Borderlands 4 Review: The Best Looter Shooter

The Familiar Grind

From the moment I started Borderlands 4, it was one of those games I wanted to love. The iconic gunplay was back: the wild kick of a Jakobs revolver, the thump of a Torgue shotgun, and the neon flash of a Maliwan charge-up. The center loop of shooting, looting, and watching legendary drops explode out of enemies was still addictive. Gearbox knows how to make it feel good.

Borderlands 4 is one of the highly rated games. Everything works seamlessly, from the combat and graphics, the loot system works wonderfully, and even the world is massive. Still, no matter how long I play, the world feels hollow and soulless. Each patch feels like it makes the gameplay worse. Most of the cheap systems are targeted towards maintaining players and avoiding losing players rather than maintaining the franchise and losing fans. Care more about your fans, and the games will prosper.

The Missing Faces

Borderlands 4 is strange because of who is not present. It is funny because you cross paths with Zane and Amara first. The rest are the cheeky banterers from Borderlands 3. Moxxi is there, Claptrap comes back to relieve the players of the world, and Lilith is there after the trailers promised so, but then there is no more. It is where the tension lies. Expectation builds slowly without payoff, so it is set to run off and get frustrated.

What could have happened to Moze, Fl4k, Tannis, Marcus, or even Ava? Not to mention, there’s hardly any dialogue recognizing that these characters are gone. Sure, there are a couple of offhand comments about “people being scattered after the Eridian incident,” but who scattered? How did it happen? I get that there are comments about the incident serving as a turning point in the story, but it’s a little hard to connect it all in a final product that feels like it is without critical context. Borderland 4 is rather lackluster in its historical continuity.

I know that there was a strong anti-Ava sentiment in Borderlands 3, but such strong conclusions to story arcs tend to have implications for the future. Nevertheless, BL4 does nothing with her. She was right there on the ship with the rest of the crew. It doesn’t get more baffling than that.

Gearbox seems to want to erase her completely because of my reaction. But that seems a little shortsighted to me. Even fans who wanted her to leave recognize the issue that a biased transition creates. It begs the question of whether Vex is just Ava under a different name. Her entire design, mannerisms, and even her voice sound like Ava, just older, and her design is a reimagining of Ava. It seems like half of the developers shifted their focus to avoiding backlash and simply changed Ava to Vex. Although from my experience in story writing and seeing them in other games, I don’t believe it is just a coincidence.

A Story Lacking Substance

By a story feeling weightless, I do not mean there is no story at all. Borderlands 4 does have a story, albeit a thin one. I suppose it revolves around the protagonist searching for pieces of the mysterious “Watcher’s Prophecy”, a piece of story lore introduced over ten years ago in The Pre-Sequel. You end up traveling around various planets and doing a series of “fetch-it” quests for different characters, and never truly feel connected to the story. The “villain” is a corporate ruler warlord named Drayven Holt, and aside from a few monologues and one or two brief confrontations, he lacks the presence of a true antagonist in the story. He is all hollow, and there is no charisma, menace, or spark.

There used to be an element in past games that kept you hooked. Handsome Jack is the obvious example, and even the Calypso Twins from Borderlands 3 had a voice and intent that were consistent and drove the story. Holt just does not have that. He is simply there, he is bad, and you are supposed to stop him. It is not that Borderlands lacks story and needs Shakespearean-type dialogue, but it used to have energy—a sense of chaos and personality that made even the dumbest jokes come alive. Borderlands 4, by comparison, feels sterile.

If you buy PS5 shooter looter games, you will find that the open-world format gives you too much space, so that you end up spending most of your time completing additional side quests or crafting loot. You spend so much time liberating outposts of loot caches that it tires you out. After this, you can complete a main plot goal, and it may take you up to three hours.

