I had a pretty miserable time at the start of Borderlands 4, but I eventually warmed up to it a bit as skill sets and weapons became more interesting as I progressed through the story.

The narrative is extremely lack luster across the board and is easily the least ambitious story told in all of the Borderlands sequels. The new characters are largely forgettable. You can’t get anymore generic than a big bad that’s called the Time Keeper. The handful of returning characters (Zane, Alara, CL4P-TP) are very sparce compared to other entries. Even with the very few familiar faces, they felt the need to bring Lilth back in the mix for the 4th game in a row. 3 seemed like an appropriate send off for her character and they dredge her up for some reason just for her to do practically nothing in the story. The most interesting things they do revolve around Arjay’s revival and betrayal after being experimented on, but it all takes a back seat to the Time Keeper plot and the boss fight that wraps up his storyline was a pretty pitiful way for him to go out.

Out of the dozen or so side quests that I saw through to the end, only one felt pretty unique (finding vending machines with clues on them to sell different weapon rarities in the order that it’s shown) and even that wasn’t anything mind blowing. They were all very straightforward and boring with objectives that they’ve used a thousand times before. The writing was always very lackluster and the attempt at humor was pretty pitiful.

It’s pretty crazy how we’re 16 years into this franchise, one that prides itself on the amount of gear variety available to the player, and they haven’t figured out how to have a better inventory management system. It’s always been a problem in the past, and this iteration actually feels like the worst attempt. The sort feature is practically useless and the trash system is straight up busted. It’s so dumb how you have to run around a room after a big boss fight and individually look on the ground at each piece of gear that was dropped to see if it’s worth picking up. The weapon compare system is clunky as hell and barely works either and when you’re redeeming rewards there’s no option to compare it to equipped gear so you have to deal with going into the inventory afterwards to properly compare things. It all sucks.

The inclusion of an instantly deployable vehicle is probably the best thing that they’ve added to the game, but they use it to make fast travel points very few and far between. Makes backtracking to previous areas an absolute slog. On top of that, the navigation system is also one of the the worst I’ve seen in one of these games. It’s constantly giving you pathing that takes the longest route possible and always manages to somehow not prioritize the waypoint you actual want to go to.

The new grapple system is implemented in the most boring way possible and is only available to use on set traversal points and interactable items. Would have been way better if you could set your own grapple points and/or use it to interact with enemies in a more direct way.

Combat starts off painfully dull, but does eventually get to a pretty fun spot at around level 20 once you have a fair amount of abilities and perks at your disposal. End game content doesn’t seem like anything particularly special.

Overall, it really felt like the main focus was just to get a Borderlands game running on Unreal Engine 5. They really don’t do anything to swap up the formula and a lot of the bones of this game feel like relics of the past. All of the issues I listed above aside though, if you’re able to just turn off your brain, have fun with your abilities, and fire guns that feel good to use, that’s really the only thing a Borderlands game is good for these days and they do eventually get to a spot where all of that feels pretty good. Playing with friends has also been a pretty fun time.

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