Borderlands 4 is a game that somehow manages to be both a high point and a low point of the series: a brilliant gameplay experience that is buried beneath a mountain of technical issues.
As a long-time fan of the Borderlands series, it’s safe to say that Borderlands 4 absolutely confuses me. It leaves me conflicted, and questioning myself every time I pick up the controller to play it.
Borderlands 4 is arguably some of the most fun I’ve had with a video game in 2025. Yet, at the same time, it’s also one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had as well. It feels to me that Borderlands 4 highlights the strengths of modern gaming, yet also shows the festering problems that lie just beneath the surface as well.
Borderlands 4 is the latest in the tried and tested looter-shooter series. After a less than stellar last outing with Borderlands 3 that proved divisive with fans (as well as a box office bomb of a live action movie to add the cherry on top) the series has been in dire need of a kick up the backside.
Thankfully, that seems to mostly be the case! The gameplay loop of Borderlands 4 is simple, you play as one of four Vault Hunters (each of whom have their own unique skill sets, skill trees, and myriad ways to build them as you level up), and you’re on the hunt for some of that sweet, sweet loot. This time around you have Rafa, the Exo-soldier; Harlowe, the Gravitar; Amon, the Forgeknight; and Vex, the Siren.
Initially, I wasn’t that keen on the designs or traits of any of these new Vault Hunters (particularly when the game first debuted at the end of 2024). They felt lacklustre, uninspired, and without any identity compared to the previous games. However, I’m able to admit when I am wrong and can put my hand on heart and admit that these new Vault Hunters aren’t just good, but they may be some of my favourites in the entire series.
And that isn’t just from a gameplay perspective either, these new Vault Hunters have a lot of dialogue which fleshes them out a lot more than in previous games, and when playing in co-op you get to hear a lot of what each of them have to say depending on which players are interacting with certain story beats.
Which raises an obvious question… how is the dialogue and the story? After all, this IS a Borderlands game and they aren’t exactly know for being the most high brow of affairs when it comes to their particular brand of humour. In fact, that is where one of the main critiques of Borderlands 3 came from. That game took things a little too far in terms of leaning heavily into meme and internet culture and it made the game, in layman’s terms, absolutely insufferable to play through.
Borderlands 4 still has the particular brand of Borderlands humour the series is known for, but it feels like they may have toned it down a bit too much. The story and dialogue are, in a lot of scenarios, a lot more grounded and serious and at points it sometimes feels a little TOO serious. One particular mission sees you attempting to stop a bio-weapon from wreaking havoc on your allies. There’s nothing tongue in cheek about it, it’s a stone faced affair about war crimes and morality and, there I was sitting there genuinely asking myself “I thought this was a Borderland’s game? Where is this coming from?”.
That’s not to say the game doesn’t go overboard in some of its writing, because it does, and a lot of it can be summed up in one word: horny. I don’t know what was on the writers minds, but so many secondary characters or bosses in this game feel like they’ve been exposed to some kind of aphrodisiac and, well… it isn’t subtle at all. The level of thirst on display is honestly a little unnerving at times.
And now that this review has been completely derailed by an aspect a lot of people probably weren’t expecting it’s time to talk about one of the biggest changes Borderlands 4 makes to its gameplay, and that’s the shift to an open-world map.
Previous Borderlands games were dissected up into smaller playable areas that you’d load into. This time around the entire world is inter-connected and persistent. There are only a handful of areas that require a loading screen, and these are normally reserved for the bigger boss fights. On one hand, the shift to an open-world does offer changes to traversal which make Borderlands 4 feel like the most fluid in the series. You can now double jump, and you get access to a glide pack early on in the story which allows you to manoeuvre around the environment with ease. Each Vault Hunter also gets access to a grapple hook which makes vertical traversal easier as well (provided there is a convenient grapple point in the vicinity).
Yet, on the other hand, my biggest complaint about the shift to an open-world is the seeming loss of a lot of interestingly designed areas and set pieces. A lot of the open-world (and especially the initial starting area) feels sparse and barren. There are a few points of interest scattered around, but everything in between them is dead space with nothing interesting going on. The result of this? I was more likely to try and unlock as many fast travel points as I could so I could hop around the map quicker, rather than traverse it on foot or in a vehicle (which can actually be summoned anywhere you want now instead of at a designated Catch-a-Ride station so… quality of life improvements for what it’s worth).
