Borderlands 4 Review

Hey, what are your thoughts on aiming a reticle at a guy’s face and pulling (or holding!) the trigger down over and over again until he falls over? Love it? Love to shoot the same guy in the head like 20 times? How about 40? Great! Then Borderlands 4 is for you. It’s a game about pointing a reticle at a guy’s face and pulling (or holding!!) the trigger down until he falls, then doing it again to the guy standing next to him. Also they’re all trying to attack you, so you’ll need to move around a bit to prevent that from happening. In-between head-clicking fests the game also has cool features like “stare at the guns on the ground and check to see if any of them are better than the ones you currently have” and “wonder why all of these guns that keep dropped are just vendor trash” and “wait, money isn’t even good for much of anything anyway, why am I picking this stuff up?”

Wait, let's back up a bit. I had an OK time with Borderlands 4, but it gets in its own way a little too often. My chief problems with it are the world itself and the loot. The world is large… and mostly empty. Getting from place to place is kind of a lifeless trek here, and the fast travel points are always just a little bit further out than it feels like they should be. While sometimes those long drives will expose you to side activities and other spots on the map with something for you do to, they feel sprinkled out across too much land. This contributes to an overall “old” feeling that I’ll get into in a bit.

The loot is… well, since the series’ inception, the idea of a random gun generator has been at the center of the experience. In my time with the game (30 hours, according to the game itself, but I’m not sure how it counts time paused), the overwhelming majority of items I collected were useless. Guns that were worse than the ones I already had, shields that were smaller, healing items that didn’t heal as well, class mods for classes other than my own, and so on. But you still have to consider each item, right? I mean, it’s a game about loot, why am I doing this if I’m not going to check out the loot?!?!?

I wonder how many of those 30 hours were spent staring at a gun on the ground and looking at a damage number or its other traits to decide if it was worth equipping or not? Too many. Way too many. Most of this stuff is trash. You can sell that trash—and I certainly did—but this eventually caused another realization: money is more or less useless in Borderlands 4, at least on your initial trip through the story. I bought exactly one item from a vending machine. Every other time I checked, the stock in those machines was useless.

Speaking of story, a lot of the talk around Borderlands 3 focuses on its writing and how bad it is. A lot of the pre-release discussion of Borderlands 4 focused on how, if at all, it would improve upon the awful dialogue and characters of the previous game. I put it to you that the Borderlands series has been on this path the entire time, and anyone trying to tell you that the writing in the early games was “good” is misremembering those games. That said, Borderlands 3 did establish a new low, and B4 pulls back from that cliff reasonably well. It does this by, well, having fewer jokes. The bad guy in this game is a serious character, not some trash-ass one-liner machine like Handsome Jack or whatever the streamer siblings were in the last game. The game writes jokes and includes silly sequences, but it tends to do this in the side missions, where you’re doing things like helping a ripper heal the rippers by killing rippers. There’s a toilet with a computer lady trapped in it and she falls in love with Claptrap, who is barely in the game, by the way. It’s addition by subtraction in a lot of cases, though, because they haven’t exactly replaced the style of writing with something else, they’ve just included characters that can occasionally be sincere and the game allows itself to have a serious moment or two without cramming in some dumb fart joke. It's actually kind of nice!

All that said, it’s still a game where the psychos rant about murder the way people on the internet used to rant about bacon. It’s still a game where enemies shout non sequiturs like “may I borrow some sugar” or “now you’re going to have to live with that” during combat. Your characters crack wise, though they only seem to have a few lines and they’re repeating constantly. Rafa is constantly shouting “boundaries people, this isn’t rocket surgery” during combat. He even throws in a “who do you think you are? I am” for good measure, just in case you like references in your Borderlands quips. Most of the combat lines just repeat way too often to stay fresh throughout the campaign, let alone a world in which you’re invested in the post-game.

The post-game here is called Ultimate Vault Hunter, and it opens up a new skill tree that comes off as a somewhat simpler version of Diablo’s paragon ranks or, even, the badass ranks from Borderlands 2. It opens up a new vendor that rotates stock and location weekly, which seems like a version of Xur from Destiny 2. There’s also a weekly “wildcard” mission that has you replay one of the campaign missions with new modifiers, like “every enemy spawns a black hole when you kill them.” While the first pitch for these missions given in-game makes them sound like full-on remixes, it keeps in every bit of story dialogue and every bit of busywork instead of just cutting around all of the non-combat objectives. Having the game build up these new missions only to jump in and have to run around a town and open water valves and then drive across a bridge and then, finally, get to combat was a real dud move. Completing this mission raises the world level up a tier, opening up a higher level cap for items and enemies, should you want to continue grinding out any of the side missions or anything else you skipped. Once this is open you can also start a new character at level 30 with the Ultimate Vault Hunter stuff enabled, which is handy.

Post-game also opens up a couple of additional ways to spend money, but I didn’t find those to be much better than the vending machines. It sometimes feels like a broken loop, a system there for the sake of having systems. You lose a percentage of your overall money when you die and while those numbers get very large by the end of the game, it also felt like utterly meaningless busywork. The numbers go up, but none of them matter. I’m generally of the mind that if your game needs some kind of elaborate loot filter that lets you automatically mark items as junk if they don’t meet your specific criteria, then your game’s loot is too complicated. But for Borderlands 4, I’d make an exception. It’d benefit from a loot filter, because spending a third of the game or whatever staring at the floor is a bad way to spend your time.

