Borderlands 4 Review: Evolution not Required

The Borderlands franchise has long been a favorite of mine. I first saw kids playing it at a convention and fell in love with the art style. I’ve sunk over 500 hours into the first two games on a variety of systems. However, there has not been a good mainline title in the series since Borderlands 2 released in 2012. When Borderlands 4 was announced, I wondered if it would be a return to form for the games, or another bomb like Borderlands 3. I decided to find out. 

For those unfamiliar, Borderlands is a cell-shaded looter shooter: basically you are constantly getting new gear after every battle which you can sell or equip. Constantly finding new guns is a large part of what makes these games fun. The series takes place in a dystopian science fiction land, and usually revolves around killing the big bad guy and opening a vault that is filled with extra cool gear and tougher bad guys. You play as one of four vault hunters. These vault hunters are broken down into pretty standard character classes: a soldier, a tank (big strong smash-y person), a rogue and a support/sniper character. 

I tried Borderlands 4 with two different vault hunters, Rafa and Vex. Playing with the soldier Rafa and his tech armor required a quick playstyle, shooting enemies and moving while waiting for his special attack to recharge. While it was fun, I only spent a couple hours with him before making Vex my primary. Vex is a rogue Siren, and her special skill is summoning a cat-like familiar named Trouble that does elemental damage that mirrors your active weapon. 

Playing Vex in this configuration had me swapping weapons frequently to utilize different elemental types against enemies. Trouble was fun, when he worked correctly. Oftentimes in battle, Trouble was nowhere to be seen. My companion would either be walking around behind me until I used his special ability to pounce on an opponent, or he would be a star floating in the sky for some reason. When he would fight alongside Vex, they were a lot of fun to use. 

So far, I have played about half of the game. Most of my notes on Borderlands 4 were negative. Many aspects of this game are not good or even broken. Despite that, I will continue playing it, and here’s why. 

After falling in love with Borderlands after the first two games, it has been a rough few years for the series. The story for Borderlands 3 was filled with poor jokes, cringeworthy dialogue and forgettable characters. However, the main story beats in Borderlands 4 ignite a sense of urgency that has your character running to the next part of the main story, ignoring any exclamation points that might be nearby signaling a side quest. The main antagonist is a character called the Timekeeper who rules the planet of Kairos. While not the most intimidating bad guy, he is better than any the franchise has put out in a decade. 

And that is why Borderlands fans will love this game. It is not spectacular (quite the opposite), but fans of the series have been starved for so long for anything resembling an interesting and fun story. Borderlands 4 is the B- a constant F student brings home, and everyone who cares for him is thrilled and excited. Others on the outside might be confused by this, but the family gets it. 

The other reason I will continue to play Borderlands 4 is the loot. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford recently said there is a lack of “looter shooters” out there, and he is right. This game scratches an itch that has been growing since I finished Diablo IV. Add in that you can now occasionally get top-level legendary gear from vending machines and Golden Keys, a way to unlock a special chest through codes Gearbox distributes on social media sites, and I am all in. Overpowered guns and armor are what make this game so much fun. 

That said, let’s not pretend that this game is not very broken on PC. I would often empty a clip into an enemy only to have my first bullet hit them after I reloaded and started firing again. The game plays slow and janky, even on the low settings of a decent graphics card. I quit one mission because it required me to kill all enemies and follow the person I was trying to save. I cleared the room and searched it over twice to make sure I killed all the enemies, despite the game saying I had not. There were none left, and even the individual I was saving in the game was playing with her glasses and yawning. 

One of the areas Borderlands 4 fails early on is with side quests. I played one where a hungover person sent me to find the person who got them drunk. That individual sent me out to find ingredients for a hangover cure. It required running all around the map, finding these items and bringing them back. I played multiple similar missions, where hangover ingredients were replaced by finding a local animal and then finding it a mate. 

Another type of side quest that is prevalent in this game requires you to grab some item and take it all the way across the map. If you use fast travel of any kind or try to use your speeder bike, the item is dropped. You literally have to walk across the map with the item in your hand to do these quests.

This got me thinking, how are these still a thing? What other video games make you do these boring repetitive tasks for little to no payoff? Borderlands has been doing these since the beginning, but the payoff was usually at least some memorable jokes. For those who have played Borderlands 2, the Bullymong quest comes to mind. In it, you learn more about a local species by killing dozens of them, but at least the running commentary from the questgiver is hilarious. In Borderlands 4, most of the jokes on these quests fall flat.

And that is one of my big complaints about Borderlands 4, the game fails to evolve in virtually any way. Same cheap sex jokes, except not as funny. Same sidequests on repeat. Even the graphics and design of the game look virtually the same. Borderlands as a series fails to evolve.

But wait, there’s (plenty) more! 

The user interface in Borderlands 4 is abysmal, especially if you are playing with a controller on PC. Cities on the map are overrun with icons. If you want to use fast travel to get there, it is nearly impossible to click on with the analog stick. Looking at your backpack in the game is equally frustrating. Items that are equipped are mixed in with everything else your character looted. Most games would have these at the top of the list or separated, but Borderlands 4 only adds a small yellow checkmark to them, which is difficult to notice on an orange gun, especially if you are colorblind. 

Tracking quests in this game is equally horrible. Pushing up on the D-pad should show the direction for your active quest. However, more often than not, it is wrong. Sometimes the active quest gets changed without the player doing anything. Other times, the directions are just incorrect, like South when the destination is North. You can set your own markers as well which show up in a different color. These will occasionally just disappear off the map. 

A nice feature of Borderlands 4 is that in town there is a lost loot machine, a place to pick up weapons you might have missed during your adventures. The machine allows you to claim these items to inventory or trash them if you do not want to keep them. The problem is if you trash these items, you do not get the money you would if you sold them. Since there is no way to mark these items to sell within the lost loot machine, you need to claim everything in there to your inventory, go into your super fun backpack (see above), and mark what you want to sell from there.

There are many more annoyances with Borderlands 4, including items disappearing randomly from your backpack, invisible walls when you are trying to get some places in the world and vaults that once were the highlight of the game, but now only drop mediocre weapons. That last one is especially painful after playing the other games. Also, if you are playing on PC, you can expect to spend 30 minutes per week waiting for shaders to compile. Sometimes this even happens when you are in the process of fast traveling to a new location in the game. 

Borderlands 4 feels like it was developed shortly after Borderlands 2.The problem is 13 years have passed, and what makes a good game has changed. Gearbox apparently did not receive this memo, and are relying on what might have worked a decade ago. Basic modern day gaming concepts seem lost on them. Borderlands 4 is not a good game, but it is a fun game for those who played other titles in the series. Too many glitches, errors and poor choices in this game make it difficult, and not in a fun way. Overall, I give Borderlands 4 2.5 out of 5 stars. If you are not a huge Borderlands fan, it is worth waiting to pick this title up until it is roughly $20 or less. The story is fantastic, the look is okay, but everything else seems stuck in the past.

Borderlands 4 is available on PlayStation, Xbox and PC.

Review Haiku

Compelling story
Design choices stuck in past
Save some cash and wait