Borderlands 4

I hate when people with a 5090 say "I have a pretty powerful rig" no. I have THE BEST gaming gpu currently on the market so why do I have to struggle to reach 60 fps without DLSS? Borderlands used to run on from the lowest graphics card to the highest experimental tech in BL2 with the PHYSX stuff in that game. I'm sick of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ optimization. I love this game and just want to play it the way it is meant to be played.

Played it during the free weekend, started the game and got the privelege of it taking 10 minutes to download shaders. Then it installed Patch 1, force closed the game, and when I relaunched it, I got to wait another 10 minutes. Borderlands 4 is a buggy, poorly optimized and repetitive mess that doesn't really do anything GOOD, but it sure does a lot of things. I'll start with the positives I can name, such as the significantly improved gunplay over 3. Unlike in 3, you can typically use whatever guns (on level) you find, rather than praying you get at least a purple to drop or holding onto that same legendary for 5 levels because for some reason its still better than that on level purple you found 10 seconds ago. Additionally, the ability tree for Harlowe that was just a better Maya from 2 was fun and had some interesting synergies within the skill tree. That is of course if you were running the right weapon type for the path down the tree you picked, I was only running Jakobs because God knows you're barely able to land crits with most other gun types. Also the game's OST goes super hard. Now onto the bad. The game's open world was something I barely interacted with and in fact found myself getting annoyed by. It was like the devs took a a bag of coloured marbles, dropped them over a blueprint of the BL4 world, and decided that's where they would put the correlated open world mechanic. There feels little to no rhyme or reason for anything in the world, the objectives are mostly not worth doing (oh cool I can carry slightly more ammo) and most of them were just copy/paste objectives in different areas. My personal least favourite was defending the area. Additionally the open world made sure to let you fast travel from almost wherever, and they even let you fast travel to your friends (a really good change), but they also seemed to forget to actually put that many fast travel points throughout the world, and the ones they did put down you have to unlock. That might have worked in BOTW and TOTK when enemies weren't using you for target practice every 5 meters, but in BL4 if you're focusing on main objectives ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you get punished. The many walks of shames I've had to do were infuriating. And don't even get me started on the massive distances in the game you could (and honestly should) just skip. Also I still can't tell if in the areas enemies were scaling with me or not because sometimes enemies were weirdly higher levelled than me, and given this game is "open world" with levels, I can only assume they were intended to be higher levelled. Also the open world sometimes had random dynamic events (don't know why they decided to go the MMO route) and they are... not great. For example, the ones I saw took the form of a boss fight, and rather than make any sort of arena, they made it a circle, that once you enter it the fight starts, and once you leave, the boss just... disappears. No invisible wall, barely a warning, I went to deal with some trash sniping at me from a distance and when I came back, the boss got bored I guess. And finally onto the topic of the game's performance. It's bad. I've attached my specs to this review to show my PC should in fact be capable of running this game 0 issue. But I was running it with many a issue, a ton of frame drops/stutters, and I was running the game on low (not that the game looked that great anyways. What was the point of the shaders?). Then there was the bugs. There was quite a bit of random clipping in the game, during some bosses there were just... no collision in some objects that left me getting stuck in them, and my personal favourite was a bridge that I had to cross over during one of the aforementioned walks of shame back to the objective, and the bridge just... had no collision. I fell through it three times before telling my friend that we were done for the night after he fell through it too. I'm not sure if the game runs worse if its been on for too long or I'm just an unwilling playtester, but when I reloaded the game, the collision was there (and it was there when we had to cross the bridge initially anyhow). Also one last gripe is the way the game advertises the DLCs for it to you, both on the main page and throughout the game. The game has a type of battle pass system (included in the game, it itself doesn't cost any extra money), with base game rewards, as well as rewards locked behind owning the DLC. Also when you go in certain areas, the DLC characters literally talk to you, and try to get you to interact with the stupid object telling you to spend 20$ on 2K's newest piece of garbage that they neglected fixing the base game for (I love you ProZD, shut up Fl4k). Also the story is lame and generic, so much so it's not even really worth mentioning. It's just kinda the same song and dance three different times in different areas (never finished the game during the free weekend so don't know if the third one I did had any twist, probably not), go to area, fight the oppressors, save the oppressed, they join you after a somewhat interesting boss fight (I liked most of the non-flying bosses. There are a shocking amount of flying bosses in the game despite them kinda sucking). All in all, BL4 is a game that is kinda bad, with many issues. I'm already not the biggest Borderlands fan but I have a pact with a friend that we will play through the mainline games together (never touching Wonderlands) and honestly, there were parts of this game I enjoyed a lot, but for the most part, all the issues were too much for me and the game is just kind of uninspired, and full of issues. I may buy this game in 5 years when its 20$ CAD base game with all DLC, and they've fixed the performance issues and didn't make it 170GB for some reason. RandyPitchford/10.

Not enough ICE for me, and shout out to the OutBounders for trying to self deport

This game is so bad, that it makes borderlands 3 look good. Performance is abysmal. Story and characters are so bland, they made me feel nothing, at least in bl3 they were annoying af. Gunplay and grind, as always is 10/10

I fell through the floor multiple times. There are sidemissions where you have to carry stuff while climbing. Apart from it not being fun, the stuff you carry often falls through the floor also. Too many invisible walls for a game with the core mechanic of climbing to high places. Too many builds have a lot of offensive bonus from full life/shield/overshield, which makes the fight for your life mechanic way worse, especially with heavy weapons not being allowed while you are fighting for your life. Enemies matching your level during the story is a bad mechanic. As a lot of other reviews mentioned, the game runs terribly and often has to recompile shaders, even when the game is already running and I just want to fast-travel.

I spent 2 hours "Compiling Shaders", and now I cant refund

Unironically one of the worst games I've ever played. It's the epitome of everything wrong with the industry in terms of every single aspect of the game. Do not believe the people saying it's better than three, somehow it isn't. I've loved this series for a long time and that's the only reason I could stomach trudging through this moldy trough of slop on the free weekend. Disgusting.

LGBTQ+ = NO I do NOT work to PAY for things I don't want to see, affiliate with, listen to, read about, or deal with. We play games to get AWAY from you political crazy nutcases, not to deal with you here too.