Sometimes, to meaningfully move forward, you have to start over fresh. That’s how it felt starting up Borderlands 4, with its new planet, villains, factions, Vault Hunters, and even plenty of new (or at least reworked) mechanics. Even the game’s character select screen felt a lot like it was revisiting the feel of the first game’s, with the four playable hunters waiting in a cell, rather than being picked from a menu or standing in a line.
Once selected, your chosen Vault Hunter meets Borderlands 4’s primary villain, the Timekeeper, via a golden hologram. The Timekeeper became immortal after finding a vault on the planet Kairos where the game takes place and he now wants to prevent anyone from reaching it, especially Vault Hunters. To this end he affixes a control bolt to your nervous system in a plan to use you to further his agenda, but before he can tell you what he wants you do do, an aspiring Vault Hunter, Arjay, explodes (literally) onto the scene with his helper bot, Echo-4, to try and recruit you to the Crimson Resistance. A merry prison break/tutorial sequence ensues, which includes introducing you to the game’s mechanics, especially the new way healing and grenades work as well as the new grapple hook that you can use both for traversal and to grab items with. At the end of the tutorial, the Timekeeper reveals that he has the power to remote control people, which he demonstrates by taking control of a group of other inmates. You and Arjay use the chaos to cover your own escape, Arjay commands his Echo-4 robot to jam the Timekeeper’s control of you before an explosion knocks you out. Waking up on a beach, we are met with the ‘leader’ of the Crimson Resistance and the first recurring character, Claptrap, who introduces the game’s new movements options, the glide pack, and the fact that Catch-A-Rides can now be summoned from anywhere.
However, while Claptrap is technically the first recurring character and introduces the starting area’s faction, he doesn’t have a particularly large presence unlike the other reoccuring characters. “Wait,” you might be asking, “factions, returning characters?” Yes, there are other returning characters, drip fed to you as you play through the story. There are signs early on if you’re paying attention, for example after your very first boss fight you can see Moxxi-themed standees that let you immediately refight a boss for a nominal (in-game) fee. You eventually meet several reoccuring characters if you follow several main quest lines.
That you can choose to tackle the game in a partly nonlinear fashion is actually one of its numerous new quality of life features. These also include the ability to send items directly to the item bank from inventory, tying storage deck upgrades directly to side quests and missions instead of to eridium or cash like in previous games and making them immediately upgradeable, and the Echo pathfinding line (though I still would like a minimap to go with it, Gearbox). Most of the map is also explorable from the get go, with only certain areas being locked behind plot progression, instead of all new areas being locked like in the previous entries in the series.
You have three major story factions: the Outbounders, who have dreams of leaving the planet, the Electi, once-favored citizens of the Timekeeper permanently locked out when the moon Elpis arrived and caused massive cataclysms, and the Auger, traditionalist miners. These three factions have questlines independent of each other, and after the point where all three factions are unlocked, you can choose to completely abandon one faction’s questline for another at any point, or bounce between them at your own discretion without penalty. Each faction has a focal NPC, plus a recurring character or two. Importantly is that, despite these cameos, the focus is on your Vault Hunter.
Also notably, while a lot of characters will refer to you via a generic nickname, there are now voiced lines that address your chosen Hunter by name, which increases the feeling that your choice of Hunter is more than just a skill set and some snarky lines. Not that there aren’t snarky lines, it is a Borderlands game, but there’s also a solid story, and probably the best base game story since the first Borderlands too. It also helps that there are multiple lesser villains standing between you and the Timekeeper.
Also helping the excellent writing is the fact that you are joined by Zadara, a former ally to the Timekeeper, who helped build his regime to try and support the people of Kairos, but now wants to take him down as she realizes he never actually cared. It helps give multiple different perspectives to the world of Kairos to make it feel like a 1,000-year-old regime that the Vault Hunter and Crimson Raiders have stumbled on, and not just a flash in the pan threat du jour like certain other villains from the series who shall remain nameless. Borderlands 4 also managed to pay off a 10-year-old brick joke in a way that had me cackling, so you’ve got that too look forward to.
Gameplay-wise, I have few complaints. On PC – I played this on both PlayStation 5 and PC – I only had the occasional frame jitter, and it was actually less common in combat compared to exiting the inventory menu, and has improved considerably after last week’s patch. On PlayStation, I did not personally notice the slowdown that has been said to occur the more you play it, but I also did take a minute every couple hours just to make sure it didn’t impact me. I found the new Vault Hunters – Vex was my first choice, I’m working on Amon now – to each have their own niche both from each other and from Vault Hunters in the previous games. The new way that healing and grenades – or rather Ordinance, as these now also include heavy weapons and thrown knives – work on a cooldown rather than being on a limited stock make them much more helpful in battle. Plus there’s the firmware system which allows you to mix and match set bonuses for added effects, and the fact that Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode can now just be started from the end of a completed game, rather than requiring a whole new playthrough to do. I also like that you can start a new Vault Hunter at Level 30 after completing the campaign, though I am curious why 30 and not 50, and why the mode doesn’t auto-include the faction fast travel spots even though it sets the world to a post-plot state for you.
Despite the stutter and the slowdown, do I recommend Borderlands 4? Yes. I’m still playing it. And I’m going to play the DLC when that comes out too.
Tim reviewed Borderlands 4 on PlayStation 5 with a provided review copy, and on PC with his own bought copy.
