Borderlands 4 (2025)

I am really loving this Borderlands installment.

When I played BL3, I did not enjoy it so much. It had fun gameplay but the story and world exploration were not that great. This one fixes all the issues of that for me. I think it's the best borderlands yet!!

The story this time around leaves you in a new setting, with your vault hunter in Kairos. The tone of the story is darker than the previous, which was welcomed to me. There is still humor in it, but the characters are good and I found the story actually interesting. The humor is less cringe, but still borderlands. The humor is mostly within the side quests, BUT I found the side quests here to be worth my time and interesting, expanding the world and giving some genuine entertainment.

The gameplay loop here is perfected. Yes, you are just looting and shooting and listening to exposition in between. But, it's very fun.

Unlike the other games, you have an open world. I found this much more fun to explore than the mini zones of previous games. You have tons more movement tech, including a vehnicle you can always spawn, a double jump, grapple hook, gliding, climbing and more. None of this is new to modern gaming, but it all feels nice and well done. It leads to the gameplay and the combat feeling very satisfying.

The loot loop is also great. Good loot is more rare than BL3 which gave it away too easily but you still get good loot often enough for it to be rewarding. You don't have to grind but if you want to you can. It's still extremely addicting as a looter shooter.

Honestly, this whole game is just straight up extremely fun to play. It simply has the juice for me to find it addicting. I haven't enjoyed a BL game this much in a long time if ever.

I did not personally experience the crashes or performance issues many others did in the comments. The only thing negative I can find to say about this game at all, is that it can take some time to load into the world initially, as it takes a while to load the shaders every time.

I can't really speak to the performance issues that have dominated the discussion about this game. I have a 4080 and Ryzen 7 5800X3D and I've had no issues with framerate, stuttering, and the game has not crashed a single time. I get the argument that I SHOULD be getting higher than 60-80 FPS with this PC for how the game looks, but it feels great to play so that's all that matters to me, and considering how bad PC releases have been lately a stable 60-80 FPS seems perfectly acceptable. And on top of that the framegen implementation is flawless so I don't mind using it to boof myself up to 120+ FPS. Some games I use it, some games I don't, depends if it causes issues or not and how distracting those issues are, but I'm not fundamentally against anything if it works well. This is the best implementation that I've seen, and it's not even close. Only visual glitch I've caught is the hacking countdown screen for propaganda speakers, otherwise it's been impossible to tell framegen is even on. Which is crazy considering how much visual nonsense is on screen during big fights.

I'm not a huge Borderlands guy. I bounced off 3 almost immediately, didn't really give it a fair chance. I played 1 and 2 at least enough to finish the story and maybe more after that, it was a long time ago and I don't remember too much other than I hated the writing with a fiery passion. But I definitely didn't like them nearly as much as I like this one. I am ADDICTED to this one.

Shooting feels AMAZING, jetpack and grapple are game changing additions, good variety of weird builds and ways to break the game. The writing overall is a vast improvement over the previous games. The vault hunters are genuinely likeable and have great dialogue, Rafa in particular. I enjoyed a lot of the side quests and even laughed at some of them (pretty sure I never laughed at ANYTHING in Borderlands 1 and 2). Main questline is a little bland, but I'm fine with bland over cringe, and there's some good visual setpieces and bosses. I didn't want to set any of the characters on fire besides claptrap, and he's blessedly not in the game very much (and you can mute him if you want). I personally like the switch to open world (and I say this as someone that is usually against that trajectory for other series, but it just makes a lot of sense for a looter shooter).

There are definitely things they need to work on. The inventory management and UI could use a lot of work. SDU needs to be shared with new characters so you don't have to scour the map every time you make a new character just to be able to use your shared bank and have ammo and backpack space. Obviously performance improvements should continue to happen so other people can have the good experience I've been having. There's some balancing that needs to be done. I've encountered a few minor bugs. But overall I'm absolutely loving it and am planning to at least get two characters to level 50 and get all the achievements before I put it down, which was not expected at all as I was not that into the previous ones.

Beat my first playthrough as Amon.

Despite how stubborn and unapologetic Gearbox's CEO is, Borderlands 4 is one of those rare games that feels like a straight up apology. 4 feels like an apology for taking things too far with 3. Whether it be the villains, the overbearing humor, or the overly frequent legendary drops. A lot of it is toned back here and feels a lot like 1's style of writing. Maybe a bit too toned back, but if thats going to appeal to newcomers, then sure. The villain here is almost entirely serious and is a threat. I wouldn't call him Handsome Jack levels of good, but he does the job being threatening. One particular death comes off the most like an apology for a death in Borderlands 3. It was given much more tact, wasn't a stupid way to go out, and it was taken entirely seriously. I didn't care for the character who died, but their death was much more tastefully done than the one in 3. I really like the decision to make the first boss of the game so quick and easy to farm, it incentivizes new players to farm and get into what makes Borderlands the series that it is. Someone who is not too far away from a fast travel and is reasy to run back to respawn. Borderlands 4 was great. By far, the best one since Borderlands 2 despite its technical problems.

88% 36 Hours, Level 36. I've played and spent quite a bit of time with every Borderlands game. The premise is as appealing as it was in 2009 - the graphics, the tone, the style, the abilities and, most importantly, the dance of death you inflict with your abilities mixed in with your guns.

The gameplay has never been better. Shooting enemies and the expanded movement means every combat interaction is frantic and fun. I rarely felt like a boss was cheap, or a gun was underpowered. I played as Vex and summoning ghost clones to fight alongside me was just fantastic. Each subsequent ability meant they could last longer, or deal more damage, or more would appear.

The jet pack and lasso thing means interactions were far more likely to include more verticality, always a good thing. The switch to a more open world style instead of maps hidden behind load screens (for the most part) was a welcomed one. I had a really hard time stopping playing and not exploring the entire map.

That being said, there are some detriments to the new design. The pathfinding from your robot can be quite silly, with the route going through solid walls. It could be really, really difficult or cumbersome to get to a specific part on the map.

The elephant in the room is how buggy the game was. At times it felt very smooth and when things were going right, the framerate was great. But I had about 8 outright crashes during my 36 hours and I'd often have to let the game sit and think about things before getting to the action. Frustrating.

Overall, I had a blast. I also appreciated the story was toned down and the meme humor from 3 is far more balanced. While I loved Borderlands 3 for its gameplay, I felt like NPCs would never stop talking and in 4 they get to the point far more quickly. It feels evolved, maybe a little less goofy but a more solid experience. I'd give it a higher score if not for the frequent crashes, weird loading shader times and bugs.

Yup, it's another one of those games and it is still fun for me. I feel like I am talking about eating fast food at a site that has much more sophisticated palate, but Borderlands continues to hit that spot of enjoyable "enough". I haven't played anything since Borderlands 3 and so I am ready for that loot shooter loop, dumb humor it brings, and a low stakes game to just chill out to at the end of the night.

I was also looking for an open world game and so far, this seems to add in enough elements for me of some basic exploration and discovery.

Game Informer Issue #396 Cover Art

We spent two days at Gearbox’s Texas headquarters, and another in 2K’s California offices to dive deep into Borderlands 4. Our cover art showcases the opposing factions within Borderlands 4’s Kairos, with the Timekeeper’s forces representing order and the Rippers, who have adopted the iconic Borderlands Psycho masks, representing chaos and free will.

• Matt Miller