Borderlands 4

This one is a rough review. I like Borderlands, I like borderlands a LOT. In fact, I like it so much I've bought the handsome collection (1, 2, and pre-sequel) 3 times, borderlands 2 and its dlc twice, the tales games, and this game. I even 100 precented borderlands pre-sequel, and 3 plus dlcs. On the surface, this game had things going on about it that made me rather excited for it when the trailers were coming out. The vault hunters looked cool (after their re-design) and had nice little abilities and lore tid-bits, the villain was NOT another handsome jack clone, expy, or wannabe and there was even... a villain vs villain war going on? How cool! And then it was revealed the game was not only going to be running using Unreal Engine 5 (uh oh) but that it was going to be open world (ah ♥♥♥♥). And that immediately had me worried, because I had just been burned my Monster Hunter Wilds going down the same route, and Metroid Prime, and... alot of games this year actually. Open world has been THE plague of 2026 gaming. But it came out, and the stupid little launch trailer did me in so I forked over 70 USD for the base game. And the game *looks* nice, sort of. The writing is better than base game BL3 (which is... practically an insult with how low that bar was.) and the setting itself is rather interesting. A planet that ALSO had Elpis as a moon that was cloaked by the Timekeeper as a sort of safe haven, until the mayhem caused by it's ugly neighbor Pandora and its' denizens cause the moon to explode... twice and shatter the sky. The time keeper goes nuts and implants people with bolts that control them in any which way the timekeeper wants, and ripping it out causes you to go crazy and become this game's version of a bandit. The two factions don't like eachother, as the Order sees the Rippers as ♥♥♥♥♥ up maniacs, and the Rippers don't like the Order's sterile and boring way of life. This is cool, there is a groundwork for things to be done here... Except it's then revealed that the time keeper can only be accessed by 3 "command bolts", which can only be obtained from his 3 lieutenants... one of which is the leader of the Rippers and a Turncoat. Which means the game works like Far Cry 5 and 6 now. And that entire civil war thing is wasted, now. Hell, any time a ripper force and an order force do fight, they'll stop and kill you if you get too close. So, this whole thing is a bust, but how does the game work now that the most interesting thing in terms of it's premise is a bust? Well, it doesn't. Or at least, not well. The game breaks, all of the time. And the things that DO work, work POORLY and oftentimes just worse than they did in even Borderlands 2, a game that was 13 years old when this game released by the way. The map is confusing to navigate in the menu, because the in game map doesn't do layers. So if an objective is in a cave or ABOVE you, you won't find out until you are close enough for it to be a pain in the ass. And because navigation takes so much longer and is more confusing because the world is now open, you get a guideline. The guideline doesn't work. It can: Disappear early, Phase through terrain (including Mountains, Buildings, the FLOOR, and it can even sneak out of bounds), or even just not let you activate it. For no reason. Sometimes the game just does not let you use the guideline, even if you are not in a location that bans it. Or how about guns! Guns have parts! The guns in this series are actually just a bunch of parts SMASHED together which determines things like stats and manufacturer. Especially important in this game, where you can get guns with parts made by other manufacturers, including ones that aren't properly in the game. So, a Hyperion add-on adds the aim shield to your gun, a Jakobs barrel adds the crit ricochet, so on and so forth. So, in a game where knowing what parts do, how do you check on them? In borderlands 2, you inspect the gun in your inventory. In the pre-sequel, you inspect the gun in your inventory. In borderlands 3, you inspect the gun in your inventory. In borderlands 4? You can't. If the part is not important enough to show up on the info card (the one that tells you general stats and weapons manufacturer when you look at it on the floor or scroll over it in the menu), you do not get to see what a part does. Which is any manufacturer part that isn't a cross-manufacturer part or legendary. So, you just... don't have the same level of info as you do in a game that is now 13 years old and it feels bad. They also rarely mesh with your vault hunter skills in a way that matters, outside of buffing the status ailments or more stats. Vault hunter skills also sometimes just don't work. Okay, so what about the things that you use the guns on, enemies? Those should be fine, right? No. Enemies are very weird in this game. And not fun weird I mean, they just don't seem to function right. Some enemy weakpoints just don't seem to work properly with the hit box either being too big, or too small. They can get stuck on geometry, and, while this isn't a bug, the leveling system for them is very out of order. In one zone they'll be your level and 20 feet to the north they'll suddenly be 10 levels higher than you, and it is instant death. This is a looter game, you cannot cheese this out without a hyper specific build. This is a sacrifice for the open world, as is performance. This game runs terribly. I've seen malware wreak less havoc on people's pcs than this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. It recompiles shaders more often than a chainsmoker going out for a smoke break, it stutters, it lags, and while I don't have the BEST specs on the market, I'm attaching my specs to show that they can be considered "pretty damn good" by most standards. But also the game crashes. A lot. It's better with patches but it sill crashes a lot more than a game costing 70 US dollars for the base game should. And it happens more often with longer play sessions, like there is a memory leak or something. Quests also don't work properly. Flags can sometimes not trigger, dialogue can repeat itself multiple times, dialogue can sometimes just not happen at all, sometimes the game is convinced that you aren't actually at the right spot because it marked the correct spot to be some random spot about 100 meters from where you are supposed to go. I haven't bought any of the dlc, but the free one was a single mission and the others are... about as long, except for the vault hunter dlc. Which comes with a full story...? Which is about 3 hours of content, or so I'm told. Which doesn't seem like it's worth 40 usd. To be fair, I don't think you could convince me 40 usd is a worthwhile price on any dlc unless it's something like Icebourne or Sunbreak where it doubles the size of the game. Which this is not. But I don't know how those are gameplay wise, or story wise because like... they are so prohibitively expensive for what appears to be so little, so those might improve things. C4SH might actually be balanced properly. I don't know. But TL:DR, this game is a mess. It's buggy, and at times even broken. The UI sucks in ways that would be bad for a game released during the ps3 era, let alone in 2026. The story is fine, but has missed potential in exchange for basically being a Far Cry game. The map exploration sucks, because it's either tedious or unrewarding, and enemies and fighting CAN be fun! When they work. I'd wait until all of the dlc is out and they fix the game in order to convince dumbasses like me to buy the dlc and rave about how this game was secretly a misunderstood masterpiece, or at least actually a fun game. Like what happened with Borderlands 3, and to a lesser extent, Tiny Tina's wonderlands. Or get it on deep sale, if you can run it. Test your hardware.

