Borderlands 4 review round-up_ 'The best Borderlands game I've ever played—but with a small hitch'

It's an enormous day for the games industry, folks. I've just discovered that there are, apparently, other videogames websites than PC Gamer. Seems weird to me, but I guess that's just the crazy, mixed-up world we live in.

What's more, some of those videogames websites have been playing Borderlands 4 and now they have thoughts about it. As for our thoughts, well, you'll have to wait a little longer for those. But to hear the other guys tell it, Gearbox seems to have (mostly) learnt the right lessons from the doldrums of Borderlands 3, turning out a looter-shooter with a great deal of satisfying looting and shooting, and relatively little tedious, meme-heavy humour.

Here's what the rest of the world is saying about Borderlands 4.

"Every millisecond of a good scrap bursts with texture"

GamesRadar+: 4/5

Our comrades at GR seem to have had a very good time reducing the denizens of Kairos to indeterminate goo. Reviewer Andrew Brown says the game spends its time "careening you from one shootout to the next," with particular praise for its enemy variety and the sheer ludicrous malleability of the game's 80 bajillion guns: "so overkill they throw out the rules not only on how shooters should work, but how firearms function".

There's not as much praise for the story, though. Where BL4's carnage is brash and colourful, its narrative is "rather dull," with a "very safe antagonist" who will leave your mind not longer after entering it. And if you've ever wished BL4 could take anything seriously, bad news: "Tone-wise, there's also a frustrating lack of sincerity."

"Exactly the kick in the pants [the series] has needed"

IGN: 8/10

IGN's Travis Northrup brought years of looting and shooting to bear on [[link]] his review of BL4, and found that the game's embrace of an open world made it a far cry (god, I'm hilarious) from its predecessors, "not just because you’ve got so many new ways to get around, but because progressing through the story and leveling up your character is so much [[link]] less linear now". That is, when he wasn't colliding with a frustrating invisible wall.

Northrup also praised the game's tight and responsive gunplay, but alas—he couldn't apply either word to its performance, running into "numerous bugs" and tech issues in his time reviewing the game's PC version. No wonder he rounds off the review by chatting about the possibility of "a few patches" later down the line.

"Rises beyond anything the series has accomplished to this point"

Game Informer: 8.5/10

GI's Brian Shea echoed the points above, praising BL4 for the sheer variety of its guns and the frenetic pace of its combat, and reserved a particularly glowing spot in his assessment for the new mobility skills: "I always enjoyed gliding onto the battlefield, ground-slamming an enemy from above, and sprinting into a sliding shotgun blast before zipping out of danger. These improved movement mechanics add a ton to each combat encounter, and I genuinely think it would be difficult to go back to older Borderlands games."

He did, though, find that things had a tendency to drag on just a touch too long: "Some fights are too prolonged, some missions feature too many chaining objectives, and some bosses have way too much health." I suppose it doesn't matter how fun a gun is, firing it ad nauseum at a boss who refuses to die is gonna get boring. It's far from a deathblow to the game, though: "When the game is this much fun to play, that’s only a minor annoyance and is often alleviated through the series’ excellent co-op".

"Feels like the sequel to Borderlands 2"

VGC: 4/5

Though a little less hot on some of the new traversal stuff—the grappling hook ends up "clumsy and forgotten about"—VGC's Jordan Middler also very much enjoyed doing horrible things to the game's enemies: "It is difficult to put into words how satisfying it is to hit headshot after headshot in his game. Enemies explode like bin bags full of mince that have been hit by a truck." Sorry if you're eating lunch.

VGC also paid its compliments to an area of the game I think everyone else was moving too fast to notice: the interior design, which are "all highly detailed and well-designed," but couldn't say the same about BL4's outdoorsy bits. "We didn’t feel like many of the locations were all too memorable. There’s nowhere in Borderlands 4 as memorable as Sanctuary from Borderlands 2, for example." Nevertheless, it's enough of blast—and enough of a rectification of 3's sins—that VGC came away with a smile.

"The best Borderlands game I've ever played—but with a small hitch"

Windows Central: 4/5

Windows Central's Michael Hoglund again summoned the dread spectre of performance woes in his review of the game, where excellent gunplay and shooting found themselves undermined by "intermittent zone loading," "dips below 60," and other assorted issues that'll have you sucking air through your teeth, and that's on a machine that beats out the recommended specs.

The good news: this is actually better than it was during most of Hoglund's review—where he experienced "some of the worst performance I’ve seen from a AAA game"—thanks to a patch, but he's still worried for folks on older machines. So even though Hoglund is "still having a ton of fun playing," you might want to wait for a patch or two.

"Repetition eventually leaves combat feeling stale"

GameSpot: 7/10

On the more negative end of the reviews spectrum sits GameSpot, whose reviewer Jordan Ramée praised a lot of the same areas other reviewers did—gunplay, enemy variety, the oodles of loot—but found they eventually wore out their welcome. "You run into pretty much every enemy type about halfway through the story, and the new ones you run into after that are mostly variations of what came before."

What's more, the narrative just wasn't enough to hook Ramée, which is an issue when the game expects you to engage with a lot of it to get your level up. The sidequests are "boring" and humour is "a traditional Borderlands tentpole that's missing from this entry." It sounds, dare I say it, a bit like a 'podcast game' in Ramée's telling: "If uncovering loot, crafting builds, and unleashing chaotic mayhem is what you're looking for, Borderlands 4 has you covered… Just maybe find a good podcast or video essay to fill the moments between the shooting and looting."

Borderlands 4: Everything we know
Borderlands 4 Shift codes: The new key connection
Borderlands 4 Harlowe builds: The amped-up Gravitar
Borderlands 4 Rafa builds: The speed-demon Exo-Soldier
Borderlands 4 Vex builds: The spooky Siren
Borderlands 4 Amon builds: The fierce Forgeknight