Starting in 2009, I was in love with the Borderlands franchise. Its brand of cooperative looter-shooter action, off-the-wall humor, and vibrant visuals hooked me from the early hours and carried me through to the end of the adventure. My love affair only intensified in 2012 with Borderlands 2, a sequel that moved the series forward in nearly every way. Though The Pre-Sequel fell short of my expectations, the excellent Tales from the Borderlands pulled me right back in 2014. However, after a lengthy absence, Borderlands 3 failed to resonate with me in 2019, and subsequent spin-offs like Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and New Tales from the Borderlands – not to mention the infamous 2024 Borderlands movie – had me wondering if the franchise had passed me by. I assumed I would never again feel the overwhelming excitement I once had for each subsequent entry in Gearbox’s flagship franchise. Spending a couple of hours with Borderlands 4 changed my mind.
It all starts with the tone of the narrative and writing. The pop-culture and meme references of past games seem toned way down in favor of a drier humor that further spotlights the key characters in the story through more natural dialogue instead of constant setups and punchlines. However, make no mistake, Borderlands 4 is still chock-full of humor. Claptrap, in particular, had me chuckling a few times in my short stint with the game.
Borderlands 4 takes place on Kairos, a concealed planet whose protective barrier was destroyed by the events at the end of Borderlands 3. On Kairos, the Timekeeper reigns over the denizens with the goal of keeping perfect order. Like most effective villains, he truly feels justified in his crusade, telling himself the ends justify the means, but when the means involve enslaving an entire planet, he’s clearly in the wrong. The people of Kairos are desperate to escape, and it comes down to a new batch of Vault Hunters and a band of rebels to stand up to Timekeeper and his overwhelming forces.
Getting My Bearings
Borderlands 4 walks a fine line of changing so much about the overall experience while remaining definitively Borderlands. Running around the new, more seamless world, blasting enemies with the latest and greatest weaponry dropped by enemies and found in chests, was as satisfying as ever. With that core intact, as well as an increased emphasis on seamless exploration aided by fewer loading screens than ever, and a vastly expanded suite of traversal moves, Borderlands 4 feels better to move through than any prior game.
Borderlands 3 improved on the franchise’s movement, and Gearbox diligently took notice of what players did and did not enjoy with that game. “We really got to be able to look at it and say, for example, ‘People really like this movement thing. How can we make that even better?,'” senior project producer Anthony Nicholson says. “It’s one of those things where we look at where we are, what we’ve done before, and what are the things that we feel like, as players of our game […] what is going to make people feel like it makes sense? What is the player really going to love? Because we always look at the player first and what their experience is when we’re designing or creating anything.”Â
I loved sprinting, sliding, double-jumping, and gliding through the environments housed within Kairos, but the new grapple ability is such an improvement to both traversal and combat that it genuinely feels like it will make going back to the older games in the series difficult. In Borderlands 4, not only can you reach new areas using the grappling hook, but you can also use it to grab environmental objects to throw at nearby enemies. The grappling hook combines so seamlessly with other traversal moves at your disposal. I loved grappling up to the top of a new area, and gliding closer to a group of enemies before tossing grenades and slamming down with a ground-pound move.Â
Though traversal and world exploration are likely the most significant improvements regarding how you’ll interact with the world and environment, the weapons will always be the star of the show in Borderlands. While on the sticks with Borderlands 4, I encountered all kinds of incredibly fun weaponry. Each time I opened a chest or defeated a Badass enemy, I couldn’t wait to see what new gun awaited me.Â
I particularly enjoyed the process of trying out a new weapon to see if it would take the quick-select slot previously dedicated to a different gun. Much to my surprise, nearly every weapon I picked up felt viable, meaning if I didn’t like certain behaviors or abilities inherent in certain rifles or shotguns, I could rely on the ones I was already using, regardless of rarity. Still, the hunt for a new weapon and the scouring of the environment is exhilarating, even in the short couple of hours I spent with the game.Â
“If you have a favorite gun, you can use it, you can keep it, and you can spec your skills around it or the other pieces of gear to keep using the enhancements,” Nicholson says. “We wanted to make sure that we focused on that. We looked at the balance, we looked at the rarity, and the pieces of gear that we could have to make sure that each drop was viable for the players as they progress throughout the game.”Â
Borderlands 4 adds new manufacturers, additional licensed parts, and an evolved inventory system that remaps your ordnance and heavy weapons to the same slot as grenades for a more streamlined experience. Manufacturers can now mix and match within the same weapon for unprecedented ability combinations and synergies. While on inventory, I liked the new approach to health regeneration. You no longer find health kits in lockers; instead, you only find health drops by defeating enemies. Additionally, each player has a Repkit, a healing and buffing ability baked into their loadout that operates on a cooldown so you can heal on the fly without paying attention to your inventory.
