“Yo, dawg, we heard you like side-quests so we put side-quests in your side-quests so you can side-quest while you’re side-questing.” That’s my first impression of Borderlands 4, and while understanding that reference is a tacit admittance that you’re at least almost as old as I am, it’s the most apt way to describe Gearbox’s approach to their mayhemic four-quel.
Borderlands 4 is a game that deals in excess and chaos, at least in the half a dozen or so hours I’ve played. It’s patchy here and there, sometimes a little clunky, certainly a little glitchy, but everything adds to the chaos. It’s a cluttered world, scattered with detritus and debris, where every twenty yards there’s something else to pick up, kill, run away from, climb, explore, blow up, or talk to. There are moments where I stumbled into side quests while already actively side-questing, while also just trying to make my way to the mission checkpoint.
It throws loot at you like guns are confetti, so many that I stopped bothering to scan the lower rarities and just sold them, sight-unseen. And when it works, and all this madness falls into some kind of haphazard order, it froths with the same Borderlands magic that fans have been hoping to see, evoking the second game way more than the third.
It doesn’t always work though, and that’s the kicker. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve had an absolute blast and can’t wait to play more, because this is my brand of fuckery and I’m a big fan of the franchise, but now and then I’m left wondering why certain things aren’t here that I feel should be. A minimap for a start. This is not a game to make you explore for the sake of it. The world map is riddled with icons and points of interest that you have never visited and maybe never will. I spent almost as much time in the map menu as I did just powering my hover-bike along the roads. There are more elegant ways, but Borderlands 4 is not elegant. Ever.
And you can take all of these points as negatives if you like. Some people certainly will. But the fans of Borderlands won’t; they’ll understand what I’m saying here. This is a game that wants to be as loud as possible as often as possible, and yet there are moments even in the early story that drop hints that we’ll get some of the franchise’s trademark tonal shifts at some point.
The Borderlands 4 story begins with your Vault Hunter captured by the Timekeeper, self-appointed overlord of the planet Kairos who slaps a control Bolt on your back and tells you that you now work for him. Obviously, he’s never met a Vault Hunter before. Playing as new Siren Vex, I soon escaped his clutches with the help of the Crimson Resistance, a rebel movement modelled on the legendary Crimson Raiders which soon turns out to comprise entirely of Claptrap and a few enthusiastic amateurs.
Vex is pretty cool to play as. I have experimented a little with blade-wielding Rafa, too, but Vex is just too awesome to leave alone for now. Each of the Vault Hunters has three distinct skill trees capped by a trio of very different skills, essentially giving you what can feel like twelve different classes. I played most of the preview alongside Vex’s summoned pet, a huge spectral cat called Trouble that can be further augmented with nodes on the skill tree. I also played around with one of her other summon skills that let me field a combination of three gun-toting Spectres or scythe-wielding Reapers. Interestingly, her minions change damage type based on the weapon you’re currently using. It’s early days, but when you factor in the gear drops, there’s massive potential for build-crafting.
Once you’ve escaped and met Claptrap, what follows is, well, a Borderlands game. While a lot of noise has been made about this one breaking the mould, it’s actually reassuringly familiar in many ways. The art style and sense of humour are both as you remember, though the villain and supporting heroes are less irritating than they were in 3. It’s still very much Borderlands, though, and the comedy remains as you’d expect, for better and worse.
Some things are smoother. Vehicles are handled better, as you can just summon them whenever now, and the menus seem a little more user-friendly. Gearbox continue to do multiplayer better than most, too, with persistent progress for all parties regardless of who is hosting. There’s just a hell of a lot going on in Borderlands 4, and some may experience a little sensory overload from just how much there is to do per square foot.
Importantly, the arsenal is still plenty crazy. While I haven’t seen anything hugely outlandish the majority of weapons have an alternate firing mode that changes things considerably. So you might pick up a pistol that can fire clusters of rockets, and the old Torgue exploding reloads are back. My favourite weapon so far has been a sniper rifle with an underslung shotgun that has such a ridiculous effective range that I’m sure it must be bugged. But then, this is Borderlands, where rocket launchers or throwing knives go in the grenade slot and your shields explode when they fail, so who knows?
What I do know is that this is more of the silly, colourful, frantic action I know and love, and I can’t wait to dive in further. The preview portion came to an end while hunting for Idolator Sol, one of several lieutenants of the Timekeeper who you’ll need to defeat if you want to free Kairos from his iron rule. It may seem formulaic, but with Borderlands 4 you can’t ever be fully sure which way things are going to turn. As long as it maintains this pace and keeps throwing me things to fetch, collect, explode, and solve, I don’t mind. So far, a few bugs and annoyances aside, this is pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be.
Borderlands 4 is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on September 12th.
