Borderlands 4 Review

The co-op gameplay landscape of late has been dreadful. Games seem to either skip it entirely, or perhaps deliver some bottom-of-the-barrel implementation that feels so compromised you almost question if it was worth it at all. But for nerds like me, we trudge forth, chewing at the leathery scraps on offer, because it’s the only nourishment we can find. Playing games with your friends is fun – more so if the experience is purely a player-versus-environment deal, a wide world beckoning you and your mates to explore it. Better yet if you keep the nasties of that world at bay with the loud end of a cartoonishly large gun.

This has always been the credo of Borderlands proper. Explore, explode and loot your way through backwater worlds of questionably sane individuals – both friend and foe alike – with up to three of your closest nutters at your side. These games have continued to iterate on and improve their systems, but I’ve never believed a Borderlands title to truly break new ground for either co-op gameplay or first-person shootering. It’s always been a safe, familiar experience wrapped in a delightfully colourful cartoon presentation and delivered exactly what people would expect of it, time and time again.

But Borderlands 4? Holy hell, this game is well aware that things have been getting sloppy in the co-op (and even shooty) department, and it is well past time to start putting boots to arses.

*Loads shotgun maliciously*

As a sign of the times, the biggest formula shift for Borderlands 4 is the proper introduction of an open world. Gone are the many loading screens and broom closet-sized arenas that served a singular narrative purpose, instead replaced with a very admirable landscape. The planet of Kairos is ripe for a motley crew of Vault Hunters to come and liberate it, as it has been held long under the thumb of the sinister Time Keeper for over a millennia. You just need to get on down there, introduce yourself and hope things go swimmingly.

The game is quick to acknowledge this shift with a rapid gift of personal transport, now with the amazing ability to be summoned almost anywhere at will. Your first vehicle is a crotch-rocket hoverbike, one that initially lurches forward and corners like a greasy pregnant hippo on ice, but that’s just part of its clunker charm baby. Like any good first vehicle, it isn’t what it is, but what it represents – and in a world this vast, what it represents is freedom. There’s nothing stopping you from immediately jumping off the golden path and disappearing into the great unknown. In fact, if you were to beeline story missions, you’d likely find yourself feeling the size of the world in a somewhat negative way. This is Borderlands with less borders, more lands after all, and Kairos is a sizable place. Your jaunts from mission to mission can feel immense, but straying off the path and getting distracted by shiny things is absolutely worthwhile, because the true wealth of this game is in turning over rocks and seeing what comes scuttling out from underneath.

Unique bosses lurk around every corner, chilling in the open world awaiting your challenge. Madcap side missions ask you to collect geyser nuggets and help a group of locals get seriously sloshed. There’s treasure to find, bespoke challenges to uncover and even opportunities to hold out against waves of beasts or bumpkins – and that’s barely scratching the surface. The translation to true open world has been a carefully considered one, and the outcome is a game world teeming with stuff to do and rewards to reap. Christ, one mission saw fellow WellPlaydian, Adam Ryan, and I assisting the most ick-inducing animal breeder you can imagine, and the reward was a cosmetic headpiece that swapped our noggins for a sock puppet thresher. Worth every spine-tingling second of my time, though I feel poor Adam is still scarred for life.

Don’t need to obey road rules if you aren’t on a road

While on foot, your character locomotion offerings are some of the best I have seen in a first person game. I say ‘on foot’, but in reality the addition of a hovering jetpack proves without a doubt that bullet-blazing fun is always made better with verticality in mind, as you levitate between platforms for new vantage points and exploration opportunities. Alongside a double jump, a ground pound, the ability to clamber up walls and even use an energy tether whip to yank yourself to new locations, the way you view the world changes to one of endless potential. There are very few places you can’t get to, and even then you’d be surprised at how often a narrative event will change a small bit of the landscape to allow you forward. This all coalesces beautifully when your finger is on the trigger, sprinting and sliding into occasional cover – or rocketing into the sky with your whip, to hover and rain fiery death upon all who oppose you. It feels a lot like playing Apex Legends, only without needing to play…well, Apex Legends.

All of these movement options are needed to tame the surface of Kairos, as enemy variety with Borderlands 4 has hit a perfect harmony of both implementation and diversification. Every faction within the game has clear baddies that do particular things, and they all have lovely clear labels to make sure you can clue into their threat immediately. Diversification then comes from the myriad of wild and exciting suffixes that get applied to enemies, which suddenly remix them into a whole new threat. A foe may be Vampiric, and heal with every bullet that hits you, or secretly harbour a miniature black hole that manifests upon its death and drags you inwards for massive damage. There are even some silly ones, like Wealthy, that means an enemy will haemorrhage cash when they perish. These are zany, plentiful, and oftentimes excitingly terrifying when you encounter some specific combos – after nearly 30 hours of playing the game, I was still finding new ones.

