Hands-On: Borderlands 4 wants you to forget Borderlands 3 ever happened

So far, Borderlands 4 feels like a proper sequel to Borderlands 2.

Borderlands 3 went off the reservation – even the game’s own developers now admit that. While parts of that game were entirely serviceable, even hardcore fans of the franchise acknowledge that Borderlands had lost its way. It didn’t help that this souring on Borderlands 3 came just as popular culture was squarely in the middle of a comedy transition.

Whereas the Reddit-pilled, Aldi Rick and Morty-style humour of the third game would have probably absolutely killed in 2016, by 2019 it felt incredibly dated. Making a game is extremely hard. Making a funny game is practically impossible.

So Borderlands 4 doesn’t worry too much about it. The zany humour dial is turned virtually all the way down. That’s not to say it’s a particularly self-serious game so far, but we’ve yet to meet a character that makes us want to open YouTube in another tab and mute Borderlands 4, something that 3 suffered from on an hourly basis.

Instead, Borderlands 4 focuses on gameplay. We’ve started our playthrough ahead of a future review and, without spoiling anything, we’re currently on the hunt for several big bosses, all working for the Timekeeper, who the early game sets up as the overarching villain.

The story and characters have yet to grab us in the way that the cast of the first two games have, but pre-release discussions from the developers seem to suggest we’ll be running into some familiar faces soon.

The game’s map is large and entirely connected – however, it’s cleverly split into biomes, and we’ve been introduced to its various sections slowly.

We’re playing as Vex, Borderland 4’s Siren. Thanks to an early piece of luck, we’ve decided to spec her towards sniper rifles, a tribute to the absolutely ridiculous Jacobs death machine we picked up as a mission reward. Not only does this sniper kill virtually every enemy with one hit, but critical hits with said sniper often ricochet off and turn enemy brains into British Airways lasagne.

This is what we want from Borderlands. The joy of finding a weapon that feels extremely overpowered is key to the ARPG fantasy. That small window of time where you feel like a God until the enemies around you match your power is exactly what people come to the genre for.

The Borderlands franchise’s “billions of guns” thing has been a marketing point since the original, and while you’ll probably use fewer than 100 across your playthrough, the variation in what we’ve been finding has been a joy to experiment with.

We’re also enjoying the new suite of Siren powers that Vex uses, including one that essentially lets us stay in our “ultimate” state permanently. When one of our abilities is triggered, every enemy that is killed with a critical hit with releases a purple energy ball. This ball will increase the amount of time we can stay in our Siren state.

As previously mentioned, our sniper rifle is a critical hit machine, meaning that chaining these together makes Vex unkillable. Does this feel a wee bit broken? Sure. And we absolutely love it.

Playing the game in single-player, these kinds of builds are key, and discovering how all of the abilities and guns work in tandem is another great joy of the Borderlands franchise. When we’re presented with the sprawling skill tree, it’s difficult not to get overwhelmed by choice.

While it’s still early in our playthrough and there are seemingly hundreds of missions to go, Borderlands 4 is exactly what we want it to be so far.

There’s a real ‘one more mission’ addictiveness that was lost in Borderlands 3, and the world is much more interesting to explore. The quirkiness has been significantly dialed down, and while there is likely a portion of the audience that actually liked all that ‘OMG so random’ humour, the level of comedy we’ve seen so far is much less grating.

It doesn’t feel like Borderlands 4 will convert those who’ve totally written off the franchise, but for those who loved 1 and 2 and were let down by 3, it seems 4 could be the successor that we’ve been waiting for, and we’re excited to see where it goes from here.