Borderlands 4 Review: Great Guns And A Forgotten Villain
I came to this Borderlands 4 review straight off a Football Manager 26 save, which is about as far from a loot shooter as a hobby gets. Weeks of team talks, scouting reports, and a striker who wouldn't score. I wanted the other extreme for one evening, so I landed on Kairos, braced to bounce off it before midnight.
Loot shooters aren't my genre. Damage numbers spraying off enemy heads, a billion guns nobody asked for, a comedy register I stopped finding funny somewhere around the second game. Two sessions later I was still playing past the point where I'd promised myself one more bunker. Kairos is the first Borderlands map I've wanted to move around on foot.
Below, you'll find what changed my mind, what still grates after a full roadmap of packs, and where I land on the score. I do have to mention that I got the game for last Christmas.
Borderlands 4 Review Summary
Movement is the headline change. Double jump, glide, dodge and grapple turn every arena into vertical space, and the hover bike is for distance rather than combat.
All four launch Vault Hunters are worth a run, and each skill tree branches far enough to support two very different builds.
The writing is the weak link. The Timekeeper never lands as a villain and a lot of side content is there to fill a level gap.
PC performance is a different game. Gearbox reported roughly a 20% average frame rate gain and a crash rate cut from 0.63% of sessions to 0.38%.
The endgame grew a spine after launch: level 60, shared progression across characters and dedicated Pearlescent drop sources.
Kairos Rewards Movement Over Vehicles
Traversal is what separates this game from every Borderlands before it. I had a double jump, a directional dodge, a grapple and a glide, the last two handed over as early pickups rather than late-campaign rewards. Gearbox built the arenas around them, so the ledges you can see are the ledges you can reach.
Fights bend around that kit more than any weapon could manage. An Order bunker turns into a problem of altitude: grapple to the catwalk, clear the shielded units pinning you, glide off the far end before the heavy below finds its range. Dying is cheap and drops you back close enough to try a different angle, so I lost that bunker four times and took it on the fifth by ignoring the door.
Long crossings are the Digirunner's job. The summonable single-rider machine carries a front turret, and I still used it to travel and fought on foot. Kairos is large enough that holding forward toward a marker is a real part of the evening, and safehouses double as fast travel points and vendors that cut those crossings down. Rift Champions reliably pulled me off the route. They appear at no fixed location, hit far harder than anything patrolling nearby, and reward you for dropping whatever you were doing.
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Gunplay And Loot Carry The Game
Gunplay is the reason I kept coming back. The reason is purely mechanical. Recoil patterns are learnable inside a magazine or two, and the elemental interactions actually decide fights against shielded and armoured targets instead of being a colour on the item card. Guns have weight here.
Loot got the bigger structural change, and I'm not a grinder yet still kept rerunning one boss for a single parts roll. The Licensed Parts system folds one manufacturer's behaviour into another's gun. A Jakobs rifle can turn up with a Maliwan element-switching underbarrel or a Tediore throw-on-reload, so the gun you are hunting is a combination of parts, never a name.
All four launch Vault Hunters hold up. Vex is the Siren, throwing phase energy, phase clones and a feline familiar. Rafa is the ex-Tediore Exo-Soldier whose suit manifests arc blades, shoulder cannons and a plasma lance. Amon the Forgeknight forges axes and shields from his gauntlet. Harlowe the Gravitar is the ex-Maliwan combat scientist whose stasis bubbles and cryo zones rearrange an encounter before you fire a shot. Each carries three action skills across branching trees and equips one, wide enough that two Harlowe players can be doing different jobs in one fight.
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The Writing Plays It Too Safe
My enthusiasm runs out at the story. Humour sits far lower than it did in Borderlands 3, and the result is a script that avoids embarrassing itself and forgets to be memorable. Jokes land more often and there are far fewer of them, and almost nothing has filled the space they used to take up.
