Many things come to my mind when I think of Borderlands. The fascinating gun design. The weird yet charismatic NPCs. Claptrap. Some of these aspects have potential, while others have aged poorly — I’m talking about you, my loudmouthed, metal friend. Borderlands 4 is touted as the biggest deviation from the Borderlands template yet, positioned as a reimagination of sorts of a 15-year-old series. Is there still room for a new installment to put a new shine on a very established looter shooter formula? I got a glimpse of that answer when going hands-on with Borderlands 4 ahead of its launch.
Borderlands 4 is hitting major platforms — PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X — on Sept. 12, with a Nintendo Switch 2 release planned for Oct. 3. If you haven’t lost yourself in the not-so-conventional world of Borderlands yet, you should know that this first-person shooter is all about shooting and exploding enemies in a variety of ways. You play as a Vault Hunter, a figure known in the game’s universe for chasing danger and treasures, a kind of job that requires big guns and powerful skills to survive.
Typically, when making a character in a Borderlands game, you can choose from one of four Vault Hunters. That remains the case in Borderlands 4, which stars four new Vault Hunters: Vex the Siren, who can use self-cloning magic; Amon the Forgeknight, the roster’s tank; Harlowe the Gravitar, who’s equipped with gravity-based weapons; and Rafa the Exo-Soldier. I choose to play Rafa, because he’s basically a Latino cyborg with energy blades whose personality revolves around being handsome.
For this preview, which takes place a few hours into the game, I played solo a segment where we’re invading Fortress Indomita, a mission that consists of traversing a multi-layered base, destroying a ship, and facing the final boss of the area, Idolator Sol. Every step in this mission is marked by hectic combat against soldiers working for Sol, really annoying humanoid machines, and alien-esque creatures. For the record, these last ones kicked my ass.
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t really paying attention to what the characters were saying through comms, nor did I care about the narrative justification behind that infiltration mission. From time to time, Idolator Sol appeared on my screen to say he was mad at me or something along those lines. I can’t really remember because I was furiously pulling the trigger of my SMG, which was imbued with fire and electric damage, unloading delightful streams of ammo on the ground, and feeling the dopamine rush of seeing multiple red “Critical!” notifications popping from enemies’ heads. I completely lost myself in the intense action Borderlands 4 delivered.
One of the merits of the Borderlands series, which is even more evident in Borderlands 4, is how easily you can slip into the action of its smooth gunplay. I’ve played other games in the series, and Borderlands 4 feels like coming home — the shooting is that good. While I haven’t yet seen a wide variety of weapons, Gearbox seems to have balanced the power of our guns. Most of the time, I was running only uncommon and rare guns, and yet I could see them being effective. (In Borderlands, weapons follow the universal color-coded loot system: common, uncommon, rare, epic, and so on.)
Having fun by shooting things is the mantra in Borderlands 4, and this straightforward philosophy permeates its character design, which is more robust than ever. Rafa, the Vault Hunter I chose to play as, can use three specializations, each with their own main Action Skill (an ultimate, basically) and dedicated skill trees. My favorite is the Peacebreak Cannons, which gives Rafa two shoulder turrets. With the right passive skills, not only is my shield replenished as I kill enemies with my turrets, but their up-time extends whenever I land critical damage. With skill kits like this, Borderlands 4 only makes throwing myself at enemies more fun while I look for ways to capitalize on dealing damage and taking risks. And the risks are plenty!
While guns feel powerful, shields feel less sturdy, breaking more often than I thought they should. I died fighting regular enemies more than I did in the boss fight, and, before you start hitting me with “get good!”, know that Borderlands 4 is more punitive. If you don’t approach fights with good cooldown management and a solid notion of what you should be doing, you’ll quickly run out of tools. This gives enemies enough time to attack you back and, let me tell you, they hit hard. Depending on the situation, the sheer amount of incoming damage is a challenge for a single Vault Hunter to handle.
The game adds a grappling hook to characters’ kits, which, theoretically, I love. Rare is the game that hasn’t benefited from including one. This one can feel a bit clunky to use, though. During combat, all you can do is use it to grab capsules and other potential elemental explosives to throw at enemies. They can cause solid damage, but crafting a build around the hook isn’t exactly viable.
It was only during the boss fight against Idolator Sol that I needed to use the grappling hook. Sol starts with an impenetrable shield. You can’t remove it using your guns or applying a specific type of elemental effect, which is contrary to the whole “just shoot it until it dies” philosophy of Borderlands. Instead, you need to wait until Sol shoots some poles around the arena, then look for the single green one that contains an explosive, catch the explosive using the grappling hook, and throw it at him to break his armor. It’s only after this process that you can actually shoot the boss. Lotta work that does not involve pulling a trigger.
The grappling hook’s potential is held back by simply being a tool for exploration and extremely specific situations, like in the fight against Sol, instead of a more active asset you can use in general fights. At the same time, it seems like the dungeon and mission were designed around creating situations where it feels justifiable to use the hook, although they never felt natural. Did we really need the grappling hook to climb from one platform to another? Couldn’t we have unlocked the ship from its launching pad by shooting the beams instead of pulling them? At the end of the day, this addition begs the question of how much that tool actually adds to the experience of playing Borderlands 4.
I like the idea that, even though this is the fourth numbered title in a long series of games, the team behind Borderlands 4 is trying new things. Even so, I know that I will spend hours exploring its world (Kairos) and leveling up my Vault Hunter — not because of any novelty this particular entry in the series tries to offer, but because of what Borderlands titles have always excelled at: letting you shoot a bunch of guns at a bunch of enemies. What more do you need?
