The first hour on Kairos told me exactly what kind of game Borderlands 4 wants to be. You step off the drop ship, chain a double-jump into a glide over a canyon, slam into a pack of psychos, then grapple up to a rusted tower while a billion bullets and one-liners fly in every direction. It’s still unmistakably Borderlands – the cel-shading, the bad jokes, the slot-machine loot – but the movement changes the entire rhythm.
Instead of hopping between planets like in Borderlands 3, everything here is anchored to Kairos: one massive, stitched-together world of deserts, neon ruins, floating islands and industrial hellscapes. No more constant ship loading screens, no more chopping up the pace every twenty minutes. You just move – you glide across gaps, grapple up vertical arenas, dodge-roll through explosions – and the combat finally keeps up with how fast your brain wants to play this series.
That first impression stuck with me all the way through the 20–25 hour campaign and into the endgame: Borderlands 4 is the tightest looter-shooter the series has had in pure feel. The question that kept nagging in the back of my head, though, especially once the credits rolled, was simple: borderlands 4 review – is it worth playing? The answer is “yes, mostly”… but the reasons why are a little messy.
Borderlands games have always lived or died on the joy of pulling the trigger. Borderlands 4 finally respects that joy with a movement system that feels like it was built for the guns, not bolted onto them.
Every Vault Hunter can double-jump, glide, dodge-roll and use a grapple-hook from the start. It doesn’t sound huge on paper, but it fundamentally changes how fights play out. Instead of circling waist-high cover in a flat arena, fights become layered playgrounds. You might vault off a ledge, glide over a mob, drop an air slam that detonates for bonus weapon damage, then grapple to a crane and rain hell from above. The pacing is closer to Doom Eternal-level aggression than the more grounded feel of Borderlands 2.
The four Vault Hunters lean into that mobility in very different ways:
What surprised me is how much the builds encourage you to actually use that new mobility. Playing Siren, for example, it isn’t just about spamming an Action Skill on cooldown. It’s about sucking a group together, air-slamming into them for huge splash damage, then using the grapple to reposition before the heavies can line up a shot. The old Borderlands “strafe and shoot” loop is still here, but it’s sitting under a much more kinetic layer.
The guns themselves are as stupidly varied as ever. The marketing line about “billions” of guns is still a meme, but the important part is how distinct weapons feel. Homing cryo rifles that ricochet into frozen shards, corrosive spitters that vomit pellets like a fire hose, SMGs that rev like chainsaws and heal you on kill – there’s a constant drip of “oh, this is my new favorite toy” every couple of levels. The RNG can be cruel early on; it’s not unusual to spend a couple of hours waiting for your first purple drop that actually syncs with your build. But once the legendaries start dropping, the build-crafting spiral hits fast.
Enemy AI got a quiet but important upgrade. Bandits push flanks more aggressively than in Borderlands 3, snipers relocate instead of letting you farm their heads, and elite enemies love to flush you off high ground. It’s not tactical genius, but it’s enough to make the new mobility feel necessary rather than cosmetic.
Moment-to-moment, this is where Borderlands 4 is at its best. If what you want is guns that feel meaty, movement that feels modern, and a constant fireworks show of numbers and status effects, this is absolutely worth your time. On pure gameplay feel, it’s a solid 8.5/10 for me.
The setup this time: six years after Borderlands 3, the moon Elpis has crashed into Kairos and shattered the planet’s shielding. In the chaos, a time-obsessed dictator called The Timekeeper has seized control, with the Crimson Resistance and the feral Rippers fighting over the wreckage. You roll in as one of the four Vault Hunters and get shoved right into that three-way mess.
Borderlands 4 very clearly wants to be the “darker” one. There’s more betrayal, more body horror, more quiet little moments where the series’ usual slapstick drops away to show how utterly broken this world is. Side quests dig into Resistance cells chewing themselves apart, Rippers mutating into walking bombs, and people trying to live somewhere between those extremes. There are a few surprisingly effective gut-punches, and the voice acting (including some returning fan favorites) sells the heavier beats.
The problem is that the larger plot still falls back on familiar scaffolding. Mysterious artifacts, a charismatic tyrant, a ragtag crew of misfits talking smack on the radio – it’s Borderlands. The Timekeeper never quite reaches Handsome Jack levels of memorable awfulness, and the main campaign arcs play out in ways you can see coming several missions in advance.
Where it does get interesting is in Act 3, when you’re forced to pick a side between the Crimson Resistance and the Rippers. That choice actually has some teeth: it locks in which faction controls sections of Kairos in the endgame, changes a few major encounters, and even affects mounts and traversal perks (Ripper-aligned runs get you feral beasts that move faster, for example). It’s not full-on immersive sim branching, but it’s more than a palette swap ending slide.
By the time the credits roll, the story feels… fine. Better than Borderlands 3, nowhere near the magic of Borderlands 2 at its peak. If you’re here primarily for narrative, this isn’t going to change your life. Think 7.5/10: entertaining, occasionally surprising, still weighed down by familiar beats and jokes that don’t always land with the new grim tone.
If you’re asking whether Borderlands 4 is worth playing, the most important follow-up question is: do you have at least one friend willing to dive in with you?
