Borderlands 4 is here, Borderlands! I should be excited. The 2009 original was the game that got me into loot-based games. There was a generation of gamers who see Borderlands as “Diablo with guns”. Me? I’m a true believer of the series being the progenitor of the modern looter-shooter, the name we settled with for calling a mashup of ARPG and FPS games.
But why am I not as excited? Borderlands 4 got an earlier release date thanks to the still-delayed Marathon, and as things stands between the two looter games vying for the end of September, Borderlands 4 is the better one, by default.
I was so excited when Borderlands 3 became a reality, after the series went dormant for a time. But that enthusiasm just isn’t that high this time around. Was it because I already had my recent fill thanks to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands? Was it because everybody was dogpiling over the unfortunately (but expected) disaster that was the Borderlands movie? Or was it because of Borderlands 3 became a reality and all of what it entails? (I still haven’t forgave Ava—or rather, how the writing team portrayed her.)
This is an odd way to start a review with, but this should be enough to set the tone of what I feel about Borderlands 4. In a lot of ways, Borderlands 4 is a bigger game. But personally, I feel like some changes are going in the wrong direction. The game is fundamentally much better than its predecessor where it matters, but this long-time Borderlands fan struggles to fully enjoy Borderlands 4 as it stands a month after launch.
I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Borderlands 4 just yet, but I am confident that developer Gearbox has enough time and resources to polish up their best game yet post-launch. There’s a lot of good looting and shooting to be had, but it can be a drag to get to the fun bits of this unnecessarily big game.
Presentation
Remember how the big turning point for the original Borderlands was its pivot from a bog-standard-of-the-2000s beige-forward artstyle into a cel-shaded comic-booky look that stands out? I miss those days, as I feel like over the course of the franchise’s run the outlines on characters have gotten thinner and the shading a lot more realistic rather than stylised. It’s not that Borderlands 4 doesn’t have bright, contrasting colours, but as graphics have gotten higher fidelity the art style’s charm has slowly eroded.
It doesn’t help that Borderlands 4 runs on Unreal Engine 5 and currently suffers from performance hiccups. At least on the base PS5 and after one specific patch, the game doesn’t degrade in performance over time too much. But the one time I played online co-op the frame rates tanked so hard I’m just impressed the game still runs with a bunch of animation skips to keep the gameplay in sync still. How do people play this on split-screen? That’s something I didn’t try, but I assume the worst.
It’s a sad state that modern premium AAA games are not optimised at launch and rely on AI upscaling as a crutch. It’s like, buying an luxurious branded car only to find out that straight out of the factory it’s packed with spacers and body filler to cover blemishes and manufacturing errors. I remember when the only recurring gripe I have with games running on Unreal is the textures not loading fast enough. Now we have bigger issues needed a spotlight—all while Unreal 5 games like Borderlands 4 still exhibit slow-to-stream-in texture loading!
But to the game’s credit, some of the textures are decently hi-res. There are legible texts on bounty boards and hacking screens, a level of detail I greatly appreciate.
The world of Kairos does look great, but I find it… unimaginative. Too safe. In Borderlands 3, the hunt for vaults and loot expands beyond one planet, and for the first time we explore a cyberpunk city and lush swamps alongside the expected desolated desert and wintery mountains in the borderlands of Pandora. Kairos has you mostly explore a lush jungle, wintery mountains and a desolate desert, plus an urban city and one other locale also seen from a previous Borderlands game. It feels underwhelming, too safe.
It’s nice that Borderlands 4 looks and feels like a Borderlands game you know and love, but the environment design is too conservative for a game that screams “break free” in the marketing blurbs. Wonderlands at least brought a fantasy and occasional 4th-wall-breaking theme to world. Borderlands 4 feels derivative.
There are attempts to flesh out Kairos with local culture inspired by our own, the Terminus Range gives some Nepalese vibes, serendipitous timing with what the real country is going through right now. But it’s not enough.
