The planet Kairos is a world shackled. Under the absolute dominion of a mysterious figure known as The Timekeeper, its inhabitants live in a state of perpetual subjugation. Into this prison world comes a new crew of Vault Hunters, lured by the promise of legendary treasure. They instead find themselves at the center of a brewing rebellion.
Borderlands 4 positions itself as a deliberate refinement of the series’ looter-shooter formula, sanding down the abrasive personality of its direct predecessor. It delivers the most fluid and satisfying combat the franchise has ever seen, supported by a wonderfully flexible character progression system. This mechanical prowess, however, exists alongside a disjointed open world and a story that struggles to give players a reason to care about the fight.
A Symphony of Motion and Mayhem
The moment-to-moment gunplay feels exceptional, representing a clear high point for the series. Every firearm possesses a tangible weight and a distinct personality dictated by its manufacturer. A Jakobs revolver kicks with satisfying force, rewarding precision shots with ricocheting bullets. A Maliwan SMG requires a brief charge before unleashing a torrent of elemental energy, forcing a slight adjustment to timing.
A Tediore weapon can be thrown like a grenade upon reloading, turning spent ammunition into a final, explosive act of defiance. This deep-seated variety ensures that the core action of shooting remains engaging for dozens of hours. The feedback loop is a masterclass in player satisfaction; every defeated foe erupts in a gratifying explosion of numbers, viscera, and the promise of superior equipment.
Enemy design complements this system well, presenting new challenges that demand adaptation. You will face small mechanical spiders that reflect projectiles when they spin, forcing you to time your shots, and hulking crystalline beasts that are immune until you shatter their protective shards. These encounters prevent combat from becoming a simple matter of pointing and shooting.
What truly transforms the experience is the new suite of traversal options. A grapple hook, a double jump, and a short-duration jetpack introduce a level of verticality and speed that fundamentally alters the flow of every encounter. Combat arenas are now multi-layered sandboxes that encourage constant movement and repositioning. This system invites a creative and aggressive playstyle. Imagine sliding into a group of fanatics, launching one into the air with a shotgun blast, then using the grapple hook to pull yourself to a high ledge.
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From this vantage point, you can activate your jetpack to hover above the remaining enemies, raining down fire before they can find cover. This newfound agility makes simply moving through the world an engaging act, turning every environment into a potential playground. The arsenal that fuels this chaos drops with incredible frequency, a constant stream of potential upgrades. After every major firefight, the ground is littered with possibilities, encouraging a constant cycle of evaluation and experimentation.
Some guns even feature cross-pollinated manufacturer traits, resulting in bizarre hybrids like a sniper rifle that fires like a gatling gun. The true satisfaction comes from finding a rare weapon that perfectly synergizes with your chosen character build, elevating a good loadout into an engine of destruction.
The Anatomy of a Hunter
Borderlands 4 presents a formidable and well-balanced roster of new protagonists, each offering a distinct path to power. Rafa the Exosoldier embodies the fantasy of a high-tech commando, able to digistruct an array of weapons to control the battlefield. His shoulder-mounted Peacebreaker Cannons can lock onto targets, while his Arc-Knives allow him to dash into melee range for swift, lethal strikes. Vex the Siren is a powerful space-magic wielder, but her abilities are focused on misdirection and summoning. She can create a ghostly doppelganger to draw enemy fire or conjure a spectral beast to fight alongside her, giving her excellent crowd control.
Amon the Forgeknight is a cybernetically enhanced warrior who thrives in the thick of battle, using advanced technology to create elemental axes, whips, and shields. Finally, Harlowe the Gravitar manipulates physics itself, capable of trapping entire groups of enemies in gravity bubbles or creating miniature black holes. From the outset, every character feels powerful and capable in both solo and group play, ensuring no choice feels like a mistake. This is arguably the strongest starting lineup in the series’ history.
Player expression is primarily channeled through the deep character progression system. Each Vault Hunter has three distinct skill trees, each catering to a different playstyle and action skill. This design provides significant build diversity. Vex, for example, can specialize in her Spectral Summoning tree to enhance her ghostly allies.
A different path, however, might see her focusing on elemental damage, using her powers to stack multiple status effects on enemies until they melt. The game actively encourages players to explore these options by making skill reallocation simple and affordable. Finding a new legendary class mod that boosts specific skills might inspire a complete rebuild, and the system is flexible enough to accommodate that curiosity without punishment.
This is where the game’s RPG elements feel most rewarding, as you meticulously craft a character whose abilities perfectly match your preferred way to play. The developers further respect the player’s time with a feature that allows subsequent characters to skip the main campaign entirely after one completion. This is a smart, player-forward choice for those who are more invested in the mechanics of buildcrafting than in re-experiencing a known story.
An Open World with Walls
The most significant structural change is the shift from large, discrete zones to a single, seamless open world on Kairos. This new approach offers a greater sense of scale and freedom, letting players pursue objectives across different regions or simply set off into the wilds to see what they can find. If a distant rock formation or shimmering structure catches your eye, you can head towards it without encountering a loading screen.