Meeting the Vault Hunters
After learning the basics of Borderlands 4, I’m dropped into two distinct sessions, where I can take two separate Vault Hunters for a test drive. Rafa, the Exo-Soldier, and Vex, the Dark Siren, are available to me in this build. Rafa is a more straightforward run-and-gun character, but you can adapt all Vault Hunters to various playstyles using their Action Skills. For example, his Apophis Lance and Peacebreaker Cannons feature abilities like piercing ordnance attacks from an arm-cannon like Samus from Metroid and auto-firing at enemies in the crosshairs, respectively, but equipping his Arc-Knives briefly changes him to a melee character who likes to get up close and personal. Meanwhile, Vex, in her Dead Ringer style, can summon either a Reaper to draw enemy attention and deal melee damage or a Specter to act as a turret. But if you move to her Phase Phamiliar style, she can summon a beastly minion, Trouble, who can teleport and deal area-of-effect damage. Her final style, Incarnate, creates explosions that deal damage and buff Vex.Â
My longest session of the day was with Rafa. This save file dropped me into the Fadefields portion of the world with a level 5 character and a starter mission to meet up with the Outbounders. At this point in the story, Claptrap wants to start a Kairos-wide resistance, so he starts recruiting groups. The Outbounders are the first group to join the cause, which means the Timekeeper targets them. My first mission is to help them fend off his forces.Â
Upon arriving, I see the Timekeeper’s forces are already in a firefight with the Outbounders. They seem outgunned, but that’s where Rafa comes in. Using the grapple hook, I snag an explosive barrel and hurl it toward one synthetic enemy. Then, I equip the Arc-Knives and slash another to pieces. I duck behind cover and blast a Pinhead, which almost looks like a tiny triceratops. I clinch the firefight by taking out an Incendiary Breach Armature with my sniper rifle, then sprinting and sliding to blast a couple more synthetic troops with a shotgun. Idolator Sol, one of the Timekeeper’s followers, floats above the battlefield as a hologram. He voices his displeasure, then vanishes, leaving me to have a quiet introduction with the Outbounders. The seemingly magnanimous leader, Rush, thanks me for helping his crew by giving me a Digirunner vehicle, which makes the vast, seamless world even more explorable.
After speeding through the Fadefields for a bit, I follow the mission marker to Horace’s base. This next mission in the chain has me kicking down the door of a stronghold swarming with enemies, culminating in a boss fight. Methodically going room by room, destroying enemies scratched a familiar itch, and the new traversal mechanics felt amazing. After 30 minutes of infiltrating the base, I find Horace. This “murder-pervert,” as Rafa calls him, floats around the room, swinging his scythe and relentlessly blasting me. This requires me to be supremely mobile as I avoid his hordes of summoned synths and be judicious with my Repkit cooldown. Since I’m playing solo, I’m woefully outnumbered, but the good news is that when I’m downed, it gives me ample targets to destroy to stand back up with Second Wind.Â
After a long encounter, I finally take down Horace and loot his Private Reserve, resulting in me adding a Looming Muki pistol, which offers ricochet critical hits and damage beyond any other handgun in my inventory. I only have a little bit of time left, so I speed over to Claptrap and start a questline that seems like an excuse to do more mini-bases to retrieve items for the series’ mouthy mascot. Here was where the skills I developed in my first 90 minutes of gameplay really sang, as I chained together Rafa’s abilities and started wiping out waves of standard enemies and going toe to toe with Badass variants. I had a blast exploring the open world, but I was eagerly anticipating my next session, which shifted my Vault Hunter to Vex.
Stepping into the shoes of a level 20 Vex, my mission is simple: conquer the Fadefields Primordial Vault. This challenging dungeon threw me from platform to platform, each offering multiple waves of difficult enemies. The chaos involved not only staying alive but also chipping away at the insistent hordes of enemies, which range from standard beasts and gunmen to Badass creatures. It brought me right back to the perpetually moving, chaotic scenes that made me fall in love with Borderlands in the first place. When things got too hectic, I used Vex’s ability to summon beasts and phantoms to take the heat off me and provide some much-needed support.
After surviving all of the Primordial Vault’s challenges, I was faced with the Vault boss, the Primordial Guardian Inceptus. This massive beast wildly swings its whip-like tail and lunges forward to slash me with its big claws. I can do nominal damage by shooting Inceptus, but the best way to put real dents in its health is by using the grappling hook to rip open its weak spots.Â
Due to his restless stream of attacks, I am downed more than a couple of times, but thankfully, some smaller minions are easily picked off to let me stand back up. After I do enough damage, Inceptus crawls onto the ceiling and summons a pool of poisonous liquid that floods the arena. My only recourse is to use my grappling hook to climb to the stalactite-like mushrooms that grow out of the ceiling when it does this move. Grappling from mushroom to mushroom like Spider-Man while blasting his revealed vulnerable targets feels great, and through staying alive long enough to outlast it, I am able to bring Inceptus down and reap the rewards.
A Teamwork Tease
Following my victory, I had the opportunity to team up in two-player cooperative play. I had a lot of fun playing Borderlands 4 in single-player mode, but co-op is clearly the definitive way to experience Borderlands. I’m sad I didn’t have the opportunity to run wild in the open world, but just taking on the boss fight with Inceptus gave me a sense of the fun to be had there. Maybe it was the fact that we had both taken on this leviathan solo and knew how to approach the battle, but the fight went so much smoother when there was a second player to distract the boss some of the time. Though I was disappointed to only have a small amount of time with the co-op play, it was a fitting way to end my first hands-on experience with Borderlands 4.
When trying to bounce back from a polarizing release, nearly every studio will tell you that they’ve learned from recent games and are listening to fans. With Gearbox, it truly feels like Borderlands 4 is taking those steps to change the direction of a franchise that had been drifting away from me for more than a decade, while still remaining staunchly true to its overarching identity. I can’t wait to explore Kairos and take down the Timekeeper when Borderlands 4 arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 12. It will come to Switch 2 at a later date.
