FUN & GUN(S)

BORDERLANDS 4 is so good, even a bad UI can't ruin it

- By Harvey Randall

Borderlands 4 might just be the best game in the whole 16-year-old series, but trapped in a prison of terrible choices. This, however, didn't stop me from losing 47 hours of my life to a blissfully loot-driven blur. This leads me to two conclusions: Either my brain is truly broken, or the core loop in Borderlands 4's clunky heart is seriously that strong.

This is not a series that innovates, and I don't think Gearbox has reinvented the wheel here, either. What the studio has done is make the perfect wheel, then presumably gone, “Crap, we spent all our budget on a wheel,” and put it on a clunky used car with steering that keeps locking up.

I make this assumption because the game's most glaring issues are such blunders that I simply cannot fathom how they happened—they are baffling. And yet, I've never felt so utterly absorbed by a game I have so many nitpicks with. But before I air my grievances, let's get onto the good.

GOT MY TEMPO

The ARPG loop at the core of Borderlands 4 has cast a spell on me. In fact, it's downright trancelike. The game's new open-world structure marries so well with the shoot, loot, repeat treadmill that I'm shocked it's taken Gearbox so long to do it.

I wasn't sure about it at first. Opening the big map of Kairos immediately struck me with Ubisoft fatigue. No one likes looking at a to-do list, and Borderlands 4 has one of the longest. But the more I played, the more I realized that Gearbox has spent five whole games kinda wasting its time. The more traditional ARPG levels of the series' past were shackles weighing the whole thing down.

I spent the early game of Borderlands 4 getting sidelined. I'd keep telling myself I'd do the story. “I'll just do this one objective,” I'd say, veering off the straight and narrow. Then three hours later, I'd wake up, three sidequests, six objectives and two levels deep into distraction.