Borderlands 4 review: "Undeniably an excellent looter shooter, but one that requires a bit of tunnel vision to fully enjoy"

Borderlands 4 is a tricky game to score. If you're eyeing up Gearbox's latest shooter solely for an opportunity to turn hapless raiders into sludge and throw explosive guns at robots until your trigger finger goes numb, I can cut to the chase right now and tell you that yes – Borderlands 4 will let you do just that, and you'll grin from ear-to-ear while plucking loot from the gloop.

This is, after all, exactly what Borderlands as a series is designed to do: live fast, die young, pay to be resurrected and do it all over again. But beyond that core concept, Borderlands 4 is dated and at times irritating – undeniably an excellent looter-shooter, but one that requires a bit of tunnel vision to fully enjoy.

Reloaded

Borderlands 4 picks up on the prison planet of Kairos, where a dictator called The Timekeeper uses bolts attached to his citizens' spines to maintain control. Far from Borderlands' mainstay setting Pandora, Kairos is a little more freewheeling. After selecting your Vault Hunter protagonist and blazing through a rapid-fire tutorial (shoot things!), you're cut loose and left to explore the planet with a far longer leash than Borderlands 4's predecessors.

Although Gearbox was reluctant to call Borderlands 4 open world, I've got no qualms with putting that label on it. While the main quest takes you through four distinct biomes, going between each is seamless – which effectively melds them all into one massive sandbox. Fast-travel points need to be unlocked a la Assassin's Creeds' viewpoints, albeit here you're reactivating missile silos, and there's a wealth of side quests to pick up from hub cities and out in the wild. That… is an open world game.

While it's not particularly imaginative in its execution, Borderlands 4's open world is very fun to tear through. A one-button vehicle summon makes traversal incredibly easy, while the baddies littered across Kairos like roadside shooting galleries prove very hard to ignore when you're riding a scrappy motorbike with lock-on missiles.

There's not much of an emphasis on exploration – sure, you might bump into radio broadcasts that you can hack to trigger a wave defence minigame, or a bunker to spelunk for loot – but a generous map UI means you've almost always got a clear objective to be traveling towards. The best bit of Kairos is the way it's presented: Gearbox has softened Borderlands' iconic cel-shaded art style even further, with more detail and softer color palettes ensuring everything looks beautiful – particularly during some fantastic cosmic setpieces later in the game – while remaining easy to read during high-stress fights.

In that simplicity, Borderlands 4 manages to own the fact that it is essentially careening you from one shootout to the next. Only a few times toward the end of the game did I feel like I was punished for not engaging with those optional layers. I'd occasionally regret skipping over a Silo I should have activated for a closer fast travel to my objective, but a much bigger issue was level scaling. If you don't make the effort to play around in Borderlands 4's fringes, you'll find yourself slowly but steadily out-leveled by the overworld's enemies.

Meanwhile, raids take place in separate instances that are scaled precisely to your level. This creates a lot of dissonance during the main questline – you'll fire thousands of bullets fighting through what should be grunt synths, your own shields wiped out by a gentle breeze, only to reach the raid's entrance, step inside, and go back to feeling like a bullet-spitting powerhouse. These harder fights aren't particularly fun due to higher-level foes serving as egregiously exaggerated bullet sponges, and a lot of these issues would be alleviated with a suggested level for main quests (instead, they have a vague 'difficulty' rating).

But when you're on top, you're on top. Every millisecond of a good scrap (and there are many) bursts with texture – so much so that you'll struggle to understand how so much is happening at once. Enemy variety carries a lot of this excitement – for every Badass-rated miniboss that genuinely tests you, there are six grunts to comically blast apart – but more comes from the weapons themselves. These are so overkill they throw out the rules not only on how shooters should work, but how firearms function. Almost every gun has a random alternate firing mode, which can range from being able to use two ammo types to an underbarrel knife launcher.

My all-time favorite gun remains a fairly modest Jakobs semi-automatic assault rifle, except it can also fire a barrage of lock-on missiles, with the runner-up being a corrosive pistol that fires explosive bullets – and with the press of a button, sticky bombs that detonate upon reloading. While you can likely already appreciate how fun these sound, that's still a pale imitation for actually using the damn things. Charging into a camp of Rippers – bandits who have ripped their bolt out, ensuing insanity be damned – and systemically blowing them to pieces hits the dopamine button so quickly it needs to be played to be believed. Considering these highs are routine in Borderlands 4, it's hard to understate just how thrilling combat encounters are – reminding me why I sank 60 hours into Borderlands 2, but failed to crack Destiny.

