Borderlands 4 Review
My passion for looter shooters has burned quite brightly for over 15 years and Borderlands is the flame that lit the fuse. With Borderlands 4, Gearbox proves it still knows how to bring the boom. After fizzling somewhat with Borderlands 3, it felt like this series had begun to fall behind in the genre it pioneered, but breaking away from segmented levels and embracing an honest-to-goodness open world allows 2025’s Borderlands to surprise us again. Drastically improved movement makes it one of the best-feeling first-person shooters out there, the story takes a refreshingly grounded approach that pays off, and the expanded buildcrafting options like healing items, throwing knives, and weapon enhancements are all fantastic ideas. But taking these swings also comes with some unfortunate downsides, like how exploration is quite literally held back by invisible walls and awkward surfaces that refuse to be trod upon, not to mention fairly rocky technical performance (at least on the PC version provided for review) and numerous bugs. But those rough edges borders did little to keep me from once again falling head over heels for my first looter-shooter love, and blasting through hordes of psychos with a friend or three feels as awesome as it ever has.
If you’re new to the absolute insanity that is Borderlands, it’s a series where the weird enemies you mow down drop increasingly bizarre weapons that you then use to mow down even weirder enemies in an endless cycle of looting and shooting. How bizarre? It’s stuff like an assault rifle that shoots tiny rockets, can call in an airstrike, and explodes like a grenade when you reload and toss it. Or maybe you’ll luck into a sniper rifle that fires off ammo like a gatling gun and stops consuming ammo while overheated, or a grenade that screams absurd (and occasionally horny) things as it bounces up and down, spewing acid. Borderlands 4 keeps that feeling fresh by continuing to iterate on the silly weapons it gives you, which can cross-pollinate across different weapon manufacturers for even weirder outcomes.
The other distinctive bit of style that’s set its best games apart from the crowd is that despite always having been filled with lowbrow dick jokes to match its hand-drawn graphic novel look, Borderlands has never been afraid to surprise with sharp turns toward genuinely touching story moments. (Heck, it’s a universe that’s supported a Telltale-made Tales from the Borderlands game and its Gearbox-developed sequel, so it’s not all about run-and-gun action.) Borderlands 3 notably didn’t have a lot of those, though, so it was a relief when this followup finally ditched the original planet of Pandora and many of its legacy characters who’d started to wear out their welcome to tell a completely new tale on a world called Kairos that’s been dominated by a malevolent, brainwashing dictator named the Timekeeper.
Borderlands 4 is much more than just a breath of fresh air, bordering on what almost seems like a soft reboot at times. It immediately adds some memorable characters to its cast, like the fancy and charming Levaine, who has a somewhat messy dating history with your fellow Vault Hunters – but then every once in a while it takes a welcome dip back into the nostalgia pool to have Claptrap rattle off a few jokes. (Yes, the sassy little bot is back; love him or hate him, it wouldn’t be Borderlands without him.) With a few neat twists in store and a compelling plot about trying to free this planet, I ended up liking the story quite a bit, even if it doesn’t hit the highs of Borderlands 2 (especially in terms of its iconic villain).
Most of the action itself is what you’d expect from this series, but number four (or six, if you count The Pre-Sequel and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands) makes a number of pretty huge changes that shake up your vault-hunting expedition. The biggest by far is the fact that Borderlands 4 is a proper open-world game (as opposed to the traditional approach of large zones separated by loading screens) that’s filled with side quests, timed activities, collectibles, and puzzles to seek out. You also have a whole bag of tricks to aid you in the exploration of Kairos’ four diverse regions, like a grapple hook that lets you get to areas normally out of reach, a glider to soar over large swaths of land, and a vehicle you can summon on command to zip over hills and through deserts without having to hoof it to a Catch-A-Ride station first. Aside from a very limited few (such as The Division 2 or Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League), fully open-world games are pretty rare in the looter shooter space – none of which are in first-person.
That might not seem like a big deal at first, but it’s hard to overstate how different this makes Borderlands 4 from its predecessors, not just because you’ve got so many new ways to get around, but because progressing through the story and leveling up your character is so much less linear now. Sometimes I’d spend a few hours just exploring a new region of the map, clearing the fog of war away and completing any activities I encountered along the way, while other times I’d race from place to place, focusing on one part of the main story quest line before pivoting to another part of it in a different region. That story took me about 40 hours to complete, but that was with plenty of distractions, and I’ve spent another 20+ after the credits rolled with lots still left to do.
