Borderlands 4 Gunplay Is the Best in the Series

Borderlands 4 gunplay is the one thing almost everybody agrees on. Reviewers who marked the game down for stutter and crashes still rated the shooting as the strongest the series has produced. The Borderlands 4 weapons kept players on Kairos long after the frame rate stopped cooperating.

We landed in the same place in our own review, which gave the game 8 out of 10 and called it the best-playing entry in the series by a distance. The guns carry it.

We'll break down what changed under the hood, what critics and players said after a year, and whether the shooting really is that good.

Borderlands 4 Gunplay Summary

• Borderlands 4 gunplay is the most praised part of the game across critic reviews and player reviews alike

• Eight manufacturers ship with the game, five returning and three new: The Order, Ripper and Daedalus

• Licensed Parts put behaviours from several manufacturers into one weapon, so you chase a part combination and not a gun name

• The Ordnance slot puts heavy weapons and grenades on a cooldown, so the big guns fire in every fight

• Critics averaged 82 on OpenCritic with 88 percent recommending, and Steam reviews fell to mixed at launch on the back of performance complaints

Why Borderlands 4 Gunplay Feels Different

Recoil patterns here are learnable inside a magazine or two. Guns settle where you expect, and the gap between a Jakobs revolver and a Vladof rifle shows up in your hands rather than on a stat card. Aiming down sights pulls the spread in hard, and hip fire stays honest at close range. The audio does its share of the work too, since a Torgue shotgun sounds like a demolition charge and a Ripper spin-up sounds like a warning.

Eight manufacturers ship with the game. Jakobs pays out on headshots, Maliwan owns the elements, Vladof trades accuracy for fire rate, Tediore throws the gun at you on reload, Torgue detonates. Three newcomers joined them: The Order with charge-and-release blasts, Ripper built for full auto, and Daedalus leaning on reliability and multi-ammo support.

Elements decide more fights than damage numbers do. Shock strips shields, corrosive eats armour, incendiary melts flesh, and switching to the right barrel mid-fight beats trying to out-damage the wrong one. Enemy health bars are colour coded for exactly that reason, and reading them is the difference between a ten-second kill and a ten-minute one.

Cryo and radiation cover the odd jobs. Cryo slows a target and freezes it solid once you stack enough of it, which buys you the second you need against a charging Ripper psycho. Radiation spreads on death, so a packed room turns into a chain reaction if you pick the right enemy to drop first. Kinetic guns carry no element at all and still earn a slot, since they hit flesh and armour without a penalty attached.

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Licensed Parts Changed What You Hunt For

Licensed Parts let a single weapon carry behaviours from several manufacturers at once. A Vladof body can spawn with a Torgue magazine and a Maliwan element switch, so you hunt a combination of parts, never a name.

Rarity controls how many of those parts roll in. Higher rarity weapons spawn more of them, so two copies of the same legendary can play nothing alike. A perfect roll turns into a long-term target rather than a box you tick on the first drop.

Heavy weapons and grenades share one Ordnance slot and run on a cooldown, no longer on scarce ammo, which retires the old habit of hoarding rockets for boss fights. You pick one or the other, so the choice between a grenade that clears adds and a launcher that deletes a badass is a real build decision. Ordnance also stays locked during Fight for Your Life, and plenty of second winds have died on that rule.

The cost of all this lands on readability. With this many part combinations in circulation, judging a fresh drop takes longer than it did in Borderlands 3, and reviewers hit the launch menus hard for it. MonsterVine paired its praise for the shooting with a flat complaint about the redesigned UI, and the loot sorting is the part players still ask Gearbox to fix. But, it’s still worth it.

Movement Is Half of the Gunplay

Shooting only makes sense here with the traversal kit attached. 2K lists double jumping, gliding, dodging and grappling as standard for every Vault Hunter, and each one is usable mid-fight.

The arenas stack vertically around that idea. The ledges you can see are ledges you can reach, so a corridor fight becomes a three-level scrap where you glide in, slam an enemy, then slide into a shotgun blast. Height works as line of sight more than as safety, and the calmest place in a loud fight is often ten metres above it, mid glide, where most enemy tracking gives up.

Outside the arenas the hover bike does the legwork. 2K sells it as the way across Kairos, and the open zones assume you are riding it between objectives. That pace matters for the shooting too, since you arrive at a camp with your traversal cooldowns full and a route in from above already picked.

Not every critic was sold on the whole kit. VGC found the grapple clumsy and easy to forget about, and that criticism holds up indoors, where tight rooms leave nothing worth hooking.

FAQs About Borderlands 4 Gunplay

Final Words

Borderlands 4 gunplay earns this much credit for how little friction sits between wanting something and doing it. You see a ledge, you reach it. You see a shielded enemy, you swap to shock.

Licensed Parts made every drop interesting and every drop a maths problem at the same time, and the hunt for a perfect roll is a much longer road than it used to be. Is a god roll still a realistic goal? For most players, no.

Whether that is enough to keep Kairos populated through a second year of content is the open question. Watch what the next story pack does with enemy variety, since the guns already did their part.

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