The addition of a grappling hook gives Bulletstorm vibes, as you can now whip haphazardly-placed explosive canisters into your hand before throwing them at enemies. This has diminishing returns later in the game – I'd have loved for this to feel a little more powerful – and likewise, there are only a few arenas that make use of grappling as a movement tool. It rarely feels like the best tactical option due to how exposed you are in the air, and even the rule of cool isn't convincing enough to take to the skies as a glorified bullseye. While grappling only feels half-explored, the less flashy additions of a double-jump and glide pack are far more fun to play with, and allow you to really push the flanking maneuvers and sneaky vantage points you can get away with.

Though that added mobility is very fun to play with, it's essential to make use of during Borderlands 4's tougher boss fights. While raids themselves are broadly all death corridors, their bosses require better reaction speeds and more awareness of positioning than the series' past entries, which tend to wait until you've rolled credits on the story for the claws to come out. Even on normal difficulty, there are times when you'll have just a second or two to dash from an area-of-effect attack that downs you near-immediately – and while their patterns aren't too challenging to learn, there are a handful of fights you should expect do-overs for. But this is where Borderlands 4 gets difficulty right – in breathless boss encounters and shootouts where you're genuinely put on the back foot.

Talking heads

The framework holding up Borderlands 4's shooting isn't as sturdy. The Timekeeper is a very safe antagonist – which is an improvement upon Borderlands 3's actively abrasive Twins, but still rather dull. Due to limited interactions with the Timekeeper, his projected gravitas and seemingly all-powerful control over Kairos ring hollow. He's too distant to seem dangerous, and his three lieutenants – who we spend most of the game hunting down – all have more personality.

Without that magnetism, Borderlands 4's story is shapeless and forgettable. Overthrowing the Timekeeper by clearing the three regions dominated by his lieutenants is territory well-trodden by the likes of Far Cry, and almost every turn is predictable. Because we're also trying to unite three respective factions, there's never enough time with their characters to feel much for them – which is a shame, as some of them are quite endearing. As a result, it feels like we're looking at Kairos through a narrow lens, meaning it never becomes as lively or colorful as Pandora.

Tone-wise, there's also a frustrating lack of sincerity. When Borderlands 4 commits to well-crafted gags or genuine punchlines, it creates some very funny moments. Yes, I laughed at buff resistance leader Rush searching for his "Just a hungry boy in a hungry world" apron, and chortled when an upcoming boss – who'd been salivating over the imminent pain he was about to cause – admitted "all that horny stuff was just a bit" and agreed to tell me everything. Less funny is the constant noise of Borderlands – an endless stream of saccharine sarcasm from characters who feel the need to comment on every minute action.

The Vault Hunter I played, Vex, is terminally quippy – edgy, sarky, and unable to offer any depth beyond 'well that just happened'-esque chirps. At times this even robs grander moments of their stature, with quirky and out-of-place one-liners often deflating the tension from big standoffs. I find this approach interesting, because while the Timekeeper shows the dangers of Borderlands becoming too sterile, Vex and similarly-positioned characters prove that the series is overdue a growth spurt – while the quirky approach worked for Borderlands 2, that was… well, 13 years ago. I'd love to see more confidence from Borderlands 4 – a willingness to unselfconsciously take itself lightly à la Tales from the Borderlands, rather than constantly letting us know it's in on the joke.

That brings us back to the crux of this review, though. How much does all of this matter? In the 29 hours I've sunk into Borderlands 4, it has doubtless been the best shooter I've played in 2025 – almost in spite of itself – its cartoonish violence a constant source of excitement. Even now, the thought of turning a Ripper to bloody chunks with an exploding assault rifle makes me itch to pick the controller back up. Does that mean the rest of it can be naff? For me, yes. But with that comes a sense of missed opportunity – every time Gearbox made me laugh or grin, I would catch myself wishing for more of that authenticity. Instead, Borderlands 4 gives us cotton candy: undeniably delicious, but far less substantial than its volume would have you believe.

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