Borderlands 4 Year 1 100% Review
I played through all 189gb so you don’t have to.
I want to start this game review off by saying I don't normally do game reviews, but seeing the Internet ablaze about this game for all the wrong reasons made it clear to me that I must set the record straight, because nobody (other than myself) is qualified to defend Borderlands 4 from the onslaught of hate speech and brainrot propagated by vile mouth-breathing incels on Reddit and YouTube.
Furthermore, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford is a stunning and brave paragon of humanity who would be extolled only as a gaming Messiah, except for his tragic—yet brutally human—shortcoming of allegedly shitposting on cocaine all the time.
Now, a Borderlands game wouldn't be properly released without a certain amount of controversy, and thankfully Randy stepped up in the immediate aftermath of the Borderlands 4 launch, when game reviewers and Day 1 players were concerned that the game had some (minor) “performance issues,” (which really doesn't give the whole picture of the development cycle of a AAA game of this significance [and should be weighed against factors such as developer and marketing timetables, NVIDIA driver releases, and preorder revenue targets.])
Ever eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Randy Pitchford stepped up with a retort to these minor performance concerns—that Borderlands 4 is a “premium game made for premium gamers”—essentially telling people to buy a bigger computer if they don't like how the game runs, a comment that would go down in infamy in this day and age of $800 DDR5 kits and $5000 consumer graphics cards. Randy's out-of-touch comment was the digital equivalent of rape. His tone-deaf sentiment landed about as well as Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" debacle, and it set the stage for a historic gamer backlash of a magnitude not seen since Anita Sarkeesian started allowing women to play video games.
So as usual, in order to review a Borderlands game, it becomes necessary to set aside the online behavior of Randy Pitchford and look at the game as a game. And in that respect Borderlands 4 certainly is at least a game. As with previous entries, Borderlands 4 takes place in an end-stage capitalist space dystopia where militaristic corporations control fleets of starships and private armies, hell-bent on stripping planets of their natural resources, all while developing bigger and crazier weapons to destroy their competition. The player takes on the role of a Vault Hunter—an unusually competent mass murderer who rejects the status quo of plundering for corporate gain in favor of a much more noble pursuit: plundering for personal gain.
I wouldn't consider myself a Borderlands “super fan,” but I have played and enjoyed most of the games in the series, starting with Borderlands 1 on the XBOX 360, Borderlands 2 and DLC and Tales on XBOX One, and the Pre-Sequel in split-screen co-op. These were actually some of my favorite games of all time, so maybe I was a Borderlands super fan. At least until Borderlands 3 came out.
I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end I retired Borderlands 3 to my backlog after numerous failed starts with the game. Between horribly unoptimized performance—a recurring theme, try-hard humor and obnoxious characters, the whole thing fell flat for me and many others. (It wasn't until years later that I came to appreciate it as an actual masterpiece—more on that soon!)
Borderlands 4 takes place on a new planet called Kairos with a new set of deranged vault hunters and it examines the philosophical question of what happens when Borderlands 3’s story was so widely hated that it literally crashed and burned into an entire planet, setting off a race against the end of time—a race that only an obscene arsenal of firepower, loads of loot, and bizarre friends (both new and old) could see through to the end. It's a game that Gearbox has acknowledged was created to right the narrative wrongs of Borderlands 3.
But does it succeed? My answer is sort of.
The good
Starting out with the good, Borderlands 4 absolutely nails the first person shooter gameplay and mechanics. As is tradition, you start with a diverse set of vault hunters to play as, each with unique abilities and multiple branching skill trees that make buildcrafting a total hoot as you level up towards your endgame power fantasy. BL4 takes the already solid movement mechanics from the previous games and adds verticality: you can now double jump, air dash, glide and launch yourself towards distant targets with a grappling hook. Physically none of this makes sense, but it feels really good to play and adds a new dimension to the thousands of shooting galleries you'll come across.
And as usual, Borderlands 4 delivers on the “billions of guns” thing. As you level up, your enemies become stronger, but so do the randomized weapons they drop, so you're constantly swapping in new items to make yourself more powerful, which adds variety and emergence to the gameplay. There are tons of new guns along with some returning favorites from previous games. Some are gimmicky but fun, like a gun that shoots potatos or a telekinetic gun that launches you and anything you hit backwards with each shot. And there are some standouts you'll find in the early levels, spectacularly overpowered guns that hook you and have you promising yourself to find the God-roll versions once you hit the level cap. My personal favorites were a legendary shotgun called Rainbow Vomit which shoots colorful arcs of elemental projectiles, and Borstel Ballista, a sniper rifle whose shots split into several spiraling projectiles that do devastating long distance damage.
