Borderlands 4 review: brilliant co-op action that runs at a less than brilliant pace

If you think about a game like Borderlands 4 too much, the whole thing falls apart. You’re killing enemies so you can level up and pick up better loot, which allows you to kill more powerful enemies, who drop more powerful loot, which allows you to kill more… It’s an endless loop, an operant conditioning chamber where the food pellet that finally satiates you never comes. Luckily, Gearbox is really good at obscuring that.

Since 2008, its cel-shaded co-op ‘looter shooter’ formula has proven not just compelling, but genre-shifting. Everyone paid attention to the way the original spewed random guns at you when an enemy died, like you just smashed a big gun piñata. Shooters permanently embedded RPG elements like character levelling and skill trees into themselves in the post-Borderlands world. So as Borderlands 4 arrives, it slots into a shooter landscape that’s already cribbed many of its best ideas. The question is: how well has it refined those sugary sweet food pellets in this latest edition of gaming’s most addictive Skinner Box?

(And yes, you’re right, it’s not technically cel-shading but rather a graphic novel-inspired visual style with thick painterly outlines which mimics cel shading. Well done. You win a pat on the head from Randy Pitchford.)

There are some substantial new bits here. The most dramatic change is that all the explosions and shouting are happening in an open world now, instead of the hub areas connected by loading screens that featured in all previous series entrants. You’re let loose on the island of Kairos, a chaotic and hostile locale governed by The Timekeeper, a classic sci-fi bad guy who in a classic sci-fi bad guy move has microchipped all inhabitants to exert total control over them. Despite that rather glaring downside to Kairos, its natural beauty prevails. Tropical forests give way to rolling hills, strange desert landscapes with giant dragon skeletons looming over them in the sky above, and many more combinations of gaudy colours and pulpy futurism that hit the eye rather nicely.

Before you had to spawn vehicles from stations dotted around the world, but now you’ve got a hoverbike always available at the press of a button, and that encourages you to go off on random expeditions to interesting spots on the horizon without fear of having a long, boring walk back to the quest marker.

But all this space and freedom comes at a cost, and not just the one the Timekeeper exerts. Borderlands 4 runs on Unreal Engine 5, and like many games using that engine, the PC version chugs along like a misfiring barn find. Regardless of the graphics settings used, frame rates stutter and hang at random intervals, and that really affects the combat in a game this fluid and frenetic.

Ironically, on the design side Borderlands 4 really goes to every length to ensure that feeling of lithe, liquid movement in combat, adding a grapple mechanic, a double-jump and a glide ability. Use them all together and you feel like a visiting character from a platformer game who’s just stopped off to shoot at some baddies and hoard a few weapons. Boss fights are often designed with this in mind, requiring you to manipulate platforms or manoeuvre yourself around to hit a weak point during the crucial window of opportunity.

So there’s a real point of tension between its increased smoothness on a design level and its frustratingly inconsistent technical performance. Gearbox head Randy Pitchford is something of a magician in his free time, and one can’t help but think of Borderlands 4 as a great sleight of hand illusionist with arthritic fingers, devising brilliant tricks but constantly fumbling them.

There have been performance patches. Gearbox is very aware of the issue, and Pitchford himself has even been working as personal tech support on X, dispensing one-to-one tech fixes to frustrated players. You can’t fault them for trying to remedy the situation. Still, the situation remains.

And more’s the shame, because in addition to the new player movement options and the seamless open world, there’s a great variety of Vault Hunters to play with here. It’s possible – and even enjoyable – to play Borderlands 4 solo, but this series has always been designed with co-op front of mind and it’s at its best when there are four of you popping off your abilities at once, chucking enemies about with telekinesis, deploying turrets and summoning skeleton warriors. Chaining damage between groups of foes, incapacitating the big damage-dealer while you whittle down the crowd. Not only is it visually impressive to see all those abilities happening at once, it also makes you feel like more than a bunch of grunts with guns. You’re tactical commanders, imposing order on the chaos of combat. It’s deeply satisfying stuff.

When it works. Which is, as we mentioned, seldom at the moment.

So what do you do with a game like Borderlands 4? Do you slap it on its wrist for being a bad technical game and dissuade people from playing it, despite its considerable virtues? Or do you hope it’ll be fixed at some point and recommend it based on the experience it can be, after that theoretical fix?

It’s a question critics are having to ask increasingly often in gaming. And it’s a question without an answer. For now, know that there’s some exemplary co-op shooting in here, if you can weather the storm of its poor performance.