Quality-of-life features support this design well. You can summon a vehicle on demand instead of searching for a specific station, and you can instantly teleport to a teammate’s location, making cooperative exploration effortless. This structure empowers players to chart their own course through the campaign, sometimes spending hours just clearing the fog of war from a new region. The ability for a group of friends to split up and pursue their own objectives before seamlessly reuniting for a major mission is impressive.
This ambition for an open frontier is unfortunately hampered by the world’s physical construction. Player exploration is frequently and jarringly interrupted by invisible walls and sloped surfaces that your character cannot climb. This creates a powerful dissonance; the game gives you a jetpack and a grapple hook, suggesting limitless mobility, then denies you the ability to climb a moderately steep hill.
The promise of a boundless world collides with these artificial limitations, breaking immersion and creating frustration. The world of Kairos feels less like a real, traversable place and more like a curated collection of combat arenas connected by specific travel corridors. The map is filled with side quests and activities, but these rarely offer compelling narrative diversions.
Many feel like checklists designed to guide you from one point to another. In contrast to games that use optional content to tell powerful, self-contained stories and build a richer world, the side quests here function mostly as a necessary means to gain experience points. You must engage with them to keep pace with the main story’s level requirements, which can make them feel like obligatory filler.
An Echo, Not a Voice
In a clear reaction to its predecessor, Borderlands 4 adopts a much more subdued tone. The writing steps back from the constant barrage of jokes and meme-focused humor, aiming for a more grounded science-fiction atmosphere with occasional moments of levity. This change will be a welcome one for many players who found the last entry’s style grating.
The story benefits from a strong central antagonist in The Timekeeper, a figure who evokes some of the menace of the series’ best villains. His omnipresent control over Kairos provides the conflict with clear stakes and a tangible sense of threat. He is a target you understand and a force whose defeat feels necessary for the world to heal.
The narrative surrounding him is less successful. The effort to create an inoffensive cast appears to have produced a bland one. The new supporting characters you ally with are built on simple archetypes, a stoic soldier or a shady scientist, and they are seldom developed beyond these initial impressions. Their dialogue is functional, serving to direct you to the next objective, but it rarely reveals personality or forges an emotional connection with the player. This becomes a significant problem because the central plot hook is fumbled.
Early on, your character is implanted with a device that allows The Timekeeper to control them, a fantastic source of personal stakes. This threat is almost immediately neutralized by a friendly robot, deflating the narrative tension. Without a strong personal motivation or a cast of characters to become invested in, the grand plot of liberating a planet feels abstract. The story tells you why you should fight, but it rarely makes you feel the weight of that fight.
An Unsteady Future
Once the credits roll, the game transitions into its endgame loop, a system designed to keep players engaged long after the main story is complete. At launch, this consists of a few core activities. There is a weekly challenge mission which is a more difficult version of a story level, populated with enemies that have challenging modifiers. One effect might cause them to heal from certain elemental damage types, while another creates a damaging black hole where they die.
There is also a repeatable boss encounter for farming specific gear and a special vendor with guaranteed legendary items whose location changes each week. This provides a solid but sparse foundation. The loop is functional for testing new builds and hunting for perfect gear rolls, but it lacks the depth or variety needed to sustain long-term interest. It is a starting point that will require substantial additions to compete with more established live-service titles.
This content is further troubled by the game’s technical state. While playable, the experience is littered with rough edges. Performance on PC can be uneven, with frame rate hitches during intense moments. More concerning are the significant issues plaguing the cooperative multiplayer experience. Friends playing together report frequent lag, enemy desynchronization that makes combat confusing, and progression-blocking glitches that can halt a mission in its tracks.
Some players have noted that progress on the world map does not save if you are not the host, and that vending machines can sometimes appear empty for anyone but the group leader. For a series whose identity is so deeply tied to its shared social experience, these problems are not minor annoyances. They actively create friction and undermine the core promise of playing with friends, turning what should be a seamless adventure into a technically compromised one.
The Review
Borderlands 4
Borderlands 4 features the best combat and movement mechanics in the series’ history, creating a spectacular and kinetic shooter. This mechanical excellence is paired with deep, flexible buildcrafting that makes character progression a joy. However, this superb gameplay is let down by a bland and emotionally distant story, a flawed open-world design that restricts its own promise of freedom, and significant technical issues that severely hamper the essential co-op experience. It is a thrilling machine with a hollow core.
PROS
- Exceptional and satisfying gunplay with distinct weapon variety.
- Transformative movement mechanics that elevate both combat and exploration.
- Deep, flexible buildcrafting with an excellent starting roster of Vault Hunters.
- Player-friendly features like the optional campaign skip.
CONS
- A bland story with forgettable supporting characters and weak motivations.
- Open-world design is frequently undermined by invisible walls and restrictive terrain.
- Side quests feel like uninspired filler required for leveling.
- Significant technical issues and bugs, especially in co-op multiplayer.
