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.