The first thing one realizes about “Borderlands 4,” the first true entry in this beloved series since 2019’s “Borderlands 3,” is that this game is massive. You should know that I’ve spend dozens of hours in this world and barely scratched its surface, but in a season with two film festivals for this critic (TIFF & Fantastic) and a number of other games that demand attention—“Ghost of Yotei,” “Silent Hill f,” and “Alien: Rogue Incursion” coverage all forthcoming—it’s time to put my Vault Hunter aside for now. The truth is that I’ve truly taken my time in “Borderlands 4,” exploring regions, doing side missions, and experiencing what this incredibly detailed world has to offer. I’m nowhere near done, but I can say confidently that I will return to and spend dozens more hours in this universe. And that you should too. Just be ready for a lot of those hours to feel the same.
The basics of “Borderlands 4” are familiar in that it’s what is often called a “looter shooter.” Waves of enemies—they could have called this “One Battle After Another”—meet their bloody demise at the end of your always-cycling weapons in a first-person shooter that’s built on an ever-rising arsenal of firepower and RPG-esque skills. It’s another game in which missions and sometimes even just exploration leads your character to bigger and better boomsticks with which to take out the enemy, who drop new weapons to play with, and so on and so on.
Much of the charm of these games comes in the tweaked repetition. Yes, the waves of enemies start to get a bit numbing (and more so in this one than the best “Borderlands” games) but the manner in which encounters unfold are constantly being adjusted based on your choices when it comes to your arsenal. Go at enemies with a pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, grenades, or special skills that are uniquely upgraded to your play style. And there’s incredible variety within the weapon types in that one shotgun may come with incendiary bullets while another expels electric shocks, and so on. What it amounts to is a game heavy on combat that still feels personalized. There are so many combinations of loadouts, skill sets, and just different play styles that no one’s “Borderlands” experience is exactly the same as anyone else’s.
At the opening of “Borderlands 4,” you choose one of four Vault Hunters: Rafa the Exo-Soldier, Harlowe the Gravitar, Vex the Siren, and Amon the Forgenight (who was my personal warrior du jour). Characters familiar to fans of the franchise like Claptrap, Mad Moxxi, Lilith, Zane, and more also resurface. Six years after the last game, Vault Hunters have traveled to Kairos to plunder its vaults, but the planet is protected by a figure known as the Timekeeper and his waves of forces known as the Order, who are all waiting patiently to be murdered by you. After escaping the Timekeeper’s original attack, your Vault Hunter travels to the headquarters of the Crimson Resistance, where they basically have to rebuild the rebellion, going on missions around Kairos with the assistance of Claptrap and other allies recruited along the way. Kairos is enormous, and, unlike past “Borderlands” games, almost completely open world. These games usually hinged on sections of a setting that would open as the story progressed, but you truly can travel around the bulk of Kairos at your leisure, exploring its many regions.
Now, to be truthful, a lot of Kairos looks the same. As you venture north and east from the opening chapters, new climates come into play, but this is an open world that can feel repetitive as ships of same-looking enemies drop into its many regions. While “Borderlands 4” promises over 50 hours of chaos, one wonders how many of those hours are almost exactly the same. Some of the wave battles go on just a bit too long, and it’s really up to the player to introduce variety into the combat. It’s already gotten to the point in which I’m not really switching up my loadout in a strategic way but to switch up one combat sequence from another. Maybe I could try a sniper rifle approach to these 40 bad guys? What does this throwing knife I found really do?
This kind of customization weaves through all of “Borderlands 4.” There’s more personalization than ever before, not just in the skills that you choose for your Vault Hunter, but in the hundreds of cosmetics you find nearly as often as new weapons. New outfits, camos, skins for your vehicle—again, everyone’s “BL4” is gonna be different and that authorship is part of the game’s charm. There are also some new cool mechanics, including a grappling hook that can be used in and out of combat, and some dodge and ground-pound mechanics that give the battle scenes a different flavor than previous entries in the series.
In a time when shrinkflation is a viral topic, it’s notable that the main complaint one could lodge at “Borderlands 4” is that it’s too much game (and they promise even more content drops post-launch to keep you returning to Kairos). Some missions have a few too many objectives, some combat sequences a few too many enemies, etc. Even though I don’t think I’m even halfway through the experience, I’ve already grown tired of a few bad guys that I think I’ve killed roughly a thousand times. But just as that kind of feeling starts to invade the “Borderlands 4” experience, a new weapon, a new (or familiar) character in the story, even just a new cool outfit fires the sparkplugs again. After all, these games are about chaos and excess. Why be too hard on one for giving us too much of a good thing?
The publisher provided a review copy of this title. It is now available on PS5, Windows, and Xbox with a Switch 2 version forthcoming.