The transition to an open-world also brings with it that tried and tested trope of “fill the world with collectibles” that anyone who has played a modern Ubisoft game will be familiar with. You’ve got echo logs, decryptable pods, vault key fragments (which are actually important), propaganda speakers and more to pick up. Most of it does feel like chaff, however they do offer rewards in the form of storage expansion for your backpack, extra ammo for specific weapons, or bank space for extra weapons.
World events will also occasionally occur as you’re travelling across the map. These can include things like world-bosses, who spawn inside large bubbles which can be seen from a distance and who will explode into a fountain of loot if you defeat them.
As well as this, any bosses that you’ve defeated from the main story of the game, side-quests, or anywhere else, can be constantly re-challenged at any time through a very nice feature called Moxxi’s Encore. By returning to a previous boss arena you’ll find a sign you can interact with which lets you access the boss fight again which, in turn, allows you repeat chances to farm for legendary loot that each boss has assigned to them. There are no limits to how many times you can challenge a boss as well so if you fancy an evening chasing that one piece of loot that will make your build that few percentage points better, you can do that!
So far, most of what I’ve been saying has been pretty positive. It does genuinely feel like Borderlands 4 is a return to form for the series, and I have been loving its gameplay. Yet this is the point in the review where the monkey’s claw starts to curl and we need to address the performance-based elephant in the room.
Borderlands 4 is, without question, one of the most unoptimised, buggy, and unpolished games I have ever played in recent memory. Many of its issues are completely indefensible for a game of this size, and for one that costs £70 to play no less.
To start with there is the framerate. On console this can fluctuate wildly from 60fps in low intensity situations, to looking like a slideshow when things begin to kick off and particles begin to fly from abilities being cast and explosions going off. It can be a downright misery trying to play in this state. The game has been patched prior to the publishing of this review to fix a nasty memory leak issue on consoles (which would degrade your performance rapidly and would eventually require a restart of the game to fix), but the game is still by no means in a suitable state.
(Side note: Big Red Barrel’s own Kev has been playing the game on PC and has suffered multiple crashes which have forced his PC to shutdown due to overheating, so these issues aren’t limited to just console).
Secondly, the UI is an atrocious mess on consoles. I am a staunch opponent of the cursor system to navigate menus that was popularised by Destiny over a decade ago in console games. It is unintuitive, inaccessible, and frustrating to use and I wish games would ditch it. Unfortunately, Borderlands 4 uses this very system wherein its menus are designed for mouse and keyboard, so navigating them on a controller with the god awful cursor is beyond frustrating, clunky, and slow.
Speaking of UI bugs, a particularly frustrating one is present whereby pressing R3 to select a piece of gear to mark it as “junk” will mark a seemingly random piece of gear two rows or columns adjacent to it instead of the one you want. Thankfully there is a buyback system from vending machines if you do sell something accidentally, but this bug ends up costing you minutes of time as you meticulously have to sort through everything manually instead of just being able to press a single button to mark something.
At one point, I became very confused when I seemed to all of a sudden be doing far less damage than I normally would, and that several of my abilities were not working anymore. I reset the game to no avail before discovering that my skill tree and all of my perks had been reset for no reason, forcing me to reinvest all of my points and redo my build from scratch. It’s small things like this which have slowly been souring and eroding my enjoyment of the game.
Finally, the game at times just looks downright ugly, especially from a distance. Textures will pop in, some textures clip through the ground, and there’s a general flatness to everything that just looks slightly… off. Weapons textures as well will sometimes take a few seconds to load in leaving you with a handful of spiky polygons in your hands.
This is where I want to refer back to the opening of this review. Borderlands 4 confuses me and leaves me very conflicted. Is the game good? Yes, yes it is, and it might be my favourite in the series. But is the game a frustratingly buggy and unpolished mess? Also yes (and it should never have released in the state that it is in).
You see the quandary that I find myself in writing this review. I want to give the game praise, because I like it and I feel like it deserves it. But at the same time I am angry and upset that, once again, a AAA game has released in an absolutely shambolic state.
Even when writing this review the game is still coming back to bite me. Normally, when I write reviews I like to take my own in-game screenshots to insert throughout. But that isn’t possible with Borderlands 4 because pressing the screenshot button on your PS5 controller pauses the game, so every screenshot is just the pause screen.