You will quickly put these guns to good use, as Borderlands 4 throws hordes of enemies for you to slaughter in much bigger (and more vertical) encounters than previous entries in the series. There are several enemy factions, each with proper enemy type diversity ranging all the way from scrub cannon fodder types, snipers, melee brawlers, suicide bombers, to stronger minibosses, and many with their own variants. If you've played previous Borderlands games it's mostly familiar stuff, but Borderlands 4 introduces some new variety, such as “Chain Master” enemies that can form links to other nearby enemies, providing buffs to the whole group until you take out the ringleader. “Vile” enemies are granted invincibility by purple crystals attached to their bodies, and you definitely won't hate these if you're reasonably good at using explosive splash damage to dislodge the crystals and attack while they're vulnerable. There are a ton of bosses too, ranging from “big” versions of your typical enemies to fully-voiced and unique multi-phase battles with some really wild characters.
Cooperative multiplayer shines in this game. There were some rough edges at launch but Gearbox very quickly improved players’ complaints here. I loved joining up with my boyfriend over LAN and talking shit about the characters; it made some of the more tedious repeated missions tolerable. The game scales enemy power and health to each individual player, so you don't have to worry about one player sandbagging the lobby if they are at a lower level. Loot drops are also level-scaled and instanced to each player, and finishing a mission in another player's lobby gives you the option to skip it in your own playthrough, which is nice given how much the game already forces you to repeat the same missions over and over as part of its endgame progression.
Other standout features: the voice acting is brilliant across the entire Borderlands 4 cast. Each of the vault hunters has their unique dialog and personality, making campaign replays more than just a way to try different builds. The side missions are funny and generally interesting, and there are a lot of them. The art direction and environment design shine—there are some truly beautiful locations in the game's open world that benefit greatly from well-implemented HDR lighting.
The “meh”
Speaking of the open world, that's new to Borderlands 4 and it pretty much falls flat. There's a huge world map with fog of war that clears as you explore new locations, and each region is peppered with Ubislop-style side objectives that range from fun to maddeningly tedious, eg. carry an object miles on foot to a particular safe-house, or Assassin's Creed tower climbing. To speed up world traversal, Gearbox copy-pasted the Sparrow vehicle from Destiny right down to the mechanic of materializing it from thin air on demand. Zipping around the world in your Sparrow is fun at first but quickly becomes boring as you realize how lifeless it is aside from some shooting galleries that pop up in predictable locations. The hub-and-spoke world model in previous Borderlands games worked better and allowed for more variety and uniquely-designed locations.
All of this comes at a huge performance cost. Gearbox’s implementation of Unreal Engine 5 launched in an unacceptable state, and while subsequent patches and optimizations have improved things significantly, the game's performace is still not great. Frame generation and upscaling is practically required on PC to get smooth frame rates, and it doesn't make much sense given the game's cartoony art direction. On console, memory leaks and crashes apparently remain unfixed to this day. Some players blame the Unreal 5 engine itself, but there are other games like Outer Worlds 2, Arc Raiders and Avowed using this same engine and delivering the same or better graphical fidelity at smoother frame rates. So I blame Gearbox. A year plus since launch and now the performance is acceptable, but only just so.
Borderlands 4’s story is also just okay. Without spoiling more than the premise, it centers around a new villain: The Timekeeper, a mind-controlling dictator who turned Kairos into a prison planet and locked up the vault hunters. Obviously you have to beat him, but to do so you must defeat his three top lieutenants (one for each map region) and obtain their keys in order to unlock the Timekeeper's evil tower. It's a very straightforward narrative structure that fits the open world design, but the sad part is that the regional bosses completely outshine the Timekeeper himself. Gearbox deliberately wrote the Timekeeper as a more sober and mysterious villain, an overcorrection after the insufferably obnoxious and widely criticized Calypso twins in Borderlands 3. Aside from a late-story plot twist, it feels like Gearbox pulled punches and missed opportunities to make the Timekeeper more memorable as a villain, which sucks given his fantastic voice actor and character design.
But as per previous games, finishing the story is just the first part of your Borderlands 4 journey. The endgame loot grind is where completionist players will spend most of their time, and also where the game falls apart.
The bad, the the endgame, and the upsell:
I'm writing this after finishing all of the game's Year 1 content. Gearbox has just announced more Borderlands 4 content is coming for 2027, although it remains to be seen how much more they're willing to invest in the game. All I can really review is what Gearbox already promised, what people paid for, what Gearbox released, and how it landed.
Gearbox pitched Borderlands 4 as a “live service” game, with regular content updates to keep players engaged long past when the campaign credits rolled. To do this, they partitioned the post-game content in several ways:
Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode: Overcome increasingly difficult challenges to unlock new Ultimate Vault Hunter ranks. Each rank makes your enemies tougher but increases the chances of getting better loot.
Player Specialization: Continue “leveling up” after reaching the level cap, but instead of unlocking new skills in your primary skill trees, you level up your specialization rank, which provides small passive buffs and some new abilities to help min-max your build.
Free Weekly Events: Each week one or more boss is given the “Big Encore” treatment, allowing players to fight a bullet-spongier version for a greater chance of better loot. Additionally, one campaign mission is replayable with more difficult enemies and a guaranteed legendary reward.
Paid Bounty Packs: replayable missions set in new environments, along with daily challenges and unlockable legendary weapons and cosmetics.
