I’m not the hugest Borderlands fan in the world; I’ve played 2 for about 200 hours and then gave the Pre-Sequel about another hundred. Borderlands 3 wasn’t that engaging, but I gotta say that 4 was pretty good! I’m still always asking the same question when I play this franchise (why is it that the only company that makes a game that feels and plays like this also writes it like this), but ultimately I had a great time with Borderlands 4 and I probably would’ve played it fair bit more if the endgame / New Game+ situation had been less weird.
After picking up one of four Vault Hunters, all with three skill trees that feel very different from one another - with their own unique active skills to boot, so you could play the same character multiple times and have a different game experience - you get thrown into a story of planetary domination by a figure named the Timekeeper. Fighting three Big Bads around a large map made up of four very distinct zones, you complete sidequests and activities, level up, find better gear and fight through even more challenges, in a very engaging gameplay loop.
The story by itself isn’t really the big pull for me with Borderlands games; on one hand it’ll try to tell a tale with ups and downs, betrayals and sacrifices, a rebellion fighting against impossible odds, but on the other hand, Claptrap will try to stick his head in a toilet. The main story isn’t as egregious at previous titles, so that’s a net win, and while some of the side content is still a bit cringy, most of it is pretty harmless. Still wondering why some games are just Like That tho!
The open world is fine, with a lot of activity objectives scattered everywhere, like defend missions where you stay around a point defeating enemies, collectibles, special bosses that spawn on a timer, locations with even more unique challenges that you can attempt from time to time, vaults to find and plunder, small traversal puzzles, jumping puzzles, and more. Navigating this open world isn’t frictionless, there aren’t enough fast travel points, the in-game navigation system sometimes will just not work or tell you to go through a brick wall, but you can use a vehicle and a glide pack (which is pretty fun to use) and there’s enough stuff to do around that just walking isn’t that big of a deal.
Enemies are the usual Borderlands fare; some of them will shoot at you, some will charge at you, or explode. They get a bit more complex, with modifiers like if we were in Diablo, different types of lifebars that you have to chew through using different types of damage and special barriers that take a bit more finesse to break. The big ‘act’ bosses are longer fights, but they tend to be on the easier side because of how revival works in the game (when you run out of life you are put in a state where you need to defeat an enemy to get up), but that was fine with me.
There’s a lot of loot to go around and it’s not always fun to spend multiple minutes comparing everything, especially that now you get quest rewards in a special inventory as gifts that you need to unwrap, and if you’re waiting too long and do a bunch of quests, you’ll spend a considerable amount of time just looking at items. You have four gun slots - from machine guns to pistols to shotguns - with various parts all bringing different effects like being able to charge your shots or elemental damage. You have a shield slot (there are two types of shields now, one that regenerates quickly and another that does not), a medkit slot (so you can heal yourself on a cooldown, useful!), a grenade/rocket launcher slot, a class mod slot (with passive point bonuses and other perks) and an enhancement slot (often with boosts to specific gun manufacturers, I particularly enjoyed Maliwan mixology, being able to do a fraction of other elemental types). It can become a lot to properly manage all that, but it can also be fun to make up a good build.
Ultimately the way that the endgame works and how having multiple characters worked made me stop play the game sooner than I wanted. On my first character, I did some activities and some sidequests and got max level before the end of the game, because the postgame progression system (another skill tree) doesn’t unlock before you beat the game at least once, I stopped doing side content and beat the game. On my second character, I just beelined the main story missions, sometimes I was a bit underleveled, but it was doable and overall fun. On my third character, I wanted to only do activities to level up besides the main quest, but then a patch came in and made it so completed activities with other characters were shared between your different Vault Hunters! So I stopped then.
Borderlands 4 is pretty good and it kept me engaged for a while. The shooting is fun, the character building is fun and everything else is in the range of tolerable to okay. At this point you probably know if you enjoy Borderlands or not, but if you’re on the fence, I’d say to check this one out!
