Borderland 4 Review

AT A GLANCE

Borderlands 4 had one of the most anticipated launches in the looter shooter genre. It also had one of the worst launches. This Borderlands 4 review is the one we didn’t want to write.

Borderlands 4 Review: A Broken Game That Wastes Your Time and Your Money

Borderlands 4 review verdict: skip it. The excitement walking into this game was real. The Borderlands franchise built its reputation on chaotic co-op mayhem, billions of procedurally generated guns, and a tone that never took itself too seriously. Borderlands 4 had every advantage — an established fanbase, a proven formula, and years of development time. It squandered all of it. What shipped was not a finished game. It was a broken, glitch-riddled product that disrespects the time and money of everyone who bought it.

What Is Borderlands 4?

Borderlands 4 is the latest entry in Gearbox Software’s long-running looter shooter franchise, published by 2K Games. Like its predecessors, it promises a massive open world packed with missions, side quests, loot drops, and cooperative multiplayer for up to four players. The cel-shaded art style returns. The irreverent humor returns. The core loop of shoot, loot, and level up returns.

What also returns — in force — are the technical problems that have plagued Gearbox launches in the past. Except this time, they are worse. Significantly worse.

The Experience

The first hour of Borderlands 4 is genuinely promising. The gunplay feels responsive, the new world has visual personality, and the opening missions establish enough narrative momentum to pull you forward. That initial excitement is the best the game ever gets.

Then the glitches start.

Thirty minutes into a mission — sometimes forty — the game locks up. Not a crash to the dashboard. Something worse: a soft lock where the game keeps running but forward progress stops entirely. A door won’t open. An enemy won’t spawn. A trigger won’t fire. You are stuck, with no option except to quit the mission and lose everything you just did. Thirty to forty minutes of progress, gone. Repeatedly.

This is not a one-time bug. It is a consistent, reproducible failure that affects missions and side quests throughout the game. The forum posts and community threads confirm it. Friends experienced it. Strangers online experienced it. This is a systemic problem that shipped in the final product, which means it passed whatever quality assurance process Gearbox and 2K have in place. That is not a technical accident. That is a failure of standards.

The multiplayer situation compounds the damage. Co-op is central to the Borderlands experience — the franchise has always been better with friends. In Borderlands 4, connecting with a team is unreliable at best and impossible at worst. Lobbies fail to populate. Sessions drop mid-mission. Game nights planned around co-op sessions get canceled because the game simply refuses to function. There is no workaround. There is no fix in the settings. It either works or it doesn’t, and frequently it doesn’t.

What Works

The visual design shows effort. The new environments have a distinct look, and the cel-shaded aesthetic the franchise is known for remains visually appealing. The gunplay in the moments when the game is actually functioning has the satisfying mechanical snap that made earlier entries worth playing.

That is the extent of what works. And none of it matters when the game breaks before you can finish a mission.

What Doesn’t

The soft-lock glitch is inexcusable. Losing 30 to 40 minutes of progress because a mission trigger failed is not a minor inconvenience — it is a fundamental gameplay failure that makes the game unplayable on its own terms. A looter shooter where you cannot reliably complete missions has no functional core.

The multiplayer failures destroy the franchise’s primary selling point. Borderlands without reliable co-op is not Borderlands. It is a worse version of a solo game that already has better options in the genre.

The refund situation deserves to be said plainly: digital storefronts make getting your money back from a broken game genuinely difficult. Physical copies can be traded in. Digital purchases are largely final. At $60 to $70 a copy, releasing a product in this state and making it hard to return is not just a quality failure — it is a consumer protection issue. Players who bought digitally and encountered these problems had no recourse. That is not acceptable.

Verdict

Do not buy Borderlands 4. Not at full price. Not on sale. Not until there is documented, confirmed evidence that the soft-lock glitches have been patched and the multiplayer infrastructure has been overhauled — and even then, approach with caution.

The franchise has goodwill built up over years of solid entries. Borderlands 4 burns through it. Shipping a game that soft-locks mid-mission, breaks co-op, and offers no meaningful refund path to affected players is a failure at every level — development, QA, and publishing. The $60 to $70 asking price makes it worse.

There are better looter shooters. There are better ways to spend your money. This one isn’t worth your time.