If you want more Borderlands, here’s more Borderlands. The shooting is as satisfying as ever. The looting is still addictive despite legendaries not really standing out. But outside of the slick silky smooth movement and gun play, it’s a pretty sub par experience.
The writing. Here’s one of my biggest gripes with this game. Characters talk sooooooo bloody much in this game. I play with sub titles on and my god some of those subtitles were book length. And due to the constant humour in the writing, despite a lot being said it feels like nothing is actually being said. It’s a whole lot of pointless constant babbling. There is also so many jokes thrown your way and barely any of them landed with me which I found quite awkward.
The gunplay is fun and satisfying but the enemy variety is extremely lacking. None of this games enemies felt any different to fight against. In previous games the skags have a different weak spot to the spider ants. Loader bots have a smaller weak spot and have different units, units that require you to prioritise them in battle. Units that repair them mid fight. But in this game you never have to change up tactics. It’s just aim and shoot, everything fights and dies the same. The game is also extremely easy. Even playing on the hardest available setting from the beginning of the game it got to the point where me and my partner were just melting enemies. Bosses would die upon spawning in. We had no where near the most optimised character builds so god help the enemies if your a player who is on top of that. It’s this easy difficulty combined with boring combat encounters and extremely boring constant chatting that really made this game drag.
The dedicated 3 skill trees per character were dropped for a system that allows you to pick 1 permanent class and a second class later on. You can change the second class once you beat the game. Upon release I thought this offered great potential but now after completing the game I find that actually it’s rather narrow when compared to other games in the series. Only being able to progress halfway down the second tree really doesn’t help.
Also I am very grateful to any game offering full splitscreen Co-op. I played this game start to finish with my partner. She’s also a fan of Borderlands. But the co-op experience came with some downsides. The second screen doesn’t get sun titles. So when the characters are hurling constant blabber our way, she sometimes didn’t know what was being said over the gunfire and explosions. Also quest objectives don’t show on the second screen, so she never really knew what we were doing without me telling her. Despite not knowing she didn’t have to do much guessing because every single quest in this game is press square on something or shoot something.
Talking about the quests. None stand out now I think back to the game. None of the characters are memorable. None tell any interesting little side stories. It was just more of the main quest, shoot stuff and shoot more stuff.
The driving around the open world sections have been replaced with a table top you navigate on foot. This area was quite buggy. Quite often the camera would get stuck zoomed in on my character after talking to an NPC. I wasn’t a fan of this version of traversing the world since the vehicles offer a change in gameplay, with that gone in this game, all you ever do is run and shoot.
This is a mainly negative critique so let’s end on some positives. The visuals popped and were very fun. The amount of variety in level design was very welcome and the colour palette was great. The character customisation is brilliant. Really allowing you to get in there and tweak everything. I ain’t sure if I will be playing borderlands 4 having now become a little tired of the formula but I really hope they keep and improve upon this character creation system.
The writing. Here’s one of my biggest gripes with this game. Characters talk sooooooo bloody much in this game. I play with sub titles on and my god some of those subtitles were book length. And due to the constant humour in the writing, despite a lot being said it feels like nothing is actually being said. It’s a whole lot of pointless constant babbling. There is also so many jokes thrown your way and barely any of them landed with me which I found quite awkward.
The gunplay is fun and satisfying but the enemy variety is extremely lacking. None of this games enemies felt any different to fight against. In previous games the skags have a different weak spot to the spider ants. Loader bots have a smaller weak spot and have different units, units that require you to prioritise them in battle. Units that repair them mid fight. But in this game you never have to change up tactics. It’s just aim and shoot, everything fights and dies the same. The game is also extremely easy. Even playing on the hardest available setting from the beginning of the game it got to the point where me and my partner were just melting enemies. Bosses would die upon spawning in. We had no where near the most optimised character builds so god help the enemies if your a player who is on top of that. It’s this easy difficulty combined with boring combat encounters and extremely boring constant chatting that really made this game drag.
The dedicated 3 skill trees per character were dropped for a system that allows you to pick 1 permanent class and a second class later on. You can change the second class once you beat the game. Upon release I thought this offered great potential but now after completing the game I find that actually it’s rather narrow when compared to other games in the series. Only being able to progress halfway down the second tree really doesn’t help.
Also I am very grateful to any game offering full splitscreen Co-op. I played this game start to finish with my partner. She’s also a fan of Borderlands. But the co-op experience came with some downsides. The second screen doesn’t get sun titles. So when the characters are hurling constant blabber our way, she sometimes didn’t know what was being said over the gunfire and explosions. Also quest objectives don’t show on the second screen, so she never really knew what we were doing without me telling her. Despite not knowing she didn’t have to do much guessing because every single quest in this game is press square on something or shoot something.
Talking about the quests. None stand out now I think back to the game. None of the characters are memorable. None tell any interesting little side stories. It was just more of the main quest, shoot stuff and shoot more stuff.
The driving around the open world sections have been replaced with a table top you navigate on foot. This area was quite buggy. Quite often the camera would get stuck zoomed in on my character after talking to an NPC. I wasn’t a fan of this version of traversing the world since the vehicles offer a change in gameplay, with that gone in this game, all you ever do is run and shoot.
This is a mainly negative critique so let’s end on some positives. The visuals popped and were very fun. The amount of variety in level design was very welcome and the colour palette was great. The character customisation is brilliant. Really allowing you to get in there and tweak everything. I ain’t sure if I will be playing borderlands 4 having now become a little tired of the formula but I really hope they keep and improve upon this character creation system.