At least the characters look cool, though it sure took time for me to warm up to them. What I like about Borderlands 3 and newer entries is that your player character is a present in the world. A lot of FPS games you are literally a camera with hands. Borderlands 4 have this impact of having a physical body attached to the camera view thanks to the differing sizes the starting Vault Hunters are. Play as the short queen Harlowe and you’ll like be pointing the camera up when looking at most NPCs. Contrast that to the giga-man Amon who towers amongst the most characters. It’s a little thing, but it adds to the experience, especially now that combat is more kinetic than ever. Moving around, doing the occasional action skill or traversal feels weighty, as it makes you feel like a person doing this rather than just a floating camera view. Plus, your chosen Vault Hunter appears in person in cutscenes and have more lines to say this time around, though even when playing co-op, the game only takes account as if there’s only one Vault Hunter in the room. More things to incrementally improve in this department.
I have no complaints on Borderlands 4’s English voice cast. The main ensemble cast featuring a few returning faves and new faces all have good line reads which is helped with the game having a better story to tell this time. Even the annoying-as-designed and overly-chatty-because-it’s-in-the-name Claptrap.
Whoever took note of the Bubsy slider and allow us to adjust the volume of Claptrap’s audio deserve praise. Borderlands 4 joins the rare company of Bubsy: The Woolies Strikes Back, Forspoken, and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed as games with an audio slider to mute specific characters, though Borderlands 4 and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed are the ones the reduces the volume, rather than quip frequency.
The music in Borderlands 4 is an interesting one. Long-time series composer Jesper Kyd isn’t on this one, and in his stead is a number of composers all bringing different genres of music to match the game’s bigger scale. The music also feels rather… disparate. Tracks by Finishing Move has that raw thumping intensity in their beats, whether that be punk rock when facing Rippers, or intense electronic beats against The Order. It really gives off Doom: The Dark Ages vibe in that they make perfect background music but not a satisfying listen outside of context, as both games are produced by the same team of musicians. Meanwhile, Joshua Carro returns from his work on the Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands soundtrack for some dystopian cityscape ambience. Christian Pacuad also returns from his work on New Tales From The Borderlands for some industrial ambiance. Cris Velasco’s contribution to the soundtrack is more jungle-y, not in the drum n bass kind, but the “we’re on the hunt in a dangerous jungle” kind with moody percussions, wild enthralling gamelan beats and even Mongolian throat singing thrown in. Plus, there are also more tracks with those harrowing, horrifying symphony of violin strings that reeks of Bloodborne.
All the music are good. But they don’t feel in unison. They don’t vibe together. Maybe that’s done with intention, as going through the different biomes across the open world you hear different ambient and combat music. Different enemy types also has different music genres attached to them. And these composers created their contributions separately rather than work collaboratively.
Apparently, the game also has original songs made for the in-world radio. You can only hear them diegetically and they don’t really blare out loud in places like safehouses or town hubs, where you likely be spending time most of the time, so they are barely heard. A waste of possibly good music, unless Borderlands 4 adds in the ability to play the rebel radio—complete with region-specific DJs—anywhere you go. Give the Vault Hunter an Airpod or something.
Speaking of Airpods, while the effect of NPCs talking out of range being turned into a radio broadcast is cool, I don’t like that every NPC does it. I have trouble finding who the heck suddenly blurted out a line on the radio for some reason, and apparently most of it are side quest givers throwing their canned lines as I just drive by. Also, context-specific lines triggers based on distance towards the player, but doesn’t take account if the player has line-of-sight with the whatever is triggering those lines, which makes for some problems we will discuss further down this review.
Borderlands 4’s presentation leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not at the level at greatness you’d expected from a game that supposed to have a stylised look which the series seems to distance itself away inch by inch. It doesn’t help that the current version of the game, a month in, is still on the performance struggle bus.
Gameplay
Borderlands 4 is set on a new planet Kairos. Long to have been sealed off and hidden, the end of Borderlands 3 has set of a cascade of events that not only reveal the planet to the universe, but also how the people have been long subjugated by the tyrant rule of The Timekeeper. A new generation of Vault Hunters now set foot on the planet to help the citizens break free from tyranny, and loot, shoot and hunt down vaults, as the Timekeeper is known to be keeping one under his control.
Borderlands 4 feels like an attempt to break free from the series mould. Not an evolution but a revolution. It does so in many fronts, some more successful than others.
The one big change players will experience is how the world is laid out. It’s an open world. Gone are the instances of large levels with specific gates or buttons you’d press to load in the next part of the interconnected levels, it’s mostly now one big seamless world. It’s an amazing technical feat, considering that Borderlands 4 can be played with multiplayer split-screen on consoles. But the way its designed leaves a lot to be desired.