A bigger problem is the Timekeeper. He rules Kairos through Bolts, control implants forced into the population, and he plants one in you in the opening hour. It's a decent premise. He never gets the screen time or the personality to make it stick, and the Bolt ends up as a voice in your ear more than a threat you feel.
Side content sags in the same way, since a lot of the missions around Kairos are fetch loops the game leans on to keep you level-appropriate. I felt enemy variety follow the same curve. Order forces, the Rippers and the Kairos wildlife give you three distinct fighting styles for the first stretch, and later regions largely hand you tougher versions of those same three with new names. I was shooting the same silhouettes for the back half of the campaign, and the moment-to-moment gunplay carried it anyway.
Performance And Endgame Both Improved
Gearbox published a status update on PC performance laying out the work. It claims roughly a 20% average frame rate gain across specifications. The credit goes to a reworked shader pipeline, trimmed polygon counts on effects, lighter physics and cloth simulation, and Virtual Shadow Maps for dynamic lighting. Crash figures convinced me: nearly halved over one stretch of that work, from 0.63% of all sessions to 0.38%, with the share of players hitting a crash falling from 17% to 9.35%.
The endgame filled out alongside it. Its difficulty ladder, UVHM, climbs in tiers, and a separate account-wide Specializations track layers extra skills over whatever build you run. A weekly Big Encore boss and a weekly Wildcard mission give the week a point. A later update attached dedicated drop sources to eight existing Pearlescents. That mattered most to me, since chasing the top rarity through pure world drops is the odds-hunting that makes me close a game.
Progression got the same treatment. The Story Pack 1 update notes raised the level cap to 60, then made collectibles, map progress, SDU tokens and vehicle skins shared across every character on your account. It's the single best quality-of-life change the game has had. Rolling a second Vault Hunter stopped meaning rediscovering the same world, and cross-platform save has landed too.
Post-launch packs have kept a steady rhythm. Pearlescent gear arrived in an update everyone got, deployed alongside Bounty Pack 2, and Story Pack 1 added a frozen region and C4SH the Rogue as a playable Vault Hunter. Story Pack 2, FL4K and the Last Resort, followed with Loveless the Hacker. But, is there going to be any new content is the future?
Is Borderlands 4 Worth Buying Right Now?
Yes, and I say that as someone who doesn't like this genre. The shooting and the movement carry a player with no affection for Pandora or vault lore, and the systems reward experimenting without a spreadsheet. If a looter has ever lost you on its script alone, this is the one to retry. Bear in mind, Borderlands 4 was one of the most anticipated games of 2025.
The PC build is stable, the endgame has structure behind it, and the updates everyone gets have changed how the game plays day to day more than the packs have. Anyone who put this down early is coming back to a different game. Season content is the part I'd think twice about, since the Bounty Packs are slight and the Story Packs are where the real additions sit.
Sit it out if the campaign is the thing you buy games for, since the story is competent and forgettable. Come to Kairos for the shooting and let the plot wash past you. If you'd skip the early levelling entirely, Borderlands 4 accounts are the shortcut, and Borderlands 4 items cover the gap if you want a build running before you've farmed the parts. If you like Destiny 2, this is also a game for you.
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Final Words
What surprised me most was how little the loot mattered to my enjoyment. I assumed a Borderlands game lived or died on the gun chase. What kept me here was the grapple, the glide and the two seconds of altitude they buy you in a bad fight. Strip the numbers out and you still have a shooter I'd recommend.
Post-launch support has been the pleasant surprise. Shared progression, a raised cap, dedicated Pearlescent sources and a PC build that behaves add up to a game far better than the one that shipped. The open question is what happens once the roadmap runs out, since the endgame is built on weekly rotations that need feeding.
Writing is what keeps this off a higher number. A game this confident in its own hands deserves a villain worth beating, and the overcorrection away from Borderlands 3 stripped out the cringe and the personality together. No patch is going to write a character into the Timekeeper.
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