To combat some of this, you can also make use of your jetpack fuel to do a quick dash in a direction – either while airborne or on the ground – blowing the roof off of how some encounters should play out. This becomes especially apparent when dealing with some of the scarier enemies in the game, as they paint the ground with impending warnings of massive attacks that are best avoided. And as the threat level rises within the game, those telegraphs shift from casual suggestions to firm expectations, because boss encounters with Borderlands 4 are a far more serious affair, long divorced from the bullet-spongey shoot and dodge occasionally blueprint of games past. They are more akin to an MMO situation, with phases and mechanics that have been carefully designed to account for all of the neat tricks a player can do, but without crossing a line and becoming mentally exhausting to keep track of.

Long before you throw down with the big boss dogs, you’ll need to agonise over which Vault Hunter most appeals to you. I am sorry to say that Gearbox has delivered a range of spectacular player characters to choose from in this incarnation, and recommending one is near impossible. While I completed the game as Vex, leveraging my amazing magical kitty to divert attention away from myself, I also dipped a toe into both Rafa and Amon and can safely say that the skill trees and capacity for carnage is wide and varied between all of them. Even my time playing alongside Adam, witnessing his Harlowe capabilities, put a quiet thought to rest that maybe she was the weakest of the cast. That Gravitar gameplay is nuts. Mad science is really just another term for fun science.

Getting to know your Vault Hunter and their rampant potential is actually one of the best selling points of Borderlands 4. Past games have had endless builds and wikis dedicated to wringing the most fun out of any of the cast, and nearly all of them come with the caveat that you need to invest a lot of time to get to the ‘fun’ part. While I have no doubt that this will come to pass with time for Fourderlands, this really is an example of the journey being just as fun as the destination. One thing I appreciate is how the game has no overt focus on an Experience Bar. Quite often these are presented front and centre, a very obvious carrot to keep you plodding forward on your treadmill of progress – like a developer cheat code to keep you engaged and slacken the need to produce a particularly engaging world. Players with atrophied MMO brains (or heck, any kind of modern mind) get their dopamine from increasing numbers and bars filling up – but Borderlands 4 seems much more comfortable to deliver world-and-adventure first and foremost, relegating your progress to a tiny dial that is very squint to find it.

A hefty portion of this is due to how player growth feels meticulously planned. You get your initial action skill quite quickly, then an augment to change the behaviour of it shortly after that. You can then freely swap your augments, giving you some agency in playing with your approach on the fly. This means you aren’t endlessly hungry for skill points, simply due to the fact you already have some fun levers to pull. It’s so common-sensical it almost leaves me feeling a bit goofy for not desiring such a simple player-power-progression path sooner.

You already have fun toys to distract you now, so the wait for bigger and louder stuff is bearable. It will all naturally come in time.

Warning, object in crosshairs may be closer than it appears

Beyond skills, there are a lot of moving parts in Borderlands 4, considering that weapons are now made up of specific branded parts. Instead of simply having a Torgue assault rifle firing explosives, you can now come across a gun with a Torgue part attachment offering an explosive secondary fire. Maliwan, known for its elemental effects, can now have a guest role on a different gun, allowing your payload to sear or freeze flesh. In my time playing, I was constantly finding new alternative firing methods, unique quirks and oddball instruments of death. The depth on offer is staggering, and this is without even considering the exclusive effects of legendary quality weapons.

This means that identifying weapon upgrades can be a little daunting. While at times it can be as simple as comparing numbers, the additional bells and whistles of your boomsticks mean you have a great deal more to consider. This can also tie into the particular Vault Hunter you may be playing, leveraging their own specialised playstyle into what bullets work best. Couple this with enhancements (equippable passive modifiers) and the tried-and-true Class Mod system to impact your build away from skill points, and I was swiftly having the kind of fun that used to feel locked away behind 30 hours of grinding in Borderlands games past.

On the surface it can look overwhelming, but really once you understand a few key elements you’ll start to enter a groove. The devs have been very amenable with a range of menu-tutorials to get you up to speed on where to look and how to manipulate your loadout, with an onboarding experience that masterfully avoids you getting bogged down in menus. It’s deep without feeling abyssal, it’s varied without feeling staggering – easily the most involved Borderlands has ever felt, but still much more approachable than many other games that wear the RPG hat. But the most important part is that it is unmistakably fun as hell, because every dropped gun is a potential gateway to a whole new deathdealing experience.

There is no denying how good a loot explosion feels

Now, the elephant in the room. Borderlands has a long history of unique narrative exploration – a thick marbling of humour has always persisted within the series, and it has been a selling point for some. However, Borderlands 3 received a thick lashing for what can only be described as being too much, leading to comments from even Randy Pitchford himself that the entry had become a ‘parody’ of what Borderlands should be. Speaking to so many people attached to the project, who openly and confidently told me that Borderlands 4 is being handled in a very different way – and having played it myself – I can say that yes, the tone and storytelling are back in a good spot. A very good spot.

