Borderlands 4 Review
Borderlands 4 trades planet-hopping for a seamless open world and delivers the series' best gunplay and movement, even if the story sags and PC performance needed months of repair.
Borderlands has spent a decade coasting on a formula it perfected in 2012. Borderlands 4 is the first sequel in years that genuinely rethinks how that formula moves, and the result is the best-playing game the series has produced, wrapped around a story you will struggle to remember a week later.
Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K, it launched on September 12, 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The planet-hopping of Borderlands 3 is gone. Instead, a new crew of Vault Hunters crash-lands on Kairos, a hidden world ruled by a dictator called the Timekeeper, and the whole campaign plays out across one seamless map with no loading screens between regions.
Four Vault Hunters, billions of guns
The core loop is unchanged and still irresistible: shoot everything, pick up the rainbow of loot it drops, compare numbers, repeat. What has changed is the feel. The shooting has more weight than in any previous entry, the arsenal is as absurd and inventive as the series' billions-of-guns promise suggests, and the chase for a better roll remains as compulsive as ever. Even routine side missions feel worth finishing when the next drop might reshape your build.
The launch roster is Vex the Siren, Rafa the Exo-Soldier, Harlowe the Gravitar and Amon the Forgeknight, each with three Action Skills and branching skill trees that support several distinct builds. It is the strongest opening lineup the series has had, and the trees are deep enough that your first pick shapes the opening hours considerably. If you are new to the series, this rundown on choosing your first Vault Hunter also flags the early mistakes that waste hours in the opening zones.
The weak spot is the menus. Inventory management is clumsy for a game that asks you to sort gear constantly, and comparing a dozen near-identical drops through the interface is more tedious than it should be in the fourth numbered entry.
A quieter script and a forgettable tyrant
Gearbox has dialled back the relentless, meme-heavy humour that wore thin in Borderlands 3. The Vault Hunters join the Crimson Resistance, Claptrap included, and set about uniting Kairos' factions against the Timekeeper and his synthetic Order. The jokes still land unevenly, but the tone is more balanced, and some of the side missions are genuinely funny in a way the series had lost.
The main plot is where it falls flat. The Timekeeper is an imposing idea with little personality, the new core characters rarely rise above their function, and the second act loses momentum as the campaign ticks through its lieutenants. Returning faces such as Zane, Amara, Moxxi and Lilith do more heavy lifting than the new cast. You will play Borderlands 4 for the loot, the builds and the friends beside you, not for the story.
A seamless Kairos, and the best movement in the series
The biggest leap is traversal. Vault Hunters can double jump, glide, dodge and grapple, and Kairos is built vertically to reward all of it. Hopping on a hover bike to cross fields, peaks and deserts is a joy, and chaining a grapple into a glide mid-fight turns arenas into three-dimensional spaces in a way earlier games never managed. Gearbox avoids the phrase "open world", but that is effectively what this is, and it suits the loot chase perfectly.
The open structure has costs. Enemy variety thins out over a long campaign, too many optional quests are fetch-and-kill filler, and the occasional invisible wall undercuts the freedom the movement promises. Co-op is where it shines brightest: up to four players online, with level scaling and individual difficulty settings that let friends at very different points in the game play together without anyone being carried or crushed.
Performance: the launch Gearbox had to fix
On PC, Borderlands 4 arrived demanding and uneven. Gearbox has since acknowledged the community's complaints about optimisation and performance, and in a March 2026 PC performance status update said its patches had raised average frame rates by roughly 20% across specs, cut stutter by reworking shader compilation, and nearly halved the crash rate since December, from 0.63% of sessions to 0.38%. Updates in the weeks after launch had already targeted PC stability and added a field-of-view slider on consoles.
That is real progress, but the Unreal Engine 5 game remains heavy: the minimum PC spec calls for an eight-core CPU, 16GB of RAM, an RTX 2070-class GPU and 100GB of storage. Console players have had the smoother ride. A Nintendo Switch 2 version was announced for October 2025, then delayed, and Take-Two has since paused its development.
What's changed since launch
A year on, this is a much bigger game. The first Bounty Pack, How Rush Saved Mercenary Day, was made free for everyone in November 2025, and Gearbox added a fifth Bounty Pack so Deluxe owners would still get four premium ones. Story Pack 1, Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, arrived on March 26, 2026 with the Whispering Glacier zone and C4SH the Rogue, a former casino dealer bot, alongside Shared Character Progression and a level cap raised from 50 to 60. Paid Bounty Packs have run alongside it: Legend of the Stone Demon in February, A Zane to Kill For in June and Murders & Acquisitions in July.
The free endgame has grown the most. Raid bosses Bloomreaper the Invincible and Subjugator and Thol the Invincible, the Takedown at Hadron Abyss, a returning Circle of Slaughter mode and cross-platform saves have all landed at no cost. On September 10, 2026, Version 1.10 raised the cap to 70 and rebalanced every base class, alongside Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort on the island of Providence, Bounty Pack 5: Amara and the Vile Shadows, and Loveless the Hacker, a new Vault Hunter sold separately. The steady flow is welcome, but splitting new characters from their story packs makes the full game an increasingly expensive proposition.
FL4K returns in Borderlands 4 💥 The Beastmaster will team up with Loveless in Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort
— 2K (@2K) July 23, 2026
Official resources
- Borderlands 4 official site
- Borderlands 4 update notes (Gearbox / 2K)
- Borderlands 4 on Steam
- Borderlands 4 on PlayStation
- Borderlands 4 on Wikipedia
The verdict
Borderlands 4 is the series at its mechanical best. The gunplay, the movement and the seamless world make the loot chase feel fresh again, and a year of free raids, modes and fixes has turned a rocky PC launch into a far more stable game. The story is flat, the side content is padded and the DLC roster is getting expensive, but few co-op shooters are this satisfying to simply pick up and play.
If you want tighter, more demanding gunplay without the loot, our DOOM Eternal review makes a fine companion read.
What we loved
- The weightiest gunplay and most compulsive loot chase in the series
- Grapple, glide and hover bikes make the seamless Kairos a joy to explore
- Co-op with level scaling and individual difficulty keeps mixed groups together
- A year of free raid bosses, Takedown and Circle of Slaughter endgame content
What held it back
- PC performance was rough at launch and the game remains demanding
- The main story and the Timekeeper are forgettable
- Side quests and enemy variety grow repetitive over a long campaign
- New Vault Hunters and story packs are sold separately and add up fast
