to summon wherever you are to boost yourself around.
A big focus of Borderlands 4 is on combat mobility. The addition of the Warlock-like floaty jump (sorry, there are just a lot of Destiny things) is very good, as is the base level double jump all characters have. There’s a zippy little air dash that does almost nothing, however, moving you forward about two feet. Not a game-changer.
My biggest gripe is with the much-advertised grappling hook which is an extremely poor implementation of the concept. You can only grapple to fixed points, which often makes it nothing but a substitute for a simple ladder. Grapple points for quickly changing position in combat are more disorienting than tactical. And the trailer-hyped ability to grapple barrels and throw them at enemies is bad in practice and you’re better off just shooting them rather than wasting time doing that. You can’t even grapple the good barrels!
All this said, gunplay is great. Combat is great, even if the grapple didn’t hook me. One addition I really enjoyed is that heavy weapons, grenades and now throwing knives have been moved to a rechargeable ordinance slot so you don’t have to manage inventory or ammo. It felt like a whole new dynamic.
In terms of the characters, I only had time to play with a single Vault Hunter, Rafa, a Tediore mecha-soldier with an electric arm cannon, auto-firing shoulder turrets and slicing arm blades. His rocket turret augment was insane, as was his arm cannon when I eventually turned it into an incinerator beam, and I can’t wait to experiment with the other Vault Hunters, as I had such a hard time picking one to start with. Buildcrafting here will be a blast, and this is where Borderlands has always shined.
The guns are fun evolutions of what’s come before. Specifically, there are a ton of underbarrel attachments that are great, from hucking cleavers at enemies for one shot kills, shooting out gravity wells, laying down corrosive pools or an AOE energy blast around you. Past that, there is also the promised loot rarity in the game, making legendaries legendary again, at least in the campaign, and I only had a scarce handful near the end. They ranged from useless (a shotgun where bullets go up and turn into an inaccurate mortar) to the godly (a sniper rifle with multiple dancing shots that was an absolute boss shredder even 20 levels below them). I’m looking forward to getting to the endgame for more, but even the purples with their mix and match foundry parts can be kind of insane at times now.
The story is decent, at times, quite good. I don’t imagine it will attract the same amount of haters that Borderlands 3 did, given that the villains here are actually meant to be scary and evil rather than silly. Almost all modern-day memeing has been stripped out of the script. There are many storylines that are fully played straight for emotional stakes, and some of them do land, as does the lore behind the Big Bads, I found. The game is not overly stuffed with character cameos from the last three games, making the ones that it does have make an impact (there were so few I was honestly impressed at the restraint, though I suppose that’s what DLC is for). There is still humor, of course, which in my case was mainly provided by Rafa quips, but no, the dreaded H4WK-2A gun did not make it into the game.
A somewhat significant issue here is performance. This was hinted at before launch with surprisingly high recommended specs Gearbox released, but despite meeting those specs, there was a lot of hitching for me, particularly when reaching new areas for the first time, and the whole game isn’t exactly what I’d call smooth on PC. However, there are a bunch of patches and new builds and now new drivers, so I can’t even say what this will feel like today at launch. (Additionally, in the interest of transparency, I lost a full day of being able to play with a build issue that caused endless crashes in the game until Gearbox could patch it. I don’t expect that will happen at release, but it wasn’t great, and I’ve had a few more crashes since).
Tech problems aside, I’ve enjoyed my time with Borderlands 4 so far; it’s a step above Borderlands 3, and nearly all the changes they’ve made have been improvements. But I’m still early enough in the grand scheme of the game where I don’t have a final verdict, with three more Vault Hunters to test and an entire endgame to dive into. My life does not allow me 150 hours of playtime in a week like some of my YouTube brethren, but I did my best.
There will be plenty more to say, but this has been my experience so far, limited as it may have been.
Score: I’m not doing scores anymore/10. It’s good. I recommend it.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.