Borderlands 4

Written by Sean Cahill on 9/11/2025 for PC  

The Borderlands series is back with another entry in the series that was berthed over 15 years ago. The open-world looter shooter that tries to top itself with how many different combinations of guns it can come up with hasn’t had an entry in the main series since Borderlands 3 released in 2019. This also feels like a pivotal game in the series, as the hype and talk around it seems a little muted, but even if that’s the case, Gearbox has delivered a solid, if not great, entry in the series with Borderlands 4.

Welcome to Kairos, Vault Hunter

If you’re new to the series, Borderlands is probably best summarized as a loot shooter with a whole lot of chaos. This entry centers around the planet Kairos and an entity known as the Timekeeper. The intro paints the picture that fans of the series are well-familiar with: A planet that has been ravaged by battles, covered in crazy people. The Timekeeper is your big bad: an imposing figure who controls people by the use of bolts physically embedded in the populace's bodies. The intro shows what happens when those bolts are ripped out in typical Borderlands fashion: Psychos ripping out the bolt of an older person and slapping a mask on their face to formally christen them as one of them…only to get run over by Vault Hunters, the stars of the show.

For story mode, players will pick from one of four hunters, each one of them with their own unique skills but all capable of arming themselves to the teeth with as many guns as possible. My choice was Vex, the Siren, or as the game succinctly states in the intro: She’s a f***ing witch! Her ability is to generate a copy of herself in a couple of different forms, whether she wields a scythe in her reaper form or just arms herself in her spectre form. To say that Vex isn’t a fan of anything she’s attacking is putting it mildly, given her hand gesture upon summoning one of her clones. Shout-out to all my Echo Knights out there in D&D. This is your character, and she’s voiced quite well by Judy Alice Lee.

Your other vault hunters to choose from are Rafa the Exo-Soldier, Amon the Forgeknight (The man dual-wields battle axes, for the love of all that’s holy), and Harlow the Gravitar. All of these hunters should be tried out to find your favorite set of unique skills, but if all you care about is firing guns, you really can’t go wrong. They’re all fun and provide their own unique commentary as you’re destroying anything that moves in the game. Claptrap is here as well to help the Crimson Resistance in their battle against the Timekeeper.

Each hunter has three skill trees that they can go down, and it’s completely up to you to decide how to play them. There’s nothing fancy here: Find the bastards, shoot the bastards, take their loot, and use the experience to beef yourself up. Rinse and repeat. This is where Borderlands truly shines: I spent a fair chunk of time looking at Vex’s three paths, which are entitled The Fourth Seal, Vexcalation, and Here Comes Trouble. You’ll want to read up on these prior to jumping in because re-specing in game is possible, but it isn’t free, though money isn’t much of an issue unless you’re dying constantly.

Kairos is torn to hell, but it is gorgeous.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Borderlands because of the art style. Even playing on lower graphics levels, this game looks good. I’m running on an AMD Ryzen 7800 X3D and a RTX 4070 Ti for full disclosure, which this game set my default graphic levels to the third setting of “High.” Textures still come through in a beautiful way and the detail on every single gun makes me spend a few extra moments checking out some of the ridiculous models used before lighting up a handful of psychos while chuckling at the add-ons or ammo types. Have you ever used an assault rifle that’s one part single shot, one part rocket launcher? Well, I have, and let me tell you: It’s an absolute blast….no pun intended. 

The best part of this game truly is all of the wacky combinations you get with your weaponry. Borderlands has different weapon manufacturers, but you don’t have to know that to play. If we’re counting grenades and heavy weapons, there are seven different weapon types. Including the aforementioned two, there are pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles. If this was it, well it wouldn’t be a Borderlands game. The fun comes in all of the absurd combinations. A sniper rifle that somehow doubles as a rocket launcher is a thing! How about a shotgun with homing projectiles? Sure! Do you need different ammo types? Yes, you do. Trust me on that one. All of this is possible in Borderlands 4 and I never got sick of taking a look at what each gun did.