Paid Vault Hunters: New fully-voiced playable characters with unique new abilities and skill trees. We got C4SH The Rogue and Loveless the Hacker.
Two Paid Story Pack Expansions: New (separate) map regions and story campaigns. In March Gearbox released Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, and in September they released FL4K and the Last Resort.
Free surprise content: Gearbox threw in two new invincible boss fights, a Takedown at Hadron Abyss mission,ß a Circle of Slaughter arena, and a “hOLiDaY”-themed Bounty Pack, all for free.
Now all of this sounds like a lot, and if you're stepping into the game for the first time after this first year of content, it is a lot, but having experienced it as a so-called live service and sucking at the nipples of RNGesus for an entire year until the nipples ran dry, the delivery felt very sparse and also objectively is sparse compared to previous Borderlands endgames.
The real issue here is how little meat there is on this bone—I'm talking about filler content. Most of these events and activities involve playing through the same campaign missions over and over again. In order to advance through the Ultimate Vault Hunter ranks, you will have to play through the major campaign missions and boss fights again, now with slightly more difficult enemies. Similar deal with the weekly Encore missions. Gone are the user-selectable “Mayhem modes” from Borderlands 3, along with their increasingly powerful weapons that incentivize climbing the ranks. In Borderlands 4, increasing your Ultimate Vault Hunter rank is pretty tedious, but the loot you get isn't any more powerful—you're really just increasing the drop rate from the same weapon and item pool you have at the base difficulty level.
In a similar vein, the Bounty Pack DLC’s are really just one-shot missions that each can be completed in an hour with very little reason to replay. Again: filler content—and worse, aside from the unlockable cosmetics, the Bounty Packs are not relevant to the post-campaign endgame loop. After hitting the level cap, players keep playing Borderlands to grind for the God roll item drops, min-max their builds, and test them against hordes of enemies. The Bounty Pack missions do not play into this. They may look nice on a “muh content” post-release roadmap, but really they are just forgettable bumps on the road.
Ironically, it's the surprise freebies Gearbox threw in that stand out the most among the post-release endgame updates: Bloomreaper the Invincible and Subjugator and Thol the Invincible are two free boss fights that can crush all but the strongest builds. Same with the repeatable Takedown at Hadron Abyss mission. Sure, you can beat these on easy mode, but do you have what it takes to get Platinum rank and gain access to the best loot? The free Circle of Slaughter arena has you and your friends facing off against waves of stronger and stronger enemies, and there's an element of risk: if you're buckling under the pressure you can leave early with some guaranteed loot, or risk losing it all to reach the end and get the most loot. These are fun missions and they really play into the post-campaign loot and buildcrafting grinds. That's more than could be said about the Bounty Packs.
The real meat on the paid DLC bone are the new vault hunters and story packs. These meaningfully expand the game and are worth playing. But are they worth the cost?
The post-conclusion conclusion
At the time of writing (November 2026) the entire games industry is cowering in the shadow of the looming release of Grand Theft Auto VI. Gearbox has steeply discounted Borderlands 4 and most its DLC to boost sales (up to 60% off). Buying it while it's on sale is the only way I can recommend Borderlands 4 in its current state. To get all of the post game content you'll want the Borderlands 4 Super Deluxe Edition, which is currently $52. Normally it's $130—and this is actually much cheaper than buying all the DLC piecemeal! Borderlands 4 is a very expensive game and it does not live up to Randy Pitchford's vision of a “premium game made for premium gamers.” Unlike previous games in the series, Borderlands 4 is not more than the sum of its parts, though it does have some pretty addictive parts.
Being stuck on Borderlands 4’s post-release “live service” for the last year has been overall pretty disappointing. A live service model doesn’t normally make sense for a mostly single player game like this and Gearbox’s handling of it doesn’t make it make sense. As a person with obsessive tendencies, Borderlands 4 has left me with a sense of Stockholm syndrome. I got addicted to the gameplay loop and obsessively wrung out every last bit of enjoyment I could find until I fell down the rabbit hole of grinding for the exceedingly rare phosphene weapons. It was at that point that Borderlands 4 transformed from a game to an obligation. After hearing the Timekeeper shout “you grow more pathetic every moment that passes” for the more than 200th time, I realized he wasn’t speaking to the vault hunter. He was speaking to me—and he was right. I got my money’s worth out of the more than 400 hours I put into the game, but I didn’t enjoy much of it. I feel sick inside having wasted my life like this.
In the end, waiting on content releases for Borderlands 4 enticed me to go back and 100% complete Borderlands 3, and being able to compare the two games side-by-side made it clear how great Borderlands 3 actually was. Back when it released, the streamer meme villains were hateable—but that's actually want you want from villains, and they’ve aged surprisingly well as streamer culture has become increasingly unhinged in real life. The endgame activities and DLC in Borderlands 3 were way more numerous and fun than what Gearbox has released so far for Borderlands 4. It remains to be seen if they can salvage the game in its second year, but in the meantime my conclusion to the Borderlands 4 review is that you should definitely play Borderlands 3.
PS: I use em dashes—and I don't use AI to write. Eat my ass.
