FUN & GUN(S)

BORDERLANDS 4 is so good, even a bad Ul 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 realised 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.