Borderlands 4 - Grap Trap (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- Sep 24
- 9 min read
Borderlands 4
Released: September 12th, 2025
Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch 2, Xbox X/S
Borderlands 4 is fundamentally more Borderlands. There are some welcome improvements, there are some remarkable flaws, but if all you want is the trademark looting and shooting that has always been at this series’ core, you’ll absolutely get it.
Except for when you don’t.
Aaaaaand boy, there are plenty of times you don’t!
For some reason, Gearbox felt that what Borderlands has been missing all these years is a grappling hook around which nothing interesting has been built. They push this implement harder than Wii tech demos pushed motion controls, putting it front and center with such vigor you’d think they invented it, yet they couldn’t think of a single creative use for the fucker.
Instead of using the mechanic to open up its world with cool new navigational options, Borderlands 4 relies on a scattering of preset grapple points and a fucking ridiculous number of missions in which you carry a yoinkable object from A to B that you drop if you try to do anything else. Sometimes this is part of a dreary climb-and-lasso puzzle, but most of the time it’s not even that.
Barrels can be grappled to hurl in combat until you forget to bother, and if you’re really lucky you might find a 2000s-era mirror or pipe puzzle where you pull stuff around for a minute. Mostly though, you’ll be doing escort missions with inanimate objects, unable to even use your vehicle, and there’s not a sliver of a credible in-universe justification.
Remember, this is a series where deconstructing and reconstituting objects for transport is an established thing. You digistruct far bigger and more complex items throughout this very game than many of the things you’re forced to carry. Why can my backpack hold a dozen missile launchers but I can’t put a simple axe or battery in it? The only reason is because the developers said so, which is pure bloody inanity.
What the Hell was going through their heads when they figured the best way to sell a “new” feature was to make fetch quests worse with it? I had to check online to make sure I hadn’t missed something, because the very nature of these quests - which can entail long distances and may respawn the items if you leave them on the ground for too long - seemed too ridiculous to be genuine.
I don’t mean to front load the review with complaints - because we’ve plenty more of those to come - but I had to make a point of how bafflingly overbearing Borderlands 4 is about a mechanic that Bulletstorm did a dozen ways better back in 2011. I’d be fascinated to learn how and why its inclusion dictated the rest of the game’s design so detrimentally.
Leaving that fumble aside for now, there’s still stuff to like about Borderlands 4. With the setting of Pandora thankfully left behind, Kairos gives us a colorful new planet with a new charismatic baddie to face down. This time around, the Vault Hunters are hounded by the Timekeeper, an immortal dictator who presents a far less comedic threat than the likes of Handsome Jack or those Twitch streamers from Borderlands 3.
Rather than try to recapture Jack’s quippy schtick, Borderlands 4 goes with a megalomaniacal supervillain cast from a truly classic mold. He has moments of smug wit but he isn’t screwing around, and his lack of nonsense really stands out from all the prevailing nonsense. His faction, the Order, is there for your contempt, not your laughter.
I really like the Timekeeper and the similarly serious arc villains who serve beneath him. It’s a fool’s errand to try and contrive another Jack, so just giving us a straightforward dictator to smash is a smart move.
There’s still plenty of Borderlands’ trademark concept of humor and an obligatory roster of NPCs who are all “Say WUUUUUH?” or whatever. Claptrap remains Claptrap, and he’s still having those “tears of a clown” moments that are a bit too shallow to generate the desired sympathy. The entire game is as talkative as ever, with allies barking exposition at you just beneath the enemies barking threats and the guns barking gun sounds.
By series standards, Borderlands 4 is pretty solid with its campaign. It’s not relying on outdated Internet references anywhere near as much as it’s done in the past, and the more serious story beats are done well. Overall, it’s a less forgettable story than usual, composed from a nice set of digestible narratives.
Our Vault Hunters this time around are Gun Guy, Tank Guy, Gravity Girl, and The Obligatory Siren. I went with that last one, Vex, and her minion skill tree in which she commands a big ghost cat called Trouble. Once I got her to a point where she was constantly generating Overshield and increasing damage off the back of it, I settled into a nice rhythm with her.
She did make me miss the Beastmaster class of Borderlands 3 though. Say what you will about that game, but FL4K was a damn cool Vault Hunter.
Some quality of life improvements have come with this one. A weapon wheel makes gun switching more fluid to the point where I swapped my offense up more than usual, and you can summon a vehicle at any point rather than needing to find a station (at least when not babysitting quest objects). In addition to a glidey jetpack you also receive a proper dodge move, which is genuinely handy.
Adding to your defensive options are Repkits, manual healing items that can be a huge help. While health pickups are still present, some guaranteed healing that comes with its own series of buffs is a great idea. I do wish Repkits looked a lot less like guns though - when they drop as loot I keep expecting pistols.
Changes on the admin side include marking weapons as junk which can be sold as a job lot. In general, menus and inventories are better to navigate except for one huge issue that we’ll get to. Cosmetics can now be applied anywhere, just like using vehicles, and with how many skins are thrown at you, your ride, your guns, and your new robot friend ECHO-4, this is a very good thing.
