Borderlands 4 Review – Borderlands, Evolved

Borderlands 4 Review

Although 2007’s Hellgate: London is often cited as the first looter-shooter, 2009’s Borderlands created the template…at least for future Borderlands games. Over three mainline titles and a spinoff or two, the trademarks remain solid. The art style is unique, the loot ridiculously plentiful, the near-infinite variety of guns and explosive combat are baked in. Then there’s the franchise’s characters and humor, which have ranged from brilliant to cringe, sometimes in the same game. Borderlands 4 is an immediately recognizable sequel. It has the simultaneous goals of evolving the series and rediscovering what made the early games great. Largely, it succeeds.

No Borders to these Lands

Borderlands 4 is set on the planet Kairos, which was revealed to exist after the events of the prior game, thanks to Lilith’s fumbling manipulation of the moon Elpis. Each Borderlands game brings in a large number of new players, so Borderlands 4 doesn’t demand an encyclopedic knowledge of its lore. However, players of the earlier games will find quite a few returning characters and callbacks, starting with Claptrap. The story is interesting enough not to spoil here beyond the basics.

Unlike the previous games, Borderlands 4 is set in an impressively vast open world. There are loading screens after dying and during fast travel. Aside from that, traveling between Kairos’ three main biomes — Fadefields, the Terminus Range and Carcadia Burn — is seamless. That’s not to suggest “if you can see it, you can get there.” The landscape is not entirely explorable, but largely free of annoying invisible walls.

 

Open worlds are always a bit controversial. Giving players a lot of real estate is great, but often at the cost of tightly knit narrative or deliberate pacing. Borderlands 4 solves this problem in a few smart ways. The main story has the player character working to defeat three powerful lieutenants of the game’s big bad, the Timekeeper. Each boss is in a different region of the map and can be defeated in any order, with the game adjusting difficulty to character level. This allows the player to progress some part of the critical path and also explore freely across the different zones, grinding for loot and XP.

A Quest on the Side

Borderlands 3 caught some flak for its scattershot sense of humor that was too often cringe and over-reliant on cultural commentary. Developers have taken this to heart. The main campaign’s writing and dialogue have their share of snarky one-liners and moments of weirdness, but overall are the narrative is more grounded and less focused on groan-inducing humor. The vault hunter meets a number of characters with almost no comic component at all. There are moments of surprising emotional resonance.

Where the humor and satire really live is in the side quests, of which there are almost too many to count. For example, you might stumble on a flat-earther who insists that Kairos is a disk, and bets you can’t prove it’s a sphere. Most of them tie at least loosely to the main story or at least to the world’s fiction. The side quests definitely make exploring the landscape entertaining. It’s a little disappointing, though, that mechanically so many of them are simply fetch quests that end in combat.

While we’re talking about the story and writing, it’s a good place to mention that the game’s voice acting is exceptionally good. Sometimes the writing is a little bland in the main quest, but after listening to dozens of characters and thousands of lines of dialogue, nobody just phoned it in.

Come for the Combat

Borderlands developed a very specific take on first person combat, starting with the first game. It begins with a staggering number of pistols, rifles, shotguns, energy shields and SMGs, it adds gratuitously graphic violence and finishes with large-scale encounters against a variety of enemy types. It seems almost heretical for me to want some great melee weapons, because Borderlands is a looter-shooter. If I want swords and boards I can play Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.

Combat in Borderlands 4 evolves a bit through a few new mechanics, like a grappling hook, which allows the vault hunter to quickly gain a height advantage — provided the level has that built in. It isn’t the most elegant or fluid mechanic but it works. There is a personal vehicle called a Digi-Runner that can be summoned instantly, nearly anywhere. Finally, players have a drone called ECHO-4. The drone does not assist in combat directly but highlights routes to objectives, upgrades certain items and resurrects the player after dying.

In addition to the vehicle and grappling hook, traversal options have been expanded. The player can glide, slide, hover, double jump and even swim underwater. Altogether, these add up a feeling of freedom and flexibility to exploration and combat

Pick a Hunter

These mechanics apply no matter which vault hunter the player selects, but of course the four characters are the heart of the experience. If you’ve been following the game’s development you probably know your choices: Vex, the Dark Siren; Rafa, the Exo-Solider; Amon, the Forge Knight and Harlowe, the Gravitar. In RPG terms, there’s a necromancer, rogue, tank and elemental mage.

Each character has a very well defined personality, place in the narrative and clear voice. I played primarily as Vex. Even though she’s a fragile glass canon, she’s a pet class with several summonable allies, like a spectral cat named Trouble that’s a healer and powerful aide in combat. As a solo player, Trouble did a good job in boss fights holding aggro. She also has a lethal sniper specialty in her skill tree which is very satisfying to use. All the vault hunters have an incredibly deep set of upgrades, active and passive and skills, and all are viable in combat. It really comes down to preferred style. Although I sampled all the vault hunters, I’m looking forward to diving deeper into the other classes.

As satisfying as combat and the different vault hunters can be, there are a few small disappointments. Borderlands 4 is big and geographically diverse, but the enemies don’t reflect that diversity nearly enough. While each zone has a few unique variants, the majority of enemies are the same. Likewise, the rhythm and pace of combat almost never varies. As evolved as Borderlands 4 is in many areas, and as solid as combat feels, some of the more protracted battles can simply go on too long.

Home Run Art

Art designer Adam May and his team have used Unreal Engine 5 to craft the most vibrant and detailed Borderlands to date. Previews have highlighted the lush Fadefields for a reason. It looks unlike anything in the Borderlands games, and the verdant landscape is a welcome, refreshing change. For those who miss the washes of greys and browns, those are there in Carcadia Burn and Terminus Range. While a number of recent games have used a similar line-art, comic graphic novel style, Borderlands still does it best.

Visually, NPC and enemy design is great, though there are plenty of rough animations during NPC dialogue sections. Sound design is excellent, and I especially enjoyed some of the combat music which relied less on screaming guitars and more on interesting percussion.

The Unreal Engine 5 always presents challenges. Technically, Borderlands 4 has a few issues. Aside from taking a very long time to load initial textures even on a high-end PC, there were some problems with sound dropouts, freezes, framerate drops and pop in. I would go so far as to call it truly messy, but definitely in need of patches and fixes.

Future Fun

There will always be some disagreement about what content is or isn’t included at launch, and how post-game monetization will color the experience. Aside from weekly and seasonal challenges, plans for additional content include story packs, new modes and a higher tier of loot.

There’s no question that Borderlands 4 is an ambitious improvement over the last installment. Its visually impressive open world is full of enjoyable content to discover, the narrative is more serious without being dull and the series’ wicked humor is intact via side quests. In fact, the risks Gearbox has taken pay off so well it made me wish they’d taken more chances with combat. All the vault hunters are fun to play, making multiple playthroughs or co-op rewarding. Borderlands 4 doesn’t revolutionize the franchise, but it absolutely evolves it, and sets up an exciting future for the series.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***