It’s also awesome that you don’t have to worry so much about sticking next to your teammates this time. They can be leagues away doing their own thing, and if they need help with something you can just pull up your map and warp to them instantly. Open-world activities are more diverse than I was expecting as well, and range from proper story-focused side quests to an activity where you have to fix a giant crawler to claim a vehicle upgrade to one where you fight loads of madmen at a drill site to earn some badass loot. The fact that you can do all that free-wheeling exploration and discovery alongside a group of friends in a way that’s never inconvenient makes it that much better and impressive.
There is one major issue with this new open-world philosophy, however, which is that the physical terrain of Kairos doesn’t always rise to the occasion of these free-roaming ambitions. For example, some areas are filled with invisible walls that you’ll unsatisfyingly slap into while you’re trying to glide over a hill or mantle up a ledge. Borderlands has always had issues with its environments being a bit wonky, but it feels so much more noticeable in an open world where you naturally assume you’re meant to explore every nook and cranny, and most games come up with natural barriers like mountains or oceans to make it clear that you can go no farther. Instead, you quickly find the limitations of that exploration and they feel artificial. Although I eventually learned to recognize when a surface was probably not something I was going to be allowed to interact with, it still bums me out that there isn’t just some kind of “out of bounds” warning when going places I wasn’t meant to.
One other major area of evolution is combat, which not only has tighter, more responsive gunplay than any Borderlands game before it, but comes packed with a frankly silly number of new movement options that make battles much more dynamic. In addition to the existing ways to get around like running and sliding, you can now double jump, glide, grapple hook, dash in any direction, and even swim (that’s right, water no longer instantly kills you, praise Moxxi). It actually took me quite a while to remember all the new ways I was expected to navigate combat encounters, but with the help of some enemies that smartly push you to make full use of your options, I eventually learned to master them. By the end, I was soaring across the map, dodging attacks like a pro and raining hell down upon my enemies. It became wonderfully satisfying stuff once I got the hang of it.
Gearbox has also heaped an impressively high volume of new things to shoot into this game. While other Borderlands sequels reused many of the same enemy types dating back to the 2009 original, Borderlands 4’s change of planetary venue means it has to significantly expand its menagerie. Sure, the masked psychos that serve as the series’ poster boys (they’re like a disturbing version of the Minions from Despicable Me, and they managed to hitch a ride off of Pandora somehow), but there are also little mechanical spiders that reflect all the bullets you send their way when they to spin their legs rapidly, creatures covered in crystals that are immune to damage until you shoot those crystals off and quickly destroy the floating orbs they turn into, and many others that I hadn’t seen before. Those caused me to stop and adapt to their tactics in interesting ways, and that was always a memorable moment.
Even better are the boss fights, which have evolved pretty significantly in that they usually involve some special mechanics you have to learn in order to beat them. These are often pretty simple things, like picking up and throwing a toxic bomb onto one boss to peel his armor off, or having to juggle yourself in the air with grappling and gliding after the floor becomes hazardous for a phase of another fight. Granted, they don’t come close to the mechanical complexity of something you’d find in a Destiny raid, but those are often kind of over-the-top and this is a significant step up from some of the basic “dodge and shoot it until it dies” battles we’ve seen in Borderlands past. It’s a happy medium, and that makes these bosses a lot less forgettable. That’s not to say there aren’t any basic fights, but it’s fair to say that those can be an entertaining excuse to turn off your brain and blast something to bits and serve as a contrast to the ones with an extra element to them. Rest assured, the major bosses usually step up their game pretty noticeably.
It’s also neat that you’ll start encountering enemies with various modifiers as you get further into the adventure and unlock higher difficulty settings via the endgame grind. These might be things like Elemental Eater, an effect that means enemies aren’t just resistant to a specific type of attack but healed by it, or Centripetal, which causes a black hole to form where an enemy with this trait dies, pulling everything in range into its center and dealing massive damage. It’s not all new, groundbreaking stuff for Borderlands – these are similar to effects found in Borderlands 3’s Mayhem Mode, for instance – but they’re now a central part of Borderlands 4, and that makes combat more interesting and has you staying a little more aware even of enemies you’ve seen a lot of already.
One huge pain point, though, is that the full descriptions for each of these modifiers’ effects don’t appear to be listed anywhere, so you’ve just gotta figure them out on your own – or look them up on the guide that IGN’s team is already cooking up for you. I can’t tell you how long I spent accidentally healing a bad guy before realizing I was doing something very wrong, and it would have been nice to have a codex somewhere with more info.
