Borderlands 4

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo Switch 2

Six years after the events of Borderlands 3, a new generation of gun-toting, super-powered Vault Hunters emerges to wreak a fresh brand of chaos. Yet while Gearbox’s latest entry in its looter shooter series mixes things up by introducing a handful of fresh play mechanics and shifting the action from the frontier world of Pandora to the… er, frontier world of Kairos, this largely feels like Borderlands-by-the-numbers.

In some ways, that’s no bad thing. By the fourth main entry in any series, audiences know exactly what they’re getting, and for fans of speedy, carnage-filled shootouts with physics-defying weapons and tide-turning abilities, Borderlands 4 doesn’t disappoint. The new quartet of Vault Hunters pack some seriously impressive skills, whether you’re playing as weapon-spawning “Exo-Soldier” Rafa; Harlowe, who manipulates gravity as a “Gravitar”; tank-like “Forgeknight” Amon; or Vex, the latest witchy “Siren” whose powers allow her to battle alongside her feline familiar, Trouble.

Borderlands 4 feels a shade more grown up than its predecessors.

Each hero — if that’s the right term for a quartet of violent murderers — has three base skill trees to fill out as you level up, and you can easily re-spec at an in-game kiosk, allowing you to experiment with different character builds and play-styles. By the time you get to Borderlands 4’s endgame, when you can mod and tweak skillsets even further and really complement intrinsic character skills with weapons and gear, you’ll feel like you’re an unstoppable titan.

Borderlands 4 also feels a shade more grown up than its predecessors. The plot finds the people of Kairos oppressed by a godlike tyrant known as the Timekeeper, with your Vault Hunter roped in to help forge a resistance movement. It’s still comedic — said resistance is “lead” by series mascot Claptrap, although the bumbling ‘bot is toned down and marginally less annoying here — but there are moments where the narrative and even the mission structure brushes against more serious themes, such as the use of propaganda and how corporations abuse people.

It’s all still plenty raucous and relies on splatterhouse gore — there’s no way brains should quite so readily eject from the skulls of downed enemies — but it generally avoids going anywhere as wacky or farcical as Borderlands 3 got at times. This is matched, subtly, in the visuals, keeping the mixture of sci-fi, western, and post-apocalyptic aesthetic influences but adopting a slightly more restrained, less cartoonish approach to them.

Borderlands 4’s biggest improvement over earlier outings is an energised take on traversal. Your Vault Hunter can now grapple to fixed points, use a glider to cover large gaps, and, from early in the game, summon a hover-vehicle at any point. While the latter two mainly help better navigate the vast world of Kairos, grappling folds perfectly into the speedy gunplay, allowing your Vault Hunter to haul themselves up and around areas like a gun-toting Spider-Man. The last time a Borderlands game felt even close to this zippy was 2014’s The Pre-Sequel, with its low-gravity setting adding a bit of aerial play.

The problem is, all these new mechanics don’t meaningfully change the core Borderlands experience. Whether playing solo or in a group, Borderlands’ brand of vaguely mission-driven shootouts doesn’t feel to have meaningfully changed or evolved much over the years — head to objective, inject target with an armoury’s worth of bullets, move on. If the series hasn’t already won you over with that formula, this fourth expedition is unlikely to do so. Neither, though, does it change anything so grievously that it’ll deter long-time fans. It’s Borderlands, as it ever was_._

It is, however, blighted by some pretty terrible UI elements, especially in menus. Skill trees are overly busy, making it a chore to plan out character builds or skill synergies, but worst of all is inventory management. The sorting defaults to ordering items by their fictional, in-universe manufacturer, which is about as helpful as grouping them by a random ranking of cupcake flavours. You can change the sorting to something useful — most recent, rarity, or power level, say — but as soon as you switch tabs, it resets. It’s a real faff to keep re-sorting things, and given how much loot you’ll typically pick up in even a short play session, it becomes maddeningly frustrating.

It’s also disappointing to see the game launching in such poorly optimised form. PC players have the worst of it by all accounts, but even on PS5 (version tested) performance diminishes after as little as 30 minutes play, leading to juddering frame rates and vanishing textures until you shut the game down and restart. Will these issues be patched? Almost certainly. Is it annoying having to interrupt your game every half hour or so until it’s fixed? Incredibly so.

As those launch issues are addressed, Borderlands 4 will likely settle into the same comfortable space as its predecessors — cosy, turn-brain-off-now shooting, goofy humour, and a familiar dopamine hit as you reduce some slavering mutant to giblets. Its new additions tweak the recipe but don’t change the outcome — but hey, at least it’s still leagues better than the Borderlands movie.