I love Borderlands 4 despite its poor performance and bad optimization — here’s why

If there's one game that I've been excited to play this year, it's Borderlands 4.

Ever since the original Borderlands, I've been a looter shooter fiend. Taking two tried-and-true game types (shooter and loot-based RPG) and smashing them together has been a recipe to keep me coming back for months on end (I'm looking at you, Destiny 2).

The team at Gearbox has refined the looting and shooting formula in the last several releases, garnering mostly rave reviews (Borderlands 3 had some issues, but it was still an incredibly fun experience at its core).

The fourth mainline game adds new layers with more loot slots to further refine your character builds, more movement options and other goodies that make leveling up and becoming more powerful an even better experience.

Borderlands 4: The basics

• What is it? Borderlands 4 is a looter shooter from the franchise that arguably invented the genre.
• Who is it for? This game is designed for fans of shooters, whether they have experience with the loot-based aspect or not. It hit notes that will make existing Borderlands fans happy, but it does ease up on some of its trademark humor.
• How much does it cost? Borderlands 4 costs $69 and is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2.
• What other games has the developer made? Gearbox Software has a long pedigree and really came into its own with the release of the previous Borderlands games. The company also made some Half-Life games, Brothers in Arms and even Aliens: Colonial Marines.
• What games is it similar to? Borderlands 4 is similar to other games in the series. It's hard to find other looter shooters that look and feel like Borderlands outside of the Gearbox-developed games.

Shoot and loot, a simple formula

Borderlands 4 isn't reinventing the wheel. You shoot bad guys, and they drop loot that helps you shoot harder bad guys. As this bad guy shooting happens, you level up and gain new skills to enhance your Vault Hunter. There's more nuance, of course, but that's the core of Borderlands, and it's what keeps fans of the series coming back again and again.

I will admit that I'm just as addicted to what Borderlands 4 brings to the table as I was with any of the other major releases (except 2014 spin-off The Pre-Sequel, which never quite grabbed me). As I write this review, I'm wondering whether I'll have time to dive back into Borderlands 4 tonight or if I'll have to wait until lunch tomorrow. Yeah, I'm that hooked.

None of that is to say that Borderlands 4 doesn't alter the formula. The semi-open world featured in older Borderlands games is replaced with a true open world that makes exploring a lot more enjoyable without loading times as you pass between sections.

On the other hand, this also introduces some drawbacks. To prevent you from climbing to places the developer doesn't want you to go, there are invisible walls. It reminds me of the pitch for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where Nintendo talked about being able to go anywhere you can see. Borderlands 4 isn't that. It's more like, if you can see it, try your best, but you might need to go all the way around because there's an invisible wall stopping you from going the route you'd want to take.

In addition to the exploration elements, Borderlands 4 features new movement improvements that significantly enhance the overall experience. You no longer need to visit a Catch-A-Ride station to get a vehicle. Instead, you press a single button and your sweet ride appears (much like in Destiny).

There's also a grappling hook that opens more verticality to the game, but it can only be used on specific grapple points. Limited as it may be, I found it to be quite fun to zip around during combat and drop down behind an enemy before blasting them into oblivion.

Cranking it up a notch

The theme of Borderlands 4 is Gearbox attempting to take the things longtime players like me loved about the franchise and making them more accessible (and better, in most cases). There's the open world I mentioned before and the new movement options, but it goes deeper than that.

A major complaint in previous Borderlands games was the lack of boss fight mechanics. They often lacked inventive mechanics and instead relied on large health pools that felt like nothing more than large bullet sponges. Everything else about the games was so fun that players let it slide, but with games like Destiny offering elaborate raid encounters and larger-than-life boss fights, Borderlands had to respond, and it did well in Borderlands 4.

While not full-on raids like Destiny 2, there are boss battles with different mechanics that will make you think. Some require disabling a shield through certain techniques before you can hurt them. Others get a little more inventive, but I don't want to spoil those, as they're not what you might expect from Borderlands.

Borderlands has always offered relatively thin buildcrafting with only four characters and three subclasses in each. And because it's a gun-focused loot game, your characters only have a few inventory slots to play with.

Not only has Gearbox expanded the options for leveling (though it's still limited to four characters with three subclasses), it has also added new inventory slots that further modify your character. This opens up more options for getting creative with building out your character, which is perfect for players who plan to stick around through the endgame.

And to top it off, actual gameplay pillars like shooting still feel as incredible as ever (as long as the framerate stays high enough for you to keep track of what's happening).

Let's talk technical issues

The biggest thing holding Borderlands 4 back from complete and utter perfection is the technical issues. At the same time, I didn't encounter many problems playing on a Razer Blade 18 laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce 4090 GPU. It ran smoothly at high settings without noticeable slowdown, and it looked great with Nvidia DLSS 4, which increased the FPS, reduced latency, and provided a slight image quality boost.

While there are numerous reports of people experiencing problems running the game, even with 5090 GPUs, I couldn't say I had issues with the laptop version of a 4090. Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe the DLSS 4 helped that much. If you're experiencing issues, it's worth trying if you have a GPU that supports it.

I was a lot less lucky on my desktop, which features an NVIDIA GeForce 3070. I had to keep it locked at 60 FPS with medium settings (and a slightly adjusted version of medium with some parts set to Low). It was playable at these settings, but when things got intense, I did experience some drops. The DLSS tech helped, but being a 3070 meant it doesn't support DLSS 4, which could be preventing it from looking the best.

Either way, the difference in visuals was enough to have me running back to the Razer laptop despite the desktop being hooked to a much larger screen. Sometimes size doesn't matter, and performance is more important (that feels like a joke you'd hear in Borderlands, actually).

Borderands 4: Verdict

I want to give Borderlands 4 a perfect score. I want to break the scale and give it a six-star rating.

I can't, though. The technical issues, invisible walls and middling story keep me from doing so. I've never been overly invested in the Borderlands story, so I can't say I'm surprised this one didn't suck me in (though it does go in some unexpected directions).

However, that doesn't mean I love the game any less. It's everything I hoped Borderlands 4 would be from a gameplay perspective. The loop of shooting and looting has kept me coming back for dozens of hours, and I expect it'll keep me coming back for dozens more (maybe hundreds more if my past Borderlands experiences are anything to go on).