The Open World Problem

This is where the MMO-style design really hurts the experience. The original Borderlands games were about traveling through self-contained, distinct zones. You had the deserts of Pandora, the neon skyline of Promethea, and the swamps of Eden-6, and each varied zone had its own tone and narrative. But Borderlands 4 is now designed as a massive open world. You have one enormous map and a never-ending stream of icons to distract you: challenges, bases, collectibles, and random events.

It's not that the material is poorly constructed, but that it is uninspired.. Whenever I opened the map, I was approached by a dozen distractions, each screaming for attention. Help a random scavenger, defend a convoy, collect rare minerals, and participate in shooting galleries. None of those distractions advanced the main plot. None of those distractions developed the world in a meaningful way. It felt like busy work. It felt like the sort of mindless content you’d expect from an MMO or a Ubisoft sandbox, not from a Borderlands title that used to boast about its carefully constructed mayhem.

I tried to push this feeling aside and concentrate on the story missions, fully expecting the narrative to redeem itself. But it never did. It's as if Gearbox took ten hours of narrative and stretched it to fit fifty hours of game map. It's as if Gearbox was hoping a loot treadmill would distract players from the lack of meaningful content.

A Game Too Scared to Take Risks

Borderlands 3 did not get the balance between fun gameplay and its audacious style correct, with the enormous chatter and its general liveliness and silliness earning it a variety of critiques. Instead of being confident, Borderlands 4 seems scared of angering its audience. Compared to its predecessor, it is quieter and lacks the polish, which makes it feel emptier. False wit, emotional disengagement, and tale avoidance characterize the dull, muted elusiveness of frightened fans and expectations, making Borderlands 4 as pointless as the void.

It is confident in the gameplay mechanics, yet it is unreflective as to its inherent personality, dampening the adventuring spirit. The best thing for the fans who buy PS5 games of this kind: The loot is constructed brilliantly. ​The emptiness in the game is the dampening of the adventuring spirit that the series is known for.

Echoes of the Watcher

The lasting mystery of the Watcher is what keeps me even mildly interested in the narrative. Fans have been waiting for a payoff ever since the cryptic message from The Pre-Sequel over a decade ago. Borderlands 4 suggests that the Watcher’s prophecy—the idea of a coming “cosmic reckoning”—will finally matter. There is lore scattered through missions and echo logs that hints at something significant. So far, though, there is far more potential than payoff.

It feels like Gearbox is saving the real answers for Borderlands 5 or for the next expansion. Maybe they are finally working toward that epic cosmic event that they have been alluding to for ages, or maybe they aren't. At this stage of the game, it feels like a mystery that is being unnecessarily dragged out. Eleven years is far too long to be teasing the same question, especially when there is no resolution in sight.

The Enjoyable Side of the Frustration

With all of the above being said, I will point-blank say that Borderlands 4 is fun to play. When it comes to the narrative, I find it fun to play the game when I get so lost in the rhythm of combat that I forget to think about the story. I still appreciate the feeling of landing a chain of critical hits, seeing high-tier gear drop from enemies, and testing out new legendary weapons that radically alter the weapons in my loadout. That is the satisfying feedback loop I continue to play Borderlands for.

Unfortunately, the game does not provide me with a reason to care about what I am doing. I feel a lack of an emotional connection, a great villain, and an overall absence of significance in the actions I take. The fun is there, but only in a moment, and it quickly dissipates as soon as I stop playing.

Final Thoughts

Borderlands 4 certainly is a peculiar experience in that it is both technically admirable and a little spiritually hollow. Loot and combat mechanics are the best they have ever been, yet the essence of the series feels like it left us somewhere along the way. Missing characters, stagnant narratives, excessive open-world structures--these are all the reasons that the game feels like a giant single-player MMO instead of the tightly woven, chaotic, character-driven adventures the series is known for.

Borderlands 4 feels like it is springboarding into something larger, yet it is primarily a looter-shooter that is lacking in heart and is just constructing game elements that will please the greatest number of players. The effort to appease everyone, in the end, means it is saying almost nothing.