In co-op, this thing absolutely cooks. Two to four players online, full cross-play between PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, and proper couch co-op on consoles with splitscreen that actually runs at a decent clip – that’s the core of why I kept coming back on weeknights. Abilities are built with synergy in mind: Siren slowing time while Brrzerker wades in swinging, She-lectro turning a chokepoint into a drone-infested blender while Drifter grapples bosses out of their safe spots. The game does a good job of level-scaling under-leveled friends so no one feels totally useless if they join late.
Matchmaking for public lobbies is snappy, usually under a minute during peak hours, and enemies scale to the group’s average level so you don’t just face-roll old content with a single over-geared carry. Cross-play works as advertised; there’s the occasional desync or host migration fail in long raid runs, but nothing catastrophically worse than other big co-op shooters.
Then there’s the nonsense side of co-op: the hoverbike racing. The vehicular stuff has always felt like an afterthought in Borderlands, but the custom hoverbikes with weapon slots and stunt-heavy tracks on Kairos are a fun distraction. They’re not deep enough to be a game on their own, but as a cooldown between raids and campaign pushes, bombing around the ruins with rocket pods strapped to your ride is a great palate cleanser.
Borderlands 4 in solo is solid. In co-op, it’s borderline irresistible. This is the best the series has ever felt as a hangout game: something you boot up to catch up with people while covering half the map in elemental explosions. If your playstyle leans co-op heavy, this alone pushes the value way up.
Once the credits roll, Borderlands 4 does not quietly escort you to the exit. It drags you into its endgame loop and shoves more guns at you than any healthy person should own.
You’ve got World Tiers that crank enemy health, damage, and density up through the roof, plus Mayhem-style modifiers that add things like beefy shields to enemies or increased damage taken on your side. At the top end, it’s spicy. Builds that worked fine in the campaign absolutely fall apart if you don’t start leaning into synergies and damage scaling properly.
The centerpiece is the Overdome Raids: instanced gauntlets that run 45–90 minutes, stacked with mini-bosses, build-check arenas, and some of the nastiest mob compositions in the game. This is where you’ll farm your truly absurd legendaries – SMGs that act like chainsaw shotguns, shotguns that explode into singularities, weird casino-themed gear from later DLC Vault Hunters like C4SH. There are weekly modifiers, leaderboards, cosmetic rewards for top clears – all the stuff you’d expect if you’ve spent time in any other looter-shooter endgame.
For players who love spreadsheets, build videos and labbing out broken combos, it’s fantastic. There are enough knobs to turn – skills, augment modifiers, anointments, weapon rolls – that you can disappear for dozens of hours just tuning one character to your liking. Clearing a high-tier Overdome run with a build you’ve painstakingly refined genuinely feels great.
For more casual players, though, the grind will feel like a brick wall. Perfect rolls can take ages. You’ll drown in purple junk before you see that one shotgun with the right element, pellet count, passive perk and anointment you want. There are QoL tools like auto-salvage and better filters than previous games, but if you’re not into farming, the post-campaign loop can slide from “addictive” to “exhausting” fast.
Personally, I’d put the endgame at an 8/10: great bones, some very fun raids, but too willing to lean on pure repetition instead of more interesting long-term goals.
On current-gen consoles, Borderlands 4 is finally in the place I always wanted this series to be: 60 FPS as the norm, with optional higher frame-rate modes if you’ve got a display to match. The art style remains the saving grace – those chunky outlines and bold colors hide a lot of texture-level compromises, and Kairos gives the artists more variety than “desert, swamp, space station” ever did.
Performance isn’t spotless – big co-op explosions and dense raid arenas can still trigger frame dips, and you’ll occasionally see enemies T-pose into existence before the animation system catches up – but compared to the launch versions of previous games, this is miles cleaner. On PC, if you’ve got reasonably modern hardware, you can push the visuals further with higher-res shadows and fancier lighting without tanking performance too hard.
One small but important note: controller feel is excellent. Aim assist is snappy without being sticky, the new movement options map cleanly without claw-hand gymnastics, and you actually feel the difference between precision weapons and spray-and-pray gear. Borderlands has always been “good enough” in this department; Borderlands 4 finally feels tuned on purpose.
Putting it all together, here’s where I landed after living with Borderlands 4 for a while.
If you love co-op looter-shooters, especially the Borderlands flavor of them – neon nonsense, crunchy gunfeel, a constant drip of new toys to try – Borderlands 4 is absolutely worth playing. The movement overhaul alone makes going back to earlier entries feel clunky, and the unified world of Kairos makes the whole experience flow better than the stop-start planet hopping of Borderlands 3.
If you’re mostly a solo player who bounced off Borderlands 3 because you were tired of the same story beats and endless grind, this is more complicated. The story is better paced and more interesting, but still not on the level of Borderlands 2. The endgame is deep but also unapologetically grindy. You will be running the same raids and arenas again and again if you want to see your build reach its potential.
Pricing and value-wise, the base game already offers a solid 40–50 hours of content if you do the campaign plus a reasonable chunk of side content and some endgame dabbling. With DLC and seasonal events, you can stretch that far beyond if you’re the kind of player who picks a looter-shooter and lives in it for a year.
My overall verdict?
If you already know you like this series, Borderlands 4 is easy to recommend. If you’re looter-curious but on the fence, it’s one of those games that might not be worth $70 just for you alone on the couch, but becomes a must-buy the second a friend texts, “Wanna start characters together?”
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