It’s been a year since Borderlands 4 launched, and developer Gearbox Software has continued to polish the looter-shooter that was sorely lacking in that finishing touch.
The game evolved the formula by having its new setting, the planet of Kairos, an open world. And it rebuilt an entirely new UI that fit modern gaming conventions. Both of which I personally found lacking in my review. Not just in the idea of it, what’s more bothersome is the poor execution, which should be patched out in time should the developers are given the budget and time to do so.
The good news is, if you decided to check the game out now, I’m happy to report that those patchable woes have indeed been patched out.
(Note: the impressions here is based on playing three hours of Borderlands 4 after the release of Story Pack 2. Previous playtime of Borderlands 4 was over 40 hours for the review, and an additional 20+ hours playing off-the-clock, purely for personal entertainment.)
Lock and Steady Performance on Consoles
My original review made mention a few lines of how apaling that a game of this scale made for a big audience of mainstream gamers has a litany of performance issues. It’s playable on consoles, but seeing a game struggle to maintain 60 FPS when the previous entry had no such issues was painful to see.
Reading back what I wrote back then, Unreal Engine 5 sure has a bad rep in performance a year back. I’ve since soften my stance on this, too much of the UE5 hate comes down to gamer rage, which I intend to not give in to these days. But 2025 was a time when games with the new iteration of the game engine come poorly optimised in the masses.
It is a triumph to see the developers did manage to sort this performance issue out, as Borderlands 4 today runs rock solid at what my eyes is saying as 60 FPS. Buttery smooth everywhere, even in the menus (more on that in a bit). The most frantic of firefights have been hitchless. The game can keep up, without breaking a sweat on the base PS5. As it should’ve on launch.
I do see where the performance gains were made, though. Culling, the act of not rendering a certain part of a gameplay scene, is made more aggressive that when view from a higher point of view the grass on the ground can be seen materialising as you slowly glide downwards. The detail of landmarks from afar are scant. But you know what, that’s an okay trade if it means the game keeps it lock and steady at 60 FPS.
There is a little hitching and stuttering action that can be spotted in the menus, but it’s not a dealbreaker as it was before. Speaking of…
Vastly Improved UI
Borderlands 4’s user interface got a major redesign and it was not something I have nice words for last year. But praise be, time, effort and budget were put to improve this aspect and it sure is in a much better shape. It’s usable! Menus run at 60 FPS—something past Borderlands games couldn’t muster consistently enough—and operate smoothly. The way-too-small drop-down tabs have been embiggen appropriately. A lot of the menu items can be operated with the d-pad if preferred. The implementation isn’t perfect—the d-pad movement won’t lock to an opened drop-down menu tab so you can unintentionally be scrolling the inventory instead of the active drop-down menu. But nothing as egregious as before.
That all being said, the one thing Borderlands 4 missed a trick is setting up the ideal cursor feel. The menus are still based on the Destiny cursor, and the default settings is just unbearable for me, because some of the menu layouts are not designed for it. By default, movement is slow and when hovering on an interactable button, tab or segment, the movement gets added friction to slow it even further. A lot of the menus are not made of squares, so I find myself moving a really sticky cursor over an unnecessarily long box too often that I need to tweak it.
Thankfully, you can tweak those two specific properties. I prefer my cursor moving much faster and have less friction when moving across interactables. If only the cursor has an acceleration slider, so you adjust how the first few tenths of a second of moving a cursor one way has a different speed. I prefer it to ramp up to being faster, so you can glide the cursor across the screen faster, but still have that slower, precise control when moving the cursor at shorter distance.
The backpack doesn’t take too long to populate your inventory with a unique small snapshot of your loot when first loaded up, only stuttering occasionally, though some items can sometimes just not load its thumbnail image altogether until you close and reopen the backpack. Still, it’s vastly more usable, vastly improved, and vastly less annoying compared to what it was on launch.
Also, the pathfinding UI, the one we have now slanderously refer to as “fart gas” or “scent trail” did the one specific thing I specifically mentioned in my review, and that was the ability to re-ping the trail at any time and have it reappear and glow again, rather than wait for it to fade to re-ping in again should you lose track of the it. The pathfinding still can’t be trusted in full to navigate, I see it pointing to dead-end, or to a door that can’t be opened until I solve a puzzle, it’s not perfect, but those niggles are within tolerance.
Borderlands 4 Is Good Now
Borderlands 4 is good now. If you were put off by the stories and anecdotes of how the game performance was questionable or the undercooked UI, those issues that one would expect to be rectified post-launch, has certainly be rectified. I can’t speak about the situation on PC, where the performance woes hit the hardest back then, but at least on PS5, Borderlands 4 is a blast.
The post-launch fixes doesn’t address game design issues, of course. If you gripes on more fundamental design choices like its open world design, you won’t change your mind on that. But as far as Borderlands 4 as a product goes, it’s now perfect for consumption.
It just goes to show that a year of extra polishing can vastly improve a video game, even if it’s just “the little things.” While the standard practice now is to just ship it once the game reaches a viable state and fix those long list of internally reported bugs and issues later, I do wish publishers just take their time and let the developers polish the game up before releasing. We really don’t need to have entertainment products, designed to make you entertained, be a source of frustration. Good on 2K for playing the long game and sticking it out, as we see them doing with Civilization VII which also doesn’t receive a new reception among fans at launch. But for Borderlands 4, it was completely avoidable.
I can now confidently recommend Borderlands 4. The looter-shooter is taking on a new direction that not everyone is on board, but the refinements to the looting and shooting should be universally accepted as another great iteration and evolution to the series.
Plus, the first season of promised content which includes two Story Packs (expansion-styled, with a new map), five Bounty Packs (smaller-scaled DLC which includes new missions), five Vault Cards (Destiny-style paid passive grindable season pass but with no expiration and a ticket-based unlock system for cosmetics and rerollable loot) and two brand-new Vault Hunters, have all been rolled out. So there’s a lot of extra content available should you be okay to pay more.
Whether Borderlands 4 continues to be supported after this remains to be seen, but should support ends here, the team has left the game at a good, respectable state.
Played on base PS5. Review copy provided by the publisher.