If you’ve played any open world game recently, Borderlands 4 is like that but slightly worse.
The world is too big to run on foot, but the new Digirunner that you can spawn at any time at almost any place in open world Kairos cut the travel time too quickly. At least the fast travel points are sparsely spread out so you will have to do some commuting on the Digirunner. But it feels like wasted potential.
Borderlands 3 improved the vehicles with more variation, more customisation options and more uses in missions. The Digirunner here in Borderlands 4 is just a stand-in for Destiny 2’s Sparrow, only there for traversal sake, no use in combat despite having equipped with two different weapons each and the one time it is used in a mission is a retread a Borderlands 3’s set-piece, only you go around a tinier circular track to chase and mount a ridiculously big vehicle. Plus, you don’t get to drive shotgun anymore—every player in the party of maximum four players is expected to ride their own hoverbike.
The world of Kairos is divided into several regions filled with a checklist of collectibles and activities. But I find it baffling why checking off the “Propaganda Speakers” is considered a collectible instead of an activity? To “collect” these, you have to hack a tower, stand in a designated zone until the percentage goes 100% but waves of enemies will come and halt progress. But this activity doesn’t work as you’d expected from other games with similar concepts: The percentage will stop at specific thresholds, so technically you have to survive a wave of enemy spawns rather than to clear out enemies from the zone. But if you dip out of the zone, the percentage can and will drop down to 0, which then resets the whole activity, and you have to go and start the survival activity from the first wave again. And if you play early at launch sometimes the next wave just doesn’t start spawning because the game’s bugged so you have to exit and restart the session. All for some SDU points.
In past games, you can spend cash and another currency, Eridium, to purchase SDUs- upgrades to your maximum ammo as well as for the bank and lost loot machine. You don’t do that in Borderlands 4, you have to engage in the checklist-ticking activities and collectible hunting to get your maximum ammo capacity this time. This in turn renders currency into something rather meaningless. I have a million or so dollars in Kairos money and yet with nothing noteworthy to spend on. You only be using Eridium once you reach the endgame. Don’t be surprised that you rack in so much dough only for playing 20 hours in, it’s a mix of Kairos’ rather inflated currency, the lack of UI clarity showing how much money/Eridium you have in total right now (even when you’re hovering on something you can buy like at a vending machine—past games used to display the currency count!) and just the lack of purpose these have throughout the campaign.
On the topic on collectibles still, there are new ones in the form of Survivalist Caches and Electi Safes. Both are essentially one-time chest full of loot. But here’s the thing, the game never properly introduce what they look like, and they don’t stand out as this big lootable thing. I find my eyes easily drawn to random small boxes and toilets and literal piles of garbage, but not these important checklists to be ticked collectibles. They don’t glow green bright enough! Your Vault Hunter will bark when you’re close to one, but since audio triggers directionally and not consider line of sight, I spent a good 20 minutes scouring where in the world is this Survivalist Cache, something I have yet to have a mental image of, only for it to be this big green crate that could pass as any other non-interactable crate. It was also on an upper level that I didn’t check until much later.
There’s another activity, Ancient Crawlers, where you’re supposed to grab a battery thingamajig to somewhere up the Crawler, requiring some fun platforming (you have to throw it mid-air and catch it, or lob it safely to a higher platform as you can’t hold it while clambering on walls). However, I didn’t know how this works, but I did the new repeatable quest where you have to fetch something and bring it with your bare hands (no vehicle driving, you can’t hold items while driving) back to the safehouse. Guess what I did. Yeah, it was a long trek. For nothing. No prompt saying I’m doing something stupid. No failsafe to not allow me to take this objective piece too far from its designated playspace. It sucks.
Skill issue? Maybe. But in a game like Borderlands, I shouldn’t be turning my brain too much and try to think in the minds of the designers. All these years the games have taught me to just go follow a waypoint, shoot, loot, and follow waypoint to the next loot-and-shoot area.
On the topic of waypoints, the open world truly becomes even more disappointing when the tools you have to make it more navigable are not working as intended.