Now, this is a double-edged sword, especially for fans new to the series. Let me say unequivocally that I truly appreciate the level of detail that goes into these combinations, but it can get overwhelming. Early on, a player only has 16 backpack slots and 25 bank slots. It seems like a lot, but you could fill up both of those in the span of about ten minutes. A lot of this game is going into the inventory and checking out your loot to determine if anything is better than what you have. However, it’s not as easy as looking at DPS and going “Yes, make numbers go high” and swapping. There’s accuracy, clip size, reload time, and then add-ons that make you second guess whether that purple gun you have armed is actually worse than the green gun that just dropped. The best thing I can offer to new players is to shoot every single gun. See what they’re like. See how they perform in combat. After that, determine if you like it or not before selling it, and I promise you this: You will be spending a lot of time selling items.

Getting back to the graphics, while I absolutely love all the extra detail that goes into these weapons, we have to talk about Unreal Engine for a minute. I get that Unreal Engine has the top spot in market share with Unity behind it, but the stuttering problem that is well known in Unreal Engine rears its ugly head at the worst times. I don’t want to ding Borderlands 4 for this too harshly, but I was forced to bump my graphics down to Medium in order to avoid frustration. A patch has come out during the review period, and this did help to an extent, but there was enough stutter that I had to keep it at Medium. It’s disappointing, but as I said before: Even at Medium settings, this game still looks beautiful. My hope is that we get another patch right after launch that fully corrects the issue.

Kairos, as you would expect, is a massive area with plenty to do. The main mission takes a while to get rolling as it's a bit of a slow burn to start, but it ramps up as you start meeting NPCs that help you out in the fight. I cannot recommend enough that you pump the brakes on tearing through the main quest line and enjoy the world in front of you. There are plenty of side missions that will force quick decisions and reactions while gaining strength for the main story. There are also world bosses to take on, and those are simple enough to spot: These enemies will spawn randomly on the map and a dome of energy will appear around them. Early on it threw me off as I thought it was integral for a side quest I was doing where I was trying to avoid getting dragged into a meat grinder (No, seriously. And this comes up more than once in the game.) and I stumbled into this dome thinking it was no big deal. Fifteen seconds later I’m crawling around trying to get my second wind after getting run over by the world boss. And yes, you are going to die a lot. Players can fight it all they want: This game is designed to chew you up and spit you out. It’s perfectly fine and part of the experience. The quicksave system uses checkpoints that have the familiar Borderlands alert sound. Sometimes you don’t even realize you hit one until something clocks you for the final blow and ECHO-4 has to pull you back. World bosses are just as fun as anything in this game, and they drop a ton of loot.

Vehicles are back again as it’ll take a bit, but you’ll gain access to your own Digirunner that is combat enabled, but it can be destroyed and force a cooldown. It’s fun to shoot things from it, but early on I wouldn’t recommend it for long periods of time. I got knocked off of it pretty quick and blowing through heavily guarded areas just isn’t possible sometimes, and it’s pretty easy to know when you’re hitting an area like that. Your compass up top doubles as a radar and it will light up when enemies are close. Keep an eye on it as it will help you immensely if you’re getting pelted from a distance.

The loot and inventory system is still the best and worst part of Borderlands

Alright, let’s talk about it: The loot and inventory system.

The good parts I already mentioned above: There is loot everywhere. Chests, lockers, toilets, garbage disposals, dust piles. Simply put, you can’t throw a rock in this game without hitting something that has loot. That’s a great thing because I can’t begin to guess how many rounds I’ve fired in the time I’ve played this game. Running out of ammo does happen, but every time it does, it’s a surprise to me. It’s also a moment of terror and panic because if a player is running around with weapons that all use the same ammo type, god help them. Be sure to have a couple different weapon types in your inventory and just keep one eye on the total. It can sneak up on you in a hurry. The emergency is to hop into your inventory and swap to a backup gun that has ammo for it.