It’s a shame that it feels this way, because Borderlands 4 finally sort of makes good on the whole “gun manufacturer traits” stuff they’ve been heading towards over the last few games. It’s a setup that trades away the potential of pure randomness for specific profiles. Most of these have been in place for a few games now, the Jacobs-branded guns are low-capacity or single-shot weapons with an Old West-y look, and they tend to hit harder than some of the other brands. Tediore guns don’t get reloaded, instead they’re thrown out like grenades while a fresh gun magically spawns in your hands. Guns from the game’s evil faction, The Order, have triggers that can be held to charge up multiple shots, making them absolute garbage if you want to just pop off a few quick shots… but The Order’s guns tend to do more damage than other guns of a similar level. The problem with a lot of these tradeoffs is that each gun ends up having its own little weaknesses that you’ll have to consider while staring at the pile of guns at your feet after every confrontation. At higher tiers of rarity you’ll find guns that break a few of these rules, like an Order gun with the magazine swapped out for a Ripper part, which ditches the normal style of charged shot for one that takes time to start firing when you first hit the trigger, but it starts firing full-auto once charged. More variations like this would be better, but it feels like there’s a rule system in place that prevents even wilder combinations from spawning. Or hey, maybe I had bad luck with drops, right?

The last thing I’ll say about guns is that they’ve managed to create some pretty brutal shotguns here that work at ranges that feel longer than the average video game shotgun. This helps tie into the game’s attempt to increase your overall mobility, but let’s not mince words here: Borderlands 4 is not a “movement shooter.” It does, however, have several of the pieces that many movement shooters have. You can run and slide. You have a quick little dash that you can use to sidestep and backdash to avoid attacks, and this is governed by a meter. You also have a grappling hook sort of thing, but this is a pretty disappointing hook, as they go. The hook is primarily used to grab onto grapple points, which fling you up into the air a bit, helping you reach higher points. You can also use it to grab gas cans and other things that you can then throw at your enemies. Grapple points are occasionally hard to find. In missions where you’re stuck trying to find a way up, this means wandering around while staring up, hoping for the icon to appear.

Also, the early parts of the game seem to always put grapple points in smart places, allowing you to scale up the sides of mountains to get to plateaus and reach mission objectives and such. But once you leave the first area, it’s like they forgot to put the grapple points in or something. Many high places feel like they only have one real way to get in, leaving you following your robot buddy’s mission line to find the “right” way in. All of this ends up making the grapple feel kind of pointless. You can also double jump and do a slow glide, which helps you cross large gaps where needed. All of this stuff is useful, but every little bit of it is just a little too slow for them to be all that fun in combat. It’s easy to imagine a world where you can grapple anything and tug yourself around the map to close the gap quickly on enemies, or one where you can pull smaller enemies towards yourself so you can shoot them up close, but… yeah. Grapple points. Feels kinda old, and even with the new movement options, the whole game feels kinda slow.

I think that’s my overall feeling about Borderlands 4. While it’s certainly an improvement over Borderlands 3, it feels weirdly old. The characters look nice, but quest givers still noticeably “pop” out of their idle animations into whatever quest dialogue/animation they need to deliver, then pop right back. Half the time those characters won’t even turn to look at your player when speaking, but this was also inconsistent enough to make me wonder if it’s a bug or something. Speaking of issues, the head of Gearbox has already been out on social media talking up a Day 1 patch for the game, which hasn’t been released as of this writing.

As for bugs and glitches I’d say Borderlands 4 has a few, but nothing too dramatic. I ran into one side mission that requires enemies to spawn in order to progress and the enemies never spawned. The guideline that takes you to your next mission objective sometimes just stops in the middle of a road or points into a wall, like the game forgot how to get to where you’re going. The animation is funky, though I don’t know if that’s something that’d get fixed in a patch. Probably the biggest issue I’ve seen has been the way the game seizes up and halts for a second or so whenever it sees something new. This is something noted in the info provided alongside the review build and it, as you may have already guessed, is caused by the way the Unreal Engine compiles shaders. This happens most frequently when you enter a new area and is something they say they’re working on improving in that launch day patch.

Testing here on an RTX 5090 and a 4090, this shader business can get pretty rough, but it’s typically done after a second or so and the game ran fine for me after that. It’s at its worst when entering a new area, as you’re seeing things like “snow” for the first time. Driving into a new zone for the first time strings those hitch-ups together in a way that needs to be addressed, for sure, but it happened infrequently enough that it wasn’t a major issue. I might also say that it sort of comes with the territory these days, but we shouldn’t be letting games off the hook here, even if some of this stuff is increasingly being laid at the feet of UE5, rather than solely with developers themselves. I have not seen the game on console—they said it wouldn’t be available until launch. While the performance here on PC is mostly fine in my experience, it’s left me quite curious to see how that Switch 2 version ends up running, that’s for sure.

All that is to say… heck, I don’t know. Borderlands 4 is fine, but it feels like a missed opportunity to change a lot more about the game and push it in some new directions. Instead, especially after 3, this feels like a safer way to ground things all over again and pull it all back to a Borderlands 1/2 sort of feel. It pulls in the ties from the previous games that it needs to, even if it does try (and fail) to make good on some of the dumb stuff from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. But Borderlands 3 proves that it could’ve been a lot worse, and Gearbox has, if nothing else, been smart enough to realize that they don’t need to go further and further down that path. If you’re looking for a co-op game with decent combat and more than enough downtime to discuss the world’s problems with your friends over voice chat, you could certainly do a lot worse.

3/5