‘Borderlands 4’ Serves Up Raunchy Jokes, Big Guns, And A Lot Of Heart

Borderlands the movie was largely a critical and commercial failure, but it may have legs yet. Despite adding up to, in the words of the official Inverse review “Guardians of the Galaxy with worse jokes,” the movie did get people talking about a video game series five years after the last release. How could you not with Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis running around on a screen blowing things up? While the movie itself didn’t quite entice as a movie, it was a bit like watching a cool video game. Which, for those who haven’t played, it is.

Now, one year after the flop of a movie and six years after the beloved Borderlands 3, the much anticipated fourth installation of this video game series is out — and there’s a lot to love. Newcomers, like myself, come to the game with completely fresh eyes, only having seen the movie, will find a lot to love in the exposition and tone, a lot to puzzle over in the backstory, and so much to enjoy in the gameplay. At the least, Borderlands 4 can erase the taste that the blockbuster-that-wasn’t left in our mouths — but it promises a lot more than that.

Risk and Rewards

The hordes of monsters known as rippers had me surrounded, and before I knew it, I was gunned down. I crawled behind a corner. But each time I hid, my character expired before I could recover. This happened a couple of times, until, frustrated, I charged at an enemy and slammed the shotgun in its face, fully expecting to restart again. Instead, my health was filled back up, and the words “Second Wind” flashed across the screen. That’s when Borderlands 4 began to click for me as an experience, as I realized what makes this series different from the others.

This was the surprise and delight of a Borderlands game, that makes it different from shooters like Call of Duty, Valorant, Gears of War, or even Halo. Instead of running away when you’re down, like you’d do in literally any other game, Borderlands encourages and rewards aggressive play. As someone who has declared to other teammates that I’m running in on a self-destructive mission, only to hear groans in response, I found it nice to see a game that actually gives you the ridiculous power fantasy of playing a slender, long-range character that somehow survives all the bullets to the face, rather than having to hide and crouch.

The main campaign of Borderlands 4 is about freeing the land of Kairos from the clutches of the Timekeeper, who wants to impose Order on everyone (literally armies of sci-fi enemies called The Order). The gameplay is a combination of looting gear, shooting mobs and bosses, completing main and side quests, using a grappling hook through tricky platforms and occasionally solving the odd puzzle. You get a really sweet ride early on, and can even customize it in different paintjobs and speeds.

From the start, Borderlands presents you with four possible classes to pick, including Forgeknight and Gravitar, depending on whether you prefer to tank things out or play from far away. After much deliberation, I landed on Vex the Siren, a space mage who has the long range and aesthetics that match up to the kinds of characters I usually pick in games like League of Legends or other RPGs like Lost Ark. From there, the game gives you even more choices, with Vex having three possible skill trees, so three different ways to play her.

Throughout the sixty plus hours I spent with the game, I experimented with all three styles – one approach has her transform with wings, and recover her health and shoot enemies with balls of energy. I played the first 20 hours with that approach, but then switched over to another style that gives you a pet wolf you summon named Trouble, who can become Big Trouble with a little magic. Finally, I closed out the game with what I found to be the most effective approach, which lets me summon clones of Vex that are specters that stand in one place to shoot the enemy, or reapers, who fly over to melee the enemies. In the late game, I no longer had to do much work to eliminate my foes, I merely had to plant my clones in the right places and let them clean up after me. All three of these styles are well-thought-out and add a lot of variety to the game, although the styles with a pet wolf or clones are most helpful for the main campaign and the winged approach is probably most appropriate for a team fight with friends.

It’s Not Borderlands Without Banter

Borderlands 4 is, like the games before it, full of dad jokes and internet humor. That is and will always be part of the charm of the series. So the game’s writing shines when it comes to the sidekick characters, Amara and Zane, the playable characters in Borderlands 3, who are all the more lovable and funny when given in small doses.

For the most part, the terrible, old-school, bad 2010s internet jokes land, but they can get grating and I can already foresee it being somewhat divisive among players. For instance, everyone’s least favorite chatty robot Claptrap is back, albeit only sometimes, and he makes sure to tell me to check out the grill, so I do, only to find batteries instead of hot dogs, and when I point that out, he says they’re complementary hot dogs, so I’m supposed to compliment them. Now that’s an Amelia Bedelia-level pun that made me eyeroll. But that’s better than the sex jokes, made so often as to seem to make up for the lack of adult humor in gaming blockbusters in general. As such, in some ways, it’s refreshing but then again, having all these random non-playable characters hitting on you over and over is a lot. In my book, I’ll mark it as a win for standing out from the crowd at least.

While the humor is clearly in place, the emotional impact and resonance can be a bit lacking. The main vibe is amusingly camp, but there are hidden moments of emotion. In a couple of side quests, for example, I got to help out a missile that could talk and try to patch up a marriage going through some “psychosexual” stuff, and track down a missing person whose story about grief ended up a bit darker than I predicted.

All About The Weapons

My quest for the best possible gear ended up taking center stage over the game’s story, world-building, and everything else. I spent nearly a full day reading the descriptions for the guns and enhancements in my inventory, sorting them by rarity, then by level, then by damage dealt. It was a lot of fun. There’s something so satisfying about landing on the perfect loadout, like a legendary grenade that knocks back even the thickest foes and keeps them frozen in place, or a legendary upgrade that helped me spawn Badasses (bigger and more powerful guys) to fight alongside me, or a gun that can shred even the meatiest tanks. The game takes this to another level once you finish the main campaign, having you repeat quests to grind for legendary loot – now that could get even more tedious, unless you can talk a bunch of pals into joining your hunt in multiplayer mode.

If people have likened Call of Duty to a hit of caffeine, then Borderlands is like an espresso plus a nice, fluffy croissant on the side. I was never really into shooters as a genre, but I absolutely loved the way Borderlands makes fights an equal balance between your guns and your skills, plus a side of luck in finding as much cool stuff as you can. As a huge MapleStory nerd who has spent a lot of money on the best gear, I found this quite appealing. And the game has a few super convenient quality-of-life features I wish other RPGs would have, like the ability to mark a ton of items as junk and just sell them en masse. I did run into a minor bug where the wrong item would be marked as junk when I selected an item, but hopefully that gets fixed close to launch.

The most frustrating part of Borderlands 4, comes in the middle, when the same six or so enemies run at me repeatedly. It’s a slog to have to finish them off constantly, and this part is all so predictable. Luckily, the right loadout and skill tree just takes care of business. By the end, I was setting up my clones, and running away, watching my experience points rack up by themselves.

Overall, Borderlands 4 was made with a lot of heart. The art looks hand-drawn, and the sound design rules. Even when the backgrounds were dreary post-apocalyptic deserts and space rocks, and I was exploring a dying world, I could still feel the affection and humor infused in every bit of the work. There’s a line that Zane tells Amara fairly late in the game, so I won’t share too much of the context for fear of spoilers, but he says something like “The strength is in the changin’,” which could be about getting older or getting more worn down. It feels like Borderlands 4 overcame a lot of those challenges, and found its strength in the changing, after all.

It’s easy to find gripes in such a quirky, humor-forward franchise, but Borderlands 4 rises above it all by committing fully to the bit. It serves up exactly what the fans wanted, exactly what it would be like to play as Cate Blanchett for one sixty hour mission, blowing up aliens and weirdos alike, ascending and descending from spacecraft. And anytime you might become bored or annoyed, a little dumb joke, or god forbid, speech from Claptrap, will perk you right back up.

8/10

Borderlands 4 launches on September 11 on PC and September 12 on consoles. Inverse was provided with a PC copy for this review.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.