Borderlands 4 Is a Good Looter Shooter That Launched at War With Its Own Players

At its core this is still Borderlands, and that is mostly a compliment. The series has spent four mainline games refining one of the most moreish loops in the genre, and here the shooting is the best it has felt. Weapons have real character, the manufacturers each behave differently, and the drip of better gear keeps the next encounter feeling worth starting. The four new Vault Hunters give you genuinely distinct ways to play, from crowd control to burst damage to builds that lean on the series' deep skill trees, and in co-op the whole thing still sings the way it always has. If you are here for the fantasy of hoarding absurd guns and melting rooms full of enemies with three friends, that fantasy is intact.

The biggest structural change is the world. Borderlands 4 trades the series' older hub-and-corridor layout for a larger, more open planet you move through more freely, with more traversal and fewer hard loading walls between you and the next objective. When it works, it gives the game a sense of place the series has often lacked. It is also where some of the criticism lands: a bigger map means more time spent getting from one marker to the next, and reviewers were split on whether the extra space earned itself or simply stretched the pacing thin. Eurogamer, for one, found the exploration and combat slow to find their rhythm. Your tolerance for that will decide a lot.

Then there is the thing that actually defined the launch: performance. On PC, Borderlands 4 shipped with widespread crashes, stutter, and framerate problems serious enough that Steam reviews cratered over them, and outlets that test this closely flagged significant stutter and warned players off the highest graphics preset. Gearbox followed up with extensive optimization guidance covering dozens of GPUs, which helps, but needing a tuning guide to hit a stable framerate on a new release is exactly the kind of friction that turns a good game into a frustrating purchase. Take-Two's own chief executive later conceded the performance problems hurt sales, which tells you how real they were.

What makes the player backlash sting more is the tone of the response from the top. When pressed on PC performance, Gearbox's Randy Pitchford framed the game as a premium title for premium hardware and suggested much of the complaint came from people pushing 4K at maximum settings. Whatever the technical truth of that, it reads as blaming the customer, and it hardened a lot of players against a game many of them otherwise liked. The writing and humor, long a love-it-or-roll-your-eyes part of this series, drew the usual split as well, but it is the performance and the posture around it that turned this launch sour.

Visually, Borderlands 4 is still unmistakably itself. The cel-shaded, ink-outlined look that made the series stand out more than a decade ago remains striking and still does a smart job of keeping a screen full of enemies, numbers, and loot beams readable in the heat of a firefight. The new planet gives the artists a wider canvas, and the vistas can be genuinely handsome when the game is running well. That last clause is the catch. An art style this bold depends on a steady framerate to land, and the launch stutter undercut exactly the thing the presentation does best. When the performance holds, this is a good-looking game with a strong identity. When it does not, the same scenes that should impress instead remind you why the reviews went the way they did. The audio and the moment-to-moment feedback of the guns, the series' quiet strength, remain excellent throughout.