Borderlands 4 lands as a direct follow-up to Borderlands 3, and it arrives with a clear mission: keep the franchise’s frantic, loot-driven gunplay intact while fixing the bits that tripped up the last entry. What you get is a game that, in the moment-to-moment combat, often feels like Borderlands at its absolute best — but its personality choices and pacing split opinions. If you live for new guns, creative builds, and chaotic encounters, this game will eat your spare time. If you hoped for a character-driven story with sharp, memorable edges, you may finish the campaign feeling oddly neutral.
Vault Hunters: distinct, powerful, and fun to master
Borderlands 4 gives players four new Vault Hunters, each with three skill trees and a clearly different playstyle. Vex, the Siren, summons decoys and fanged beasts to distract enemies; Amon the Forgeknight conjures elemental weapons for brutal melee; Rafa (the Exo-Soldier) mixes fast movement with deadly arc-knives and turrets; and another Hunter brings utility and control. Each class feels useful across scenarios — crowd control, boss damage, and co-op support — and the game rewards experimentation. You won’t feel stuck on one path: respecs cost money, but looting and selling abound early on, so swapping builds becomes part of the fun rather than a setback.
Customization runs deeper than skill trees. You unlock cosmetic heads, torsos, and color schemes through missions and challenges, and you can modify summonable vehicles and your Echo-4 robot companion. That variety, plus unique active skill permutations, pushes the series’ long-standing strength — buildcraft — forward in meaningful ways.
Core combat and loot: addictive and mechanically polished
The shooting in Borderlands 4 hits hard. Weapons feel weighty, abilities synergize crisply, and the game constantly tempts you to try something new — one moment you’re using a rocket shotgun with an underbarrel flamethrower, the next you’re tossing a black-hole grenade into a choke and watching elemental combos shred enemies. Enemies explode into colorful loot cascades, and bosses drop a genuine rash of interesting gear.
The developers also tightened movement: sliding and climbing build on Borderlands 3’s base, while new gliding and grappling-hook options open vertical play and creative combat setups. The grappling hook does more than traverse: you can yank explosive containers, strip shields, or fling yourself into tactical positions. Those moments of emergent creativity — turning a shield-explosion into an airborne kill, for example — deliver some of the game’s best thrills.
Open world and Kairos: ambitious but uneven
For the first time in the series, Borderlands 4 leans heavily into open-world design. It dumps Pandora for the moon Kairos and spreads players across four major regions with distinct biomes, hidden fortresses, silos that lead to vault locations, and collectible caches. The world gives the game room to breathe and provides plenty of places to experiment with builds and traversal.
That space comes with tradeoffs. Some areas feel lifeless between points of interest; long drives sometimes feel like filler. Fast travel and respawn points can sit far apart, and a handful of missions force extended treks carrying items you can’t fast-travel with. The open world works well as a sandbox for loot-and-gunplay, but it never feels as handcrafted or dense as the best entries in the genre — by late game, exploration can tilt toward checklisting rather than discovery.
Story and characters: personality split
This is where reviewers diverge. The plot places the Vault Hunters up against the Timekeeper, an antagonist who implants a tracking chip and rules Kairos with an iron fist; you quickly join the Crimson Resistance (Claptrap plays a role in its founding) to rally disparate tribes against him. Some players will find the narrative’s more grounded tone and well-written NPCs endearing — side characters get real moments, some side arcs impress with emotional beats, and the game balances humor with stakes.
Others will find the cast intentionally unoffensive to a fault. New NPCs sometimes arrive as archetypes — the big-hearted brawler, the morally dubious scientist — and the emotional hooks can feel thin. Where earlier Borderlands entries leaned into loud, divisive personalities that provoked love-or-hate reactions, Borderlands 4 sometimes chooses bland relatability over memorable edges. The result: you may laugh out loud at several scenes, but you might also fail to feel much when a side character dies or when the plot pivots.
Side missions and pacing: gems and filler
Side content displays the game’s widest range. The title includes brilliant, multi-quest side arcs that add character and worldbuilding (one mission even leans into surreal humor), and some side lines recall the quality of best-in-class RPGs. Yet other side quests fall flat: optional tasks sometimes feel like grindy filler meant to patch your experience level rather than meaningful narrative detours. The game’s scaling and “soft level requirement” system pushes players to complete optional missions or grind to match enemy levels; that loop strengthens replayability but can break pacing if you dislike long detours.
Enemy variety and combat longevity
Early and mid-game combat feels fresh and inventive, but repetition sets in for some players. You’ll face a huge array of weapons and enemy types, and boss encounters often require pattern recognition and movement rather than brute force. Still, by the halfway point many players report seeing the same enemy archetypes recycled in new skins — which dulls combat novelty and stretches the game’s runtime.
Performance and polish
At launch, some platforms showed technical hiccups. Players running high-end PC hardware have reported unstable frame rates in certain areas and cutscenes locked to lower frame rates, which can jar immersion. The studio baked large systems into Unreal Engine 5, and that complexity sometimes shows. Patches aimed at smoothing performance will likely arrive, but expect uneven technical behavior on release.
Endgame and replay value
Borderlands 4 keeps players busy after the main story. Level scaling, rare loot drops, and deep skill specializations give endgame builds real teeth, and co-op play remains a highlight: the class synergies and chaotic gunfights make multiplayer feel alive. Whether you stick around depends on how much you value loot-driven gameplay over narrative payoff.
Final take
Borderlands 4 excels as a mechanical package: gunplay, movement, build diversity, and loot design represent the series at a high water mark. It also takes risks by toning down the franchise’s loudest comedic impulses and dialing up a grounded tone — a choice that will delight some players and disappoint others who loved the franchise’s previous emotional extremes. Expect occasional repetition and the possibility of technical bumps early on, but if you came for inventive builds and a steady stream of satisfying firefights, Borderlands 4 will keep you glued to Kairos for dozens of hours. If your primary desire is a cast of unforgettable, scene-stealing characters, the game might leave you wanting a sharper personality.
