It’s been six years since the last mainline Borderlands game. (No, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands doesn’t count.) A lot has changed in the last six years, both in the land of video games and in the real world. Players expect a lot more from co-op shooters. And the people in charge are power-hungry losers. Borderlands 4 tries to change with the times, with mixed results.
While it’s a damn fine shooter, the best Gearbox has made, and one which lets the franchise now stand comfortably next to genre titans like Destiny, its attempts to address life living under a fascist regime don’t work out as well. But you’ll probably be too busy talking and joking with your friends to notice.
Borderlands 4, in a lot of ways, feels like a soft reboot of the series. The past games still happened and are referenced in big and small ways throughout the story, but the sequel is set on the new planet of Kairos and features new villains, allies, and things to kill. And unlike Borderlands 3’s story, which revolved around saving the universe and hopping across the galaxy, Borderlands 4 is a smaller, more contained yarn mostly focused on what happens when powerful people take control and never let go.
A New World To Be Saved
While I won’t spoil any specific details in this review, I’ll let you know ahead of time that if you are coming to Borderlands 4 to enjoy a satisfying tale of people rising up under fascism to defeat evil, you’ll get that—right up until the end of the main campaign. Then it kind of falls apart.
A twist in the game’s finale turns its main villain, the Timekeeper, into a far less compelling character. But before that, I really enjoyed the amount of time Gearbox devoted to showing how evil the Timekeeper and his cronies are, and how characters deal with the question of how much they’re willing to sacrifice for freedom. And what happens when some go too far, or not far enough? Don’t expect Andor-like depth and writing about genocidal leaders here. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how often I cared about what was happening to both new and returning characters alike. Gearbox’s writers do a fantastic job of really making you hate the Timekeeper and his various underlings. Don’t get too attached to anyone in this story. That’s all I’m saying…
Of course, if you play Borderlands 4 with a group of your rowdy, silly friends, a lot of its writing will get buried under your pals screaming about loot drops or laughing about inside jokes. If you care at all about the tale Gearbox is telling here, do a run through the story by yourself and take your time to interact with characters and listen to audio logs.
Regardless of whether you play alone or with others, to defeat the Timekeeper and break his ironclad hold over Karios and its suffering populace, you’ll need to kill thousands of troopers, aliens, monsters, and robots using some of the billions of guns available to loot in Borderlands 4.
Killin’ In The Name…Of Fun
What’s going to keep me coming back to Borderlands 4 for (likely) years is the gunplay and movement. I’ve never outright hated the combat in past Borderlands games, but this is the first one where I think Gearbox has truly nailed it. And not just because they tossed in more guns than ever before.
Borderlands 4 lets players double jump, glide, grapple, and wall climb around the open world of Kairos. This, combined with guns that, overall, feel more distinct and punchier, really helps elevate Borderlands 4 into the upper echelon of first-person shooters.
Further elevating combat in Borderlands 4 are the shooter’s four distinct and new playable Vault Hunters. Each one shakes up how combat encounters play out thanks to their different powers and abilities. Playing alongside a powerful Rafa, a cybersoldier, will lead to combat encounters that feel very different than when you play alone or next to other hunters.
Really, you get like 12 characters, because each hunter has three skill trees that each feature mini-skill trees inside. Perhaps you and a pal both play Vex, the new Siren character. Well, you’ll likely be very different versions of Vex by the time you both reach level 50, thanks to all the different skill and ability options available to each of you.
As I leveled up, found great guns I liked, and got more comfortable with the new movement options, I would often get into flow states where I’d lost track of time. I’d end up losing 10 minutes to a random encounter on my way to a big quest simply because I just love shooting shit in this game so much.
I did find, though, that Borderlands 4 has a nasty habit of throwing a few too many waves of enemies at you during a lot of encounters. I’d wipe out the fourth or fifth wave of angry psychos or space buffalo, and then another wave would arrive. And then another. It often felt like too much, and made some missions and activities drag on. Still, I wasn’t too mad because once I’d wiped every enemy out, I was left with piles of loot.
Crappy Green Pistols For As Far As The Eye Can See
The loot in Borderlands 4, like in past games, is the real secret sauce. It’s what keeps you going through a boring mission, or makes it hard to stop playing despite feeling tired and needing to go to bed. That promise that the next gun, shield, or grenade that drops will be better than anything you have.