The humour present is clever, and even when it isn’t, it is still a ‘good’ kind of dumb. Enemy barks within the world are often full of hilarious little tidbits, such as Adam dispatching an enemy who shot back a simple “Yeah, that’s fair” as their death gurgle. Echo device discussions between characters are snappy and fun, with characters quipping when appropriate – and brilliantly, many characters actually refer to you by name, rather than the generic ‘Vault Hunter’ of times past. It adds an organic, believable sheen to this larger than life story, with your place at the centre of it feeling real, and earned.

Narrative moments are allowed to breathe when the tone calls for it

There is also a seriousness to the game that is appreciable. Moments that need breathing room are given the opportunity to do so. Characters have moods and their communications match the tone of a given situation, so they won’t call you up, Cousin Roman style, to blurt out some aggressive one-liner during an introspective moment. The game’s narrative is very Borderlands’ish, full of amazing space magic and larger-than-life characters from every wedge of the alignment spectrum – but it doesn’t betray itself or trip over its intentions rushing to a fart joke. 

Even side content, away from the overarching story, is allowed to ask questions and suggest things to the player. In a solo session, I picked up a mission to speak to a missile – no, not a typo, an actual unexploded bomb – and find out what it wanted. Her name was Gigi, and she had fallen into a human settlement (think Megaton in Fallout 3), and had been asking for help for a while. Gigi was having a crisis of self. She was a bomb, after all, and had not exploded. So the quest asked me to repair her. During the quest, you find out that some town folk had been talking to the missile, even though they lacked the technology to hear her. They’d share their hardships, and feel good about sharing their thoughts. They admitted they suspected the missile could hear them, and were appreciative of the sympathetic ear, their perseverance filling Gigi with hope. So you gather the parts, make a pretty pointed suggestion that perhaps Gigi doesn’t need to explode, and eventually come to terms with her need to prove she’s not a dud. So, you move her away from the settlement and press the button.

What happens next I will not reveal, but It’s odd to find yourself questioning self, and purpose, through the vessel of an intelligent missile in a Borderlands game.

There are very few problems that can’t be solved with an explosion

While the game is gorgeous from every angle, performance issues initially soured the experience for me. The majority of my review experience saw intense load hitching as I crossed the enormous world – the game sputtering and gasping for a spell when a new area was loaded around me. It was described to me as a known issue, apparently the main target of the impending Day 1 patch – however a hefty amount of frame drop during intense combat scenarios was absent from that docket. It never plunged low enough to compromise your combat experience, but the sheer gulf of difference between the game blasting at full frames versus the dips was uncomfortably broad.

Of course, once I had finished penning my broader thoughts on why this was a huge bummer, a pre-Day 1 patch was deployed for the review period. Outlook so far is very good, with a noticeable improvement to the game in many of the problem areas that I encountered during my initial run through – although the trade off seems to be a slightly longer loading experience when you first enter the game. I am no expert, but I assume the play here was to front-load some of the games loftier needs during launch, instead of streaming them on the fly. All in all, a promising development considering that this is not the promised Day 1 patch.

Special mention has to be made to the sheer joy on offer when experiencing this game with friends. I was fortunate enough to dig through a huge portion of the game with a buddy, and the frictionless way this was handled was a welcome relief from recent oddities in other titles that pretended to offer a ‘co-op’ experience and ended up feeling like little more than a half-baked mod. Simple mechanics such as being able to teleport to your friend at any time, regardless of combat state, does so much to make the huge world feel properly shared – especially when one of you takes a wrong turn and ends up in a camp full of angry bandits. Or a ping system to highlight a location, or a rather scary enemy, and help direct attention and get you aligned on what to do. Even the cutscenes within the game are clever enough to supplement the correct player character for their point of view, so nobody feels like they’re just along for the ride. It all just works, and it’s a relief to see that such an offering is still possible in the modern gaming space.

Words of wisdom from Moxxi

Final Thoughts

As a series, Borderlands has never really had a lot to prove. This is a statement that could easily be inflammatory when acknowledged in a vacuum, but really it speaks more to the formula always being a case of ‘near-perfect since inception’. A new Borderlands game, even in its worst incarnation, would still offer that unmistakable (and unreplicatable) Borderlands experience, and all would be well. But Borderlands 4 feels like a noticeable leap forward, not just for the series, but for the concept of co-op shooters in general. This is the first time I’ve felt that a Borderlands game has had valuable lessons to impart on others, and I genuinely find myself hoping that observers are taking note. There’s a real blueprint here for how to deliver a multiplayer shooter experience that isn’t disappointing or gratingly uninspired at every other turn. The gifted, slacker student has well and truly become the teacher.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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