Your Echo-4 bot can send out an Echo location which pings for nearby collectible/activity/mission markers/custom markers but also puts out a waypoint to your destination. I find this being a mixed bag. When I ping for the waypoint it sometimes shows up outside of my field of view so that’s extra seconds having to turn around (and it’s much slower to do with a controller). The waypoint can sometimes be to faint when you’re on a vehicle. And when the waypoint is active, there’s no way to re-ping it so you have to wait for the signal to fade away in full before doing so. I wish I can just re-ping at any time to make the waypoint pulse as I oftentimes lose track of where it went. That line is not built for Digirunners. Plus, the waypoint sometimes suggest me going through impossible paths which gives me trust issues that the pathfinding isn’t as robust as it should be.
It doesn’t help that I played what I consider to be one of smartest designed open world game before Borderlands 4, so my expectation bar has been increased rather high, unfairly so. But even if I were to forgive and be lenient as this is the developers’ first take on open world design, I still don’t think they’ve done a good enough job. The UI/UX experience is below what I consider adequate, just from the sheer amount of bugs and unreliableness. It’s a thankless job, I get it, but it’s one of those jobs that if not done well will spawn a good number of paragraphs of complaints in a review. Yet, when done right, only gets probably once sentence of glazing.
Speaking of the UI/UX, Borderlands 4 is the latest game to succumb to the use of Destiny 2’s cursor, but doesn’t get it right. The default settings feel off for me and I had to tinker in the options menu—something I never did in Destiny 2 as it just feels natural. You can hit the d-pad to navigate through some of the menus, but it’s definitely designed to be entirely operated with that dreaded cursor. Oh I wish I just have a mouse when using the menus, as some of the elements were not designed with a Destiny cursor in mind. At launch, the drop-down menus are so tiny that it’s infuriating to move the cursor to the right selection. It doesn’t help that the menu performance is sub-optimal. Why is it stuttering when I’m just scrolling through a list of Echo logs? And if the list is too long and can’t cope with it, why haven’t it be laid out in a way to not have it be one long, stuttering list?
I understand some of the gripes I have with Borderlands 4 can still be addressed, fixed and improved on post-launch. Yet I am still baffled that despite with all these fixable bugs and issues, this premium game is deemed shippable.
But for the patient gamers out there, let it be known that Borderlands 4 is absolute fantastic as a looter-shooter. There are moments where Borderlands 4 becomes a linear game where you go from one combat encounter arena to another, checking a bunch of green-lit containers just because you can, fight a boss and see copius amount of loot spewing out of the dead enemy like it’s a fountain of guns and accessories.
Those moments feels more fun with the added mechanics you can do during combat. Vault Hunters can hook to specific points and swing around the arena, or use it to pull out throwables or elemental barrels to then be thrown or shot in mid-air. You can also hover mid-air, used mostly to traversing the open but it’s also a new way to keep yourself mobile and avoid getting shot. Borderlands 3 added slides and mounting previously, and the additions here in Borderlands 4 really keeps the arena combat even more action-packed and adrenaline-pumping.
It also helps that enemy encounters are move vertical than ever. Between The Order (the new faction replacing corpo soldiers, equipped with synths and robots), The Rippers (Kairos’ brand of Psychos, complete with lore reason why they are named as such and why they too are literally insane) and the local human-killing fauna, they all have reasons why you should point your gun upwards more often than ever. That’s where the new glider comes in clutch, and a lot of the combat encounters have some way of moving upwards, like geysers. The gunplay in Borderlands 4 is fast and brutal as something out of Doom. Not exactly, but same vibe.
It’s not just the shooting that Borderlands 4 improves, it’s the looting. As in, the loot variety.
Borderlands 4 has a new way of generating billions of guns or whatever ludicrous number they claim and that’s through licensed parts. Each gun in the Borderlands universe is manufactured by a company, and each gun manufacturer has a specific characteristic, pushed further in Borderlands with brand gimmicks. Jakobs guns fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. Tediore guns are so cheap it’s faster to throw them as an explosive and digistruct a new copy when reloading. Maliwan guns always spawn with an elemental damage. Vladof has high rate of fire, even their sniper rifles. Torgue guns have ammo that EXPLODES.
So in Borderlands 4, guns can now spawn with characteristics and gimmicks of other manufactures, with wild results. A Maliwan gun shoots slow to compensate for their high elemental damage output. But what if you get a Vladof gun with a Maliwan part so now you have access to the dual-elemental gimmick in a faster firing gun?
How about a Jakobs gun with the new Ripper manufacturer? Instead of being semi-automatic, it now charges for a second before going full-auto, which should help not hurt your finger fanning a Jakobs assault rifle.
