Ready for some chaotic, frenzied shooting action with loads of great loot to collect? Six years after the release of Borderlands 3, the first-person shooter-looter franchise with a distinctive cel-shaded art style is back for a fourth installment.
What sets the Borderland series apart are the memorable madcap characters, the thrill of finding randomly generated loot ranging from crappy to legendary, and plenty of satisfying ways to put down your foes.
Borderlands 4 takes place on the planet of Kairos, which is under the oppressive rule of the evil Timekeeper. You play the Vault Hunter who joins up with Claptrap’s Crimson Resistance in fighting to overthrow the Timekeeper and his army of synths and helping to liberate the inhabitants of Kairos.
The game is refreshing to play with its offbeat humour, campy dialogue and overly dramatic characters, but it also shows the sad lives of the oppressed inhabitants of Kairos. Although Claptrap still grates on my nerves with its over-the-top melodrama and effusive emotions, thankfully it doesn’t stick around your character too much.
As with all Borderlands games, you can choose to play the game as different Vault Hunters each with their own specialty skills, playstyles and skill trees.
These are Vex the Siren, Rafa the Exo-Soldier, Amon the Forgeknight, and Harlowe the Gravitar. A new paid DLC out in early 2026 will also feature an additional playable character, C4SH the ex-casino dealer bot.
Move and groove
Detracting from tradition, Borderlands 4 is set in the planet of Kairos instead of Pandora, which was its home for the first three installments. Kairos features a lush landscape teeming with flora and fauna, and is much livelier than Pandora.
Unlike Borderlands 3 with restricted travel within fixed areas, Borderlands 4 offers an almost seamless open world to explore. The map is also much bigger than previous Borderlands games, and clever level design takes advantage of vertical spaces to hide loot, collectibles and surprises.
With a larger and more open map, Borderlands 4 offers plenty of options for traversing Kairos. These include fast travel points by way of unlocked safe houses, vehicles to drive around in and gliders to traverse short distances by air.
To reach higher areas, your character can perform double jumps combined with the glider, and even a grappling device that can move your character up in the world. Having no fall damage to your character also makes vertigo-inducing exploration much easier.
However, some quest items need to be carried by hand, which prohibits vehicular and fast travel, and will be dropped when the grappling hook is used. This requires some problem-solving in tossing the quest item around while traversing heights and unfriendly territories.
Despite the mostly seamless open world, some parts of Borderlands 4’s map squeeze you through enemy-dense chokepoints and unnecessarily meandering paths, forcing you to fight the respawned enemies all over again every time you pass through.
Shoot ’em dead
As with all Borderlands games, Borderlands 4 offers a huge arsenal of weapons and an equally large variety of enemies for you to decimate. From pistols to submachine guns to sniper rifles with random perks, effects and stats, the game gives plenty of opportunities to experiment and find your preferred combat style.
My preferred tactic is using weapons that damage opponents over time, so I can shoot them and hide somewhere while their health points whittle away.
There are also plenty of ordnance with devastating effects to inflict on opponents, such as bouncing grenades, rocket launchers and even throwing knives.
With the grappling mechanism, you can also grab explosive canisters and fling them at your foes for some destructive splash damage. Ammo is plentiful in containers generously scattered all around, so it’s pretty hard to run out.
But the biggest, baddest and most destructive weapon is each Vault Hunter’s unique action skills, which are developed via a complex and unique skill tree as you gain experience and skill points.
Rafa, the Exo-soldier, focuses on the use of military tech with massive splash damage, while Harlowe, the Gravitar, uses unstable energy to deal radiation and freezing effects on enemies, and can even cause enemies to float around in a bubble. Personally, I enjoy playing Harlowe since her skills are so unique and fun.
Kairos is inhabited by aggressive mega fauna, drug-addled psychos and the Timekeeper’s synth minions. The massive hordes of nimble enemies who can duck behind cover, float in the air and leap over long distances as well as bosses with multiple stages prove pretty challenging. That said, the game gives you plenty of tactics, strategies and opportunities to beat them.
As a last resort, you can get a “second wind” and come back to life if you manage to kill an enemy before the timer runs out. One strategy is to keep a weak or low-level enemy around during boss battles so that you can kill it to get a second wind. If all else fails and your character perishes, you will respawn at the last checkpoint at a high credit cost.
Lootin’ and tootin’ fun
One highlight of Borderlands games is the randomly generated weapons and gear that your character can equip. There are different levels of rarity like Uncommon (green), Rare (blue), Epic (purple) and Legendary (orange) so you know which ones to pick up.
In terms of quality-of-life designs for managing loot, the Borderlands franchise has some of the most innovative ideas. If you pick stuff up meant just for selling, you can “pick up as junk”, which will automatically sell them off at vending machines.