If the fact that I’ve gone this long without even getting to discussing the entirely new batch of Vault Hunters in Borderlands 4 doesn’t tell you there’s a lot going on here, I don’t know what will. It mostly sticks to tradition, but puts some pretty neat spins on the series’ existing classes. There’s the Siren, Vex, who uses her space magic to deal elemental damage and has some awesome life-stealing options; Rafa, the Exo-Soldier who can summon all sorts of DigiStructed weapons, from shoulder-mounted turrets to melee arm blades (as though Borderlands didn’t have enough weapons already!); Harlowe, a Gravitar with an assortment of gravity-manipulation abilities that can trap enemies in bubbles, among other things; and Amon, a massive, cybernetically enhanced warrior called a Forgeknight, who has a bunch of melee options at his disposal. Each one feels pretty good, with unique tools that make them all viable choices for endgame activities without feeling especially overpowered.
While I’ve been pretty high on it so far, I do have some complaints to lodge as someone who tends to play this kind of game more than once, and with an eye toward making each of those playthroughs feel distinct. After a few dozen hours with it, it strikes me that Borderlands 4’s buildcrafting hasn’t pushed this series into the realm of something like Diablo or – dare I say it – Path of Exile, given that there are a few branching paths to choose from in each Vault Hunter’s skill trees that you can then can optimize with gear to excel at a handful of specific things like dealing loads of elemental damage or healing yourself when getting kills, but not enough customization options to really go wild.
That said, the three different trees each character does have each at least add a little bit of variety to how every class can play, meaning more than one person on your team can use the same Vault Hunter while having a different set of buffs and abilities that can make them work well together. For example, for the first half of my playthrough I focused on Vex’s Spectral Summoning tree to deploy ghostly doppelgangers onto the battlefield, but after finding a legendary item that worked well for a different kind of build, I respec’d into the elemental DPS tree that focused on casting powerful spells instead of summoning others to do my bidding. If those two different characters worked together side by side, there’d be little overlap in what they’re bringing to an up-to-four-person team.
Ah yes, teams! Although Borderlands 4 feels great to play solo as well, for sure the best way to play is when among friends, but those who play together should expect to experience bugs together. The vast majority of my time in Borderlands was spent with friends, and we encountered just about every issue in the online-multiplayer book: lag and desyncing from combat if you’re not the host, enemies sometimes becoming immune to damage or teleporting around the map, and non-host players losing progress or getting locked out of quest lines because something didn’t track properly, just to name a few.
Some of this, like the fact that you don’t uncover the map in your own save file while exploring with friends, seems like it might be intentional, but is still deeply annoying and disincentivizes teaming up. Other issues, like equipment-selling vending machines that consistently offered no wares at all for any of us while in co-op, are just head-scratching pains in the neck. There were times when I hit enough issues in succession where it became preferable to just play solo, and others where it created friction when deciding who would be the group’s host because we knew that person would see the fewest problems. That’s definitely not the kind of dynamic you want in your co-op game, and it caused my group no small amount of grief as we discovered the various ways in which things feel not so great when playing together, despite gunplay and synergizing our builds with one another otherwise being really awesome. Granted, some of this is the result of playing a short time before launch and there will certainly be at least a few fixes by the time you play it – but if history is any lesson it will be a minute before all of this is ironed out.
Playing solo is smoother, but there’s no escape from all of the problems because Borderlands 4 is a fairly buggy ride in general. It seems like there are as many bugs as there are guns, and the longer you play the more likely you are to see things like infrequent but severe framerate hitching, or your backpack suddenly deciding you have way less space for equipment than you should until you back out to the menu and reload. Two of my crew even found themselves locked out of the endgame grind when different steps in the questline broke, blocking their progression and making it so we couldn’t run the activities we wanted to do together. It’s a testament to just how fun exploring Kairos is that, even with all of that laundry list, I still couldn’t wait to play more even after dozens of hours. You’ve gotta take these complaints in context.
Speaking of the endgame grind, Borderlands 4 appears to come pre-loaded with one of those (though hey, I said the same thing about Diablo 4 – you can’t call them all right, but I’m feeling optimistic). There are three activities you’re expected to complete weekly: a more challenging version of a story mission that has a bunch of tricky modifiers, like one where all enemies explode into a black hole of damage and another where enemies heal themselves when dealing damage to your team, a repeatable boss fight that mostly just seems like it’s there to give you a straightforward enemy to kill as many times as you’d like for great loot, and a hidden vending machine that moves around each week and sells guaranteed legendary loot.
As you grind these activities, you’ll also unlock the more advanced world tier difficulties that offer better loot, but these are gatekept behind incredibly challenging quests with loads of modifiers that are the ultimate test of your loadout and shooting skills. At this point, none of these things are particularly deep or time-consuming since you just run them all each week and then are basically done, but even if that’s not your thing there’s still a massive map that has lots of side activities for you to complete out of the “box.” (Are there still boxes?) Beyond that, we have promises that Gearbox has a fairly good track record of delivering on, courtesy of a post-launch roadmap which includes plenty of content on the way. I have a lot of hope that Borderlands 4 will have legs for quite some time.
