Borderlands 4 review: A series back to its very best

With Borderlands 4, Gearbox has finally given us a game just as worthy of that love.

It marks a new era for the series; we've left Pandora's wild and wacky world for Kairos, a bleak dystopian land ruled by an all-powerful autocrat known as the Timekeeper.

Trapped on the world with the much beloved/despised Claptrap, it's up to you to enlist various local militias in the fight for freedom so you can get off this godforsaken rock.

A major part of the criticism levelled at recent Borderlands titles is the tone of their writing. It has always been a series loaded with silly humour, but from BL3 onwards, the tone has veered further into eye roll-inducing toilet humour territory.

BL4 rolls it back all the way to the good old days, with dry, witty writing that honestly had me laughing out loud at times. You still get the classic goofy jokes, but they're used sparingly – Face McShooty would not have been quite so fun had there been a hundred Face McShootys across Pandora, after all.

That humour goes a long way to helping its characters, too. Having failed to really gel with many of Borderlands more recent characters, I was delighted with almost all of the people you meet in BL4.

They're fun, competent, likeable and surprisingly well-written. The stakes on Kairos are high, and despite their obvious lean towards comedy, everyone is painfully aware of the stakes.

This results in some truly fantastic sequences where certain characters come into their own, whether that's sacrificing themselves for the greater good or growing a spine in the heat of battle.

Borderlands 4 does a fantastic job of suddenly jumping from humour to drama in the blink of an eye. These moments are powerful and reveal a real strength in the writing – any game that can make me seriously worry that a character I've known for only an hour or two could be about to die is a game worth its salt.

The same, too, can be said for the four Vault Hunters, who regularly chime in with quick jibes in response to whatever is going on around them.

Rafa, the VH of choice for me – and, I assume, many others on launch – was a hoot. He has a perfect mix of suaveness and meathead energy that makes him a joy to play as. From the little I've experienced of the other Vault Hunters so far, the quality of writing appears to be just as high for them, too.

So, the story, writing and characters are all great, but what about the gameplay?

Well, anyone who has played the more recent Borderlands titles will know that gameplay is the area that has continually improved with each new instalment. BL4 does the same, introducing some new mechanics – notably double jumps and a glide – that immediately elicit a feeling of 'how did I ever play these games without this?'

Gunplay, as ever, is fantastic. The new manufacturers, as well as the old ones that have been tweaked, add a tremendous amount to the game, and I was having a blast trying out new weapons in each new area.

Players can now mix and match bits of their guns to create monstrosities that are capable of wielding the special effects of various manufacturers, opening up a tremendous amount of flexibility.

Once the game is out and the most creative among us make their way to the late-game, I cannot wait to see what kinds of unbelievably busted builds they manage to come up with.

It's a surprisingly challenging game, too. I found myself dying a lot more often that I had done in previous entries, but I was honestly having so much fun that it didn't bother me in the slightest.

Perhaps my only real complaint about the gameplay is that I found some of the bosses to be somewhat lacking. This does not pertain to the Vault bosses, which are excellent, and really challenge you to engage in some interesting mechanics – the same can't always be said for bosses in the main story itself.

Despite all the praise I've dished out so far, I have yet to discuss my favourite aspect of Borderlands 4, and that is the vast world the game has created.

Gone are the smallish individual areas of past Borderlands games; Kairos offers up an enormous open world for players to seamlessly explore.

It takes the right approach to an open world, too. Instead of littering the map with endless icons that lead to pointless content, it leans more towards the Zelda approach, tempting you towards places of interest in the distance.

As you drive through various settlements and Psycho encampments, you'll hear pleas, radio messages and more, letting you pick and choose which missions sound interesting enough to stop by for.

At times, especially on my no longer top-of-the-line PC hardware, I did find the game started to stutter when loading in new areas of this open world, but this only ever happened while speeding around on a vehicle, and never actually impacted the gameplay in any meaningful way. Something to watch out for, though.

Having a deadline to meet, I couldn't dedicate as much time to this side content as I would have liked, but that's not actually a problem for me because I am already planning a second playthrough. You know a game is good when the first thing you want to do after beating it is to beat it again.

Part of that is because BL4 is a great game, but the more important aspect is that I can't wait to play through this game with friends.

The open world really lends itself to being aimlessly explored in a group, messing around and just generally enjoying the world and gameplay on offer.

Borderlands as a series is defined by many things, whether that is its gameplay, humour or characters, but perhaps more than anything else, it's defined by its stellar co-op experience.

There is therefore perhaps no better compliment I can pay Borderlands 4 than revealing the one thought that stayed lodged in my head during my entire playthrough – "I can't wait to play this with my mates."

Borderlands 4 does almost everything right. Sure, in comparison to Borderlands 2, it's still not going to win everyone over – you can't replicate the magic of someone like Handsome Jack so easily.

Is it a game with the emotional and moral depth that other 2025 titles like Expedition 33 and Death Stranding 2 have offered up? It's not even close.

But to be honest, none of that really matters to me, and that's because Borderlands 4 is riotous, fast and frenetic with the trademark silly-yet-grounded Borderlands humour that made so many of us fall in love with the series in the first place.

Sometimes a game doesn't need to be deep or thought-provoking at every turn, it just needs to be a blast to play, and I can safely say that Borderlands 4 is the most fun I've had in a game in a long time.

Borderlands 4 releases on 12th September f0r PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and on 3rd October 2025 for Nintendo Switch 2. We reviewed on PC.

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