add murring, then we'll talk

Terrible performances / sub-optimized to put it gently compared to other games using UE. And for 35 quids this is not acceptable (even less so for 70). 2K EULA is catastrophic.

Hmmm... While I didn't experience any technical issues outside of the usual Unreal Engine garbage performance, I just don't think the game is good. The characters are just bad. What's with Claptrap and that other chick going on about consent for a solid minute? Yeah, consent is great and all that, but who gives a sht? The rest of the NPCs you meet are just as boring. I didn't know a game about all the crazy sht going on could be this sanitized. I want Jack and Butt Stallion back. I guess the franchise did peak with Borderlands 2. The gunplay is fine, I guess. Same as usual. Otherwise, it's just boring, and finding loot is absolute a from the looks of it. You get these "card exp" now to buy skins and weapons, and I've not found any decent weapon outside of the one I bought. You spend more time traveling on the road than shooting stuff because travel points are few and far between. You clear a point of interest in like three minutes, and then it's back to driving again. Money and Eridium are basically useless; I finished the first area boss and still haven't found a use for either. The shops only sell trash, you never need ammo, and I haven't even seen a place that takes Eridium. They even got rid of the gambling machines they had in pretty much every other Borderlands. I dunno. It's just really boring.

it fun

wery good

BL3 was better, more detailed. This game was rushed, lots of Bugs. Not worth it.