While I like the Timekeeper and enjoy the narrative purpose his faction serves, I can’t say I’m mega fond of actually fighting the Order during gameplay.
I’m just not into the array of synths and soldiers who make up a vast majority of Borderlands 4’s enemies. Order mobs go beyond “classic” villainy and head right into generic territory, lacking personality or outstanding variety among their troops. I had more fun fighting the Rippers, a faction that basically looks and acts like the series’ usual enemies.
The Order combines beefy armor with incredibly irritating movement patterns. Most troops can pull off speed bursts that let them zip around really quickly, which would be fine if you didn’t fight them by the dozen. Trying to keep a bead on random robots while they run around like Sonic doesn’t make combat harder, just more of a hassle. Even non-Order mooks constantly sidestep in this one, which again, would be okay if it wasn’t constant.
With the Order comes a new type of gun, and I’m not in love with that either. The Order brand’s gimmick is charged shooting, either to combine multiple shots into one payload or fire a volley of them at once. This is totally subverted by the enemies’ aforementioned speed bursts, and in my experience you deal damage quicker by just shooting normally anyway.
If you get such a gun with a Ripper attachment though, the charge instead becomes a brief delay for a powerful auto fire, which is much more enjoyable to use. Order alt-modes can also be really nice, such as the Death Ball, which is literally just a big ball of death. Still, I started to skip this entire brand of gun after a while.
The various weapon part combos make for some extra chaotic combat, the kind where it’s sometimes hard to make out what’s happening but it barely matters because something is getting killed. Lots of explosions, blood, and screams. It’s Borderlands though, and you know that’s what you’re getting. I can at least say this game delivers when it comes to anarchic combat.
But…
For something being described by Gearbox’s CEO as a “premium game made for premium users,” Borderlands 4 is shoddy in a number of key areas, the most glaring being a completely fucked up UI. Menus are missing important features including almost all imagery. You get empty spaces where pictures should be, akin to a website that can’t fully load due to Adblock. It’s impossible to properly check your equipment at a glance.
With alarming regularity, my inventory has become completely inaccessible, with the gear I’ve picked up no longer appearing in any menus. Being unable to see or use loot is as bad as a softlock in a literal looter shooter, and I’ve had to quit out many times just to access my items again.
Enemy AI is noticeably awful this time around. Almost every fight ends with you tracking down the lone guy who’s trapped in a spawn point or lunable to pathfind a way around terrain. Allies aren’t much better - commanding Trouble to use an attack skill had a 75% success rate if I were being generous. I ended up ignoring his attacks and just used the command that buffs him since it was the only reliable option.
Texture pop-in has long been an issue for this series, but fine detail in characters and terrain is on a satellite delay when it comes to this fucker. Roads are a smear whenever using a vehicle, and characters you approach will often be heavily smudged for at least a few seconds before the textures apply.
At $69.99 with a staggering $129.99 deluxe edition, it seems the only thing truly “premium” about Borderlands 4… is the premium.
Is this the most broken game I’ve ever played? Far from it, but it’s not up to par and if you’re going to act like only an elite set of players with high standards should play your game, you better step up to the plate with one exemplary game. That is not what Borderlands 4 is.
Even with its quality-of-life improvements, smoother movement, and new tricks, this latest entry just hasn’t moved the needle forward in any way that impresses. It’s a fine enough diversion, with enough dopamine found in its gameplay loop to keep you habitually locked in, but other than that it’s outclassed by a legion of titles offering comparable gratification with better gameplay.
A lack of imagination manifests not just in the barrage of identical fetch quests, but throughout the whole thing. As I sat shooting machine parts to break them for reasons my glazed brain hadn’t even registered, it dawned on me how little had been happening. Dozens of hours into the main campaign, and I’m shooting at static glowing targets the way one would in a basic tutorial. On Kairos it’s just a standard objective.
There aren’t creative solutions or standout setpieces, no missions that feel unlike any other. You may be tempted to ask what I expected from Borderlands, and it’s a fair point, but the game’s hot new gimmick is itself a shining example of how uncreative it is, implemented to facilitate some of the dreariest quests committed to software. I can say I expect better than this.
I’m not saying I want missions that feel like, say, Phantom Liberty’s acclaimed Bondlike party mission, but… actually, you know what? Yes, yes I do want that! I want a change of pace, a change of tone, I want an unforgettable moment in a story that isn’t literal background noise drowned out by hundreds of the same screaming bullet sponges.
We’re on the fourth game and series fatigue has kicked in, that much is true. We have four games maintaining the same consistent pitch and tone, with the same structure, the same feel, the same missions. I can still play Dynasty Warriors and stay awake, so my getting tired of this routine should be a pretty strong indictment.
Borderlands could have done with a shakeup, but a substandard grappling hook and an obscene number of fetch quests in which players take luggage for walkies isn’t it. Such banality permeates what is otherwise a decent enough shooter, impacting so many other elements that it wrecks things. Adding to that is a one-note tone and huge technical difficulties, making Borderlands 4 a far from “premium” game.
6/10