As great as the loot system is and to gather up weapons that amount to the full military capacity of a small nation, I cannot stand the inventory system. Taking it further, I hate the bank. Fans of the game will recognize the pain in this because you are going to fill your backpack. This is a guarantee and it’s going to happen tens of hundreds of times through an entire playthrough. In order to free up space on the fly, going into your backpack and sending items that aren’t necessary at that moment or just stuff that’s going to be sold for money can be jettisoned into your bank. The problem is accessing your bank isn’t available simply by hitting the Tab button, and you don’t have access to it right away. Once you gain access to your bank, it is almost guaranteed to be larger than your backpack, so the problem you run into is a stupid relay race of going from a vending machine, selling your junk, running back to the bank and pulling more stuff out, then selling that. This was a big point of contention in Borderlands 3 and, unfortunately, not much changed. I get that the bank is supposed to be a secure spot where you save things that are important, but I’m not using it for that: It’s my warehouse basically. As I get better items and run out of space, that junk has to go somewhere. At least let me sell directly from the bank, even if there’s a penalty for doing so. I’ll happily take that hit for the easier selling.

Play multiplayer at all costs. This game was meant for it.

There’s nothing negative to talk about here: Multiplayer is a blast and it’s incredibly easy to enjoy. There are four modes in multiplayer: Joint Campaign, Ultimate Vault Hunter, Moxxi’s Big Encore Runs, and Weekly Wildcard. I did not finish the campaign for my review, so the only thing I could take on was the joint campaign. I was joined by our very own John Yan for some co-op hijinks and in his words he said playing in multiplayer was the most fun he had in this game. A player can join your party and just hop right into the campaign, no matter where you’re at in it. They level up their character just as you do, and when they’re done, they go back to their own campaign while keeping those levels. It’s an incredibly fun way to help out a new player if you’ve gotten deep into the campaign and they’re still figuring things out, and all of the loot and drops are instanced to the player, so fighting over drops is not a thing.

The game isn’t easy even on normal mode, but having a friend helps a lot, especially because you’ll get to see their special powers alongside yours. Throw in that I was playing as Vex and able to summon a clone of myself, it was like having three players in the campaign at times as we tore through missions and world bosses together. Largely, this game is a single-player game with fun multiplayer modes, but you truly unlock the full experience by hopping in with a friend. Don’t deprive yourself of this.

Is Borderlands 4 worth buying?

Borderlands 4 fans, this is a resounding “Yes.” I’m not a veteran of this series. I played Borderlands 1 and 2 but largely skipped over the third entry, so it’s been awhile since I’ve jumped in. I think fans of the series are going to truly enjoy the ride and exploring Kairos never got old.

Normal FPS/Loot shooter fans will want to pick this up eventually, if not right away. It ticks all the boxes: Big numbers for damage, strategy, skill trees, and tons of loot. There’s so much crammed into this game even in the first 20 hours, it’ll feel worth it.

Casual gamers may not feel the need to pick this up, but I would say the first time it hits a sale, it’s worth the grab. If you even remotely enjoy shooters, Borderlands 4 will be a quality pick-up.

Wrapping things up.

I had my skeptical glasses on for this one. I hadn’t touched Borderlands in years and there was some concern that Gearbox was over-promising. I don’t think they hit a grand slam, but a home run? I’ll buy into that. I do wish the story had a little more meat to it early on, but the slow burn is perfectly fine. After all, the real fun here is just blowing guys up, taking their loot, and seeing what wild guns you find along the way. There’s so much to explore here and there is hours upon hours of gameplay. It’s not without its faults, though. The inventory and bank system still drives me nuts and Unreal Engine 5 did cause some frustrations for me. In my mind as I was playing this, both of those are worth docking a point to me. Outside of that? There’s a quality game here that’s worth the price tag. Gearbox did well. Just please, in future games, can we make the bank system not suck? Just a small ask.