But it’s not all positive combos. a Tediore gun with a COV part means you can’t manually reload and hence can’t throw them like an explosive like most Tediore guns would, especially if it has low rate of fire which means it will never trigger the COV gimmick which it will overheat on sustained fire.
The wackiness of how all the different gun manufacturer gimmicks can interact with each other keeps the loot exciting in Borderlands 4. It comes at a cost of having less variety of the same normal gun, wild prefixes aside you’d see the same gun name more regularly than previous entries. But there’s more ways that same gun can spawn that it makes it fun to discover how wild the combos can get, if it it’s even possible.
If you happen to find the legendary weapon Frangible, you’ll know how peak, and at times ass, the licensed part system can be.
The quartet of starting Vault Hunters, with two more to come this time, is a also a slow-burn for me gameplay-wise. Similar to Borderlands 3, classes have three different action skills that can drastically change how they play. You can have one Vex that’s really good at drawing aggro (via summoning a clone) or have play like a pet-based class with a summonable killer minion. Rafa can be a melee monster or have extra firepower with extra fireable missiles. I just listed two, there’s at least three different playstyles based on the three skill trees per Vault Hunter, but new in this game, there are wider branches and more skill choices within each skill tree.
Don’t expect to be wowed in terms of originality though. Two of Harlowe’s skills are retreads of previous Sirens in past games, for instance. At least she can be a nuker in a literal way for solo players who don’t need support skills.
The biggest improvement Borderlands 4 has over Borderlands 3 is the storytelling.
Sure, Borderlands have this reputation for cringe writing and overzealous use of memes that eventually age like milk like all memes are, the recent Borderlands movie doesn’t help. But Borderlands 3 is downright horrendous when it comes to story.
To use film criticism parlance, Borderlands 3 was a legacy sequel. It’s the long return of a dormant franchise, it attempts to replicate the beats that made Borderlands 2’s story great (now-dated memes aside) but failed spectacularly in almost every way. Like how fans see the new Star Wars trilogy. Or the newest Indiana Jones movie. Though I think the Borderlands movie fail differently.
So what Borderlands 4 did was to exercise restraint. The cast of returning characters is smaller but the ones in here are given ample time to breathe and be in the spotlight. They made players invested and convinced of the villain’s villainy early with a well-executed tutorial mission. I got to the open world convinced the Timekeeper’s reign of terror must be stopped. And the game takes itself seriously. The stakes are real. You can see and experience how people are genuinely suffering if you do stop and look around and do side-quests.
The jokes are there in Borderlands 4, but it’s never the “HA HA! ISN’T THIS FUNNY!?!?!” kind of way that makes Borderlands 3 and 2 somewhat cringe. Lame puns are treated as lame puns, scoffed at sometimes even by the pun-maker and moved on. They also leave quietly in the list of challenges.
Absolutely batshit shenanigans are mostly played with a straight face, instead of making sure you are laughing when they “please laugh” sign is light up like a member of the audience who are forced to do a live laugh track.
The jokes in Borderlands 4 either leave me with a slight chuckle or a slight roll in the eyes, which is perfect. It’s a milquetoast version of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon dichotomy of main story and substory writing, if you will.
That’s how the original Borderlands was. It’s a serious world, with serious themes, but the circumstance also leads to some wild and crazy things to happen that can be morbidly funny. Props to the writing team for figuring out the delicate balance it needs for a story to still be taken seriously while still have some moments of levity through it all. Creating a good story for a Borderlands game is a low bar, sure, and Borderlands 4’s story is far from one of best I’ve seen in games this year. But being average is enough to bag home that metaphorical “biggest mover” award when it comes to improving from the previous game.
The core experience of Borderlands 4 is a tremendous improvement over its predecessors. The open world and new UI are not that good, sure, but it doesn’t detract from the looting and shooting, which is even more fun and exciting this time around.
Content
It took me 40 hours to complete the campaign of Borderlands 4, skipping most of the side-quest but also thoroughly checking the lists of some of the regions available in Kairos. I’ve added another 10 hours of playtime since and still haven’t cleared out the many side quests, and haven’t yet reach the level 50 cap.
As far as the campaign goes, the main missions are fun to go through. Early on, the game branches into three paths letting you finish each of the three main ally factions and getting them onboard the Crimson Resistance. The main missions have just enough variety and storytelling that I wouldn’t mind playing them again.