Even if you miss out on some great loot, your base will have a “lost loot” machine that saves the loot you missed out during hectic battles, with expandable slots so you don’t miss out on the good stuff. In addition, some bodies of water also offer opportunities to fish for gear, which can be hit and miss, if you don’t mind trying.
Killing bosses are more likely to yield Epic and Legendary gear, and you can keep battling the story mission bosses and Primordial Guardian Vault bosses by using Moxxi’s Big Encore Machine at a price in hope of getting better loot drops.
If you can’t get enough of the shooting and looting, the game offers an Ultimate Vault Hunter mode after the main story campaign is completed. That offers an even harder difficulty level and potentially better loot.
In spite of the loot management shortcuts, I still find myself spending loads of time in the inventory screen comparing the stats for weapons, ordnance, shields and medkits and trying to decide what to equip. There is such a wide range of options for weapons and gear, each with different effects and perks as well as pros and cons that will cause analysis paralysis for an indecisive player.
There are plenty of collectibles scattered around Kairos to find, some are in deliberately hard to reach areas which will test the staunchest completists. These include hidden caches full of loot, ECHO logs which reveal more about the characters in the game, bobble head figurines and vault symbols.
By finding collectibles and completing optional side quests, contracts and challenges, you are also rewarded with Storage Deck Upgrades (SDUs) to expand the capacity of backpacks, banks and ammo storage, which is great for packrats.
The game offers plenty of cosmetics to customise your character, weapons, vehicles and even your faithful ECHO-4 robot. These can be unlocked as rewards for completing optional side quests and add some flair to your Vault Hunter.
With so many rewarding dopamine hits, Borderlands 4 makes for a very addictive experience for hoarders, explorers and completists. In addition, you can play multiplayer co-op with friends or match-making sessions with other players to take on the campaign missions or tough bosses together.
Charming scenes, harming bugs
Borderland 4’s charming cel-shaded graphics for the lush landscapes of Kairos gives the game a distinctive look. The game’s environments are rendered in great detail, with dilapidated settlements filled with junk, futuristic installations with high-tech consoles and cave networks with ancient secrets.
In terms of audio, I found the soundscape noisy and overwhelming, especially during hectic battles with multiple enemies screaming in pain, explosions going off all around and NPCs trying to talk to you or evil bosses’ are giving their pompous monologues.
Despite the less than realistic cel-shading graphics, Borderlands 4 doesn’t make it easier for gaming machines to run. Although my PC’s specs are higher than recommended – I have an AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX graphics card with 24GB GDDR6 RAM – I can hear the fans going at full throttle, with hot air blasting from its vents. This does not happen to my rig for most other games that I have been playing even at higher resolutions.
Unfortunately, Borderlands 4’s bugginess and unstable performance mar an otherwise fun experience. During my playthrough, I experienced serious stuttering and freezing when my character entered a new area while being besieged by loads of enemies. There were times the game failed to launch and I had to reboot to try again, and frequent instances of the game crashing and freezing.
Some missions did not allow interacting with a quest objective, which is extremely frustrating since I had to restart the game and deal with all the respawned enemy hordes again. Certain optional challenges are also difficult to trigger, like the propaganda speakers where the “hack” prompt will only show up only when your character stands at a particularly tiny sweet spot.
Borderlands 4’s recommended PC hardware requirements are rather high, so do check your system specs before buying the game:
- 64-bit processor and operating system
- Solid state drive
- OS: Windows 10 / Windows 11
- Processor: Intel Core i7-12700 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
- Memory: 32GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Intel Arc B580
- Storage: 100GB available space
Sadly, the game is unable to run on the Steam Deck, with a message saying that it is not supported when I attempted to install it.
TL;DR
Borderlands 4 sticks to its winning shooter-looter formula, unique Vault Hunter with specialised skillsets and goes further with its seamless open world map with interesting characters and intricate multi-step side quests.
It’s a wildly addictive game for shooter fans and gearheads, with plenty of rewarding dopamine hits that makes it hard to put down. Best of all, the game lets you replay boss battles where you can put your new gear and ideas of mass destruction to good use, and get more loot to boot.
However, its prohibitive system requirements may alienate gamers with older systems or less powerful graphic cards. Being unplayable on Steam Deck is also a huge minus for gamers on the go.
Be warned that Borderlands 4 has bugs that can prevent mission completion as well as performance issues of the crashing, freezing or being unable to launch although tinkering with graphics settings and lighting seem to mitigate the issue for some.
However, if your system can run Borderlands 4 and you don’t need to run it off a handheld, it is a real blast to play either as a single player or multiplayer co-op. With four different Vault Hunter characters with unique playstyles, Borderlands 4 will keep spamming you with dopamine-fueled fun.
Borderlands 4 is available for PC on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S at S$99. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is planned but is delayed until further notice.