Sure, most of the time, what drops is garbage you won’t use, but thanks to Borderlands 4’s improved loot management options, collecting and selling truckloads of terrible rifles and shotguns is easier than ever. And when that amazing piece of loot does pop out of a dead enemy or chest with a distinct ping noise, it’s one of the best feelings ever. If I could bottle it and sell it, I’d be a very rich man. It feels even better in Borderlands 4 because some of the best loot, Legendary guns, are much rarer than in the last game.
And because nearly everything you do around the open world of Karios rewards you with loot, it can be hard not to just keep playing for hours and hours. Kairos is a big map, chockablock with small activities to complete–like activating a radio tower and defending it from baddies–as well as bigger or sillier side quests, world bosses, collectibles to hunt down, secrets to find, and random events to complete.
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Back-of-the-box-quote
“Billions of guns, four friends, one meh ending.”
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Developer:
Gearbox
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Platforms:
Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC (Played on both PS5 and PC)
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Type of game:
First-person co-op focused sci-fi looter shooter
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Liked:
Combat better than ever, great traversal options, QoL changes, open world.
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Disliked:
Bugs and performance problems, less-than-satisfying ending, some fights feel too big.
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Release date:
September 12, 2025
As a result, the open world of Borderlands 4 is more active and alive than in any previous entry in the franchise, and all of this content rewards you with more loot. Thank god you can junk most of it in seconds. Otherwise, I’d have drowned in all the green pistols that the game dumped on me over my 60 or so hours with it across PS5 and PC.
Loot also becomes a currency among friends. Get a cool sniper, but you don’t snipe? Drop it for your friend. And then, if they find a badass shield that suits your character build better, they’ll share it with you, or you can at least guilt-trip them into giving it over. And because guns can spawn with all sorts of wild extra parts that turn SMGs into rocket snipers or whatever, hunting for loot and sharing it with pals is more exciting than ever.
Well, assuming you can see the guns you have. A nasty bug affected one of my friends and made all his guns invisible. Which leads me to my biggest disappointment with Borderlands 4: the technical problems.
Excuse Me, There’s Some Bugs In My Looter Shooter
On PlayStation 5 Pro, I routinely had to restart the game due to the performance tanking after a few hours of play. I also encountered a few bugged quests that required restarts, too. Over on PC, many players and I have experienced optimization and performance problems. Even on my RTX 5080, which can run everything I throw at it, Borderlands 4 demands I turn on DLSS and frame gen while also turning down visual settings. And despite getting the game to run at a mostly stable 120FPS, I still encounter microstutters.
On both platforms, I’ve also found empty vending machines, seen characters hovering off the ground, had animations break, events not start, and encountered audio lines cutting out randomly.
None of this has completely ruined my enjoyment of Borderlands 4, and I’ve had some sessions in which it all worked pretty flawlessly, minus some hitches or stutters. But it would be irresponsible not to mention these technical flaws and annoyances in a review of Borderlands 4, as they are just as much a part of the game as the loot, combat, and story. Hopefully, Gearbox can patch the game over the next few weeks and months to create a better experience, and this part of my review will then become a weird artifact from the past.
Still, despite some annoying bugs and performance problems, Borderlands 4, in many ways, is the best game Gearbox has ever made.
It takes what the studio has learned about creating looter shooters and builds upon that in a way that feels like a big moment for the franchise. A large leap forward in both gameplay and narrative. I joked with colleagues that critics and players would suggest this is where the series “finally grew up,” but really, that’s what it feels like.
The story isn’t as cringeworthy, with far fewer memes, more character-driven jokes, and a sense that you might not get out of this adventure with all your friends in one piece. The combat and movement are more refined and expanded, no longer feeling like an afterthought as was the case in past games. And the world of Kairos is visually varied and packed with good reasons to explore it alone or with friends.
Bugs, performance problems, a less-than-memorable villain, and a grindy endgame are disappointing for sure, but what Gearbox has put together is still a mostly fun, action-packed, and hand-crafted looter shooter that proves once again that this studio is still the best at making these kinds of over-the-top FPS RPGs.