And that’s the funny thing, Borderlands 4’s endgame is designed around doing that, replaying past missions. The endgame certainly took notes of Destiny 2, as two out of the three thing you can do once you unlock Ultimate Vault Hunter (the endgame, not a seperate mode or playthrough like previous games) is to replay campaign missions with added modifiers (ala Strikes) and also to find a secret vendor selling rare Legendary gear where their location changes on the weekly (like Xur). The other is a souped-up version of Moxxi’s Big Encore, a stronger version of those repeatable (and farmable) boss fights so you can earn those dedicated drops and gain more Specialisation XP.
Borderlands 4 can keep you busy beyond the campaign, with more loot, DLC and even more Vault Hunters coming. And if you want to start a new Vault Hunter you now have the option to skip the campaign and have them start at Level 30 with the endgame unlocked. It’s still ways to go to reach the level 50 cap, but it saves time from having to go do the main mission again three to five times to get all characters at endgame state.
Personal Enjoyment
I should’ve enjoyed Bordelands 4, but somehow I didn’t. It’s the right game that arrived at the wrong time for me. I played Bordearlnads 4 right after I have my fill with open world games, and right after I’ve witness some of the most polished UI/UX in a video game. That explains why I am so harsh on those aspects in this review.
But the Borderlands I know and love is still in there in Borderlands 4 underneath the uninspired open world and rough edges. When the game just has you go from room to room clearing out ridiculous amount of enemies and I’m laughing with my nuker Harlowe build who literally nukes the whole room with a press of one, sometimes two buttons, that’s my dopamine fix. Having to go through the cycle of growth in a Borderlands 4 campaign where you have to keep switching your loadout with gear of higher levels despite already landing on a good setup of weapons, that’s always a fun ride of going through “we’re so back” and “we’re so over” phases until the level cap is reached.
Of all the things Borderlands 4 took inspo from Destiny 2, which is a lot of them as outlined here, it’s the endgame that I liked the most. This means that there’s a reason for me to check in weekly and do something, without having to commit to timesinks as big as replaying the whole campaign again. I might end up trying all the Vault Hunters this time around, something I rarely do these days.
As much as I gripe over the changes Borderlands 4 has made feels like for the worse, the essence of Borderlands is still there. Maybe I’m not as a big fan of the series as I used to be, but the game is still just as fun as any Borderlands I’ve played, if not more fun.
It helps that despite this entry’s efforts to make the orange Legendary loot to drop much rarer, I’ve been blessed with good RNG, being able to experience the wild and wacky guns and gear. Sure, I have to re-farm all of them once I hit the level cap, but it’s fun to get a taste.
Verdict
Borderlands 4 goes big with its changes, though not of them are all for the better. The new UI is sorely in need of more polish and fixes, and the only remarkable addition to the change towards open world design is the amount of padding it adds. While the game is still playable, the performance issues are not a good look for a premium game and not something any premium gamer should deal with.
But this is by far the best story the Borderlands story has ever told, matching the same bleak, serious and only-sometimes funny of the original. And its core gameplay loop has made the fun of looting randomly generated weapons from a barrage of almost non-stop shooting even better than ever.
The overall review score for Borderlands 4 is lower than Borderlands 3, but reviews on Gamer Matters are more of how much we recommend playing, rather than an objective rating to be compared side-by-side. Borderlands 4 is a much better game, despite the lower score.
You don’t have to rush and play Borderlands 4 now, but you should absolutely make time for it later, come around and check it out. Underneath the growing pains of going big lies a smarter, more chaotic, more engaging entry of the famed looter-shooter series. And you need to be a little pain tolerant to enjoy the game as it is right now at launch.
Played on base PS5. Review copy provided by the publisher.
Borderlands 4
Borderlands 4 goes big with its changes, though not of them are all for the better. The new UI is sorely in need of more polish and fixes, and the only remarkable addition to the change towards open world design is the amount of padding it adds. While the game is still playable, the performance issues are not a good look for a premium game and not something any premium gamer should deal with.
But this is by far the best story the Borderlands story has ever told, matching the same bleak, serious and only-sometimes funny of the original. And its core gameplay loop has made the fun of looting randomly generated weapons from a barrage of almost non-stop shooting even better than ever.
- Presentation 8
- Gameplay 9
- Content 9
- Personal Enjoyment 8