Borderlands 4 is a bold departure for the series, but 2K may have carved off some of its soul in the pursuit of killing cringe – preview

Borderlands is undergoing a grand and drastic rebirth with Borderlands 4. It’s more mature, less zany than before. A smart haircut and fresh new work shirt. It’s bringing with it a gameplay overhaul, taking what’s loved from the hugely profitable original trilogy and adding to it a contemporary makeover. It marks a new era for Borderlands, and while it still offers that same lootin’ and shootin’ richness as you’d expect, I can’t help but feel some meaty chunk of its soul has been thrown out the window in the attempt.

The game brings players to an entirely new setting, the planet Kairos where vault hunters, galaxy-spanning arms manufacturers, and Claptrap units have never touched. That is until a moon crashes throuhg its protective veil, essentially smashing the old into the new and blending them all together. What this means for the player is a blend of new and returning characters and weaponry, and a tone alltogether seperate from what we’ve seen from the Borderlands series.

Let me start with something I like. Borderlands 4 is a vast, beautiful sci-fi game. During my preview I was able to explore two small corners of the world: the first a lush green portion of its open world. Borderlands 4 has tossed aside the loading screens and blue digital gates between zones in favour of one giant landscape, and it’s all the better for it. Exploration, the hunt for quriky optional fights or hidden (hopefully red) chests has been greatly enhanced, wooden ramps shoot off from a huge cliff off into the waters below. Even in our walled off slice, I could stumble across a drilling site, and confront a secret boss few others at the preview knew about. There’s magic in that. It feels like Destiny, and not in a bad way!

But, with this transition to an open world apporoach comes open world problems, namely how to actually fill out the world so it’s not just cool spots seperately by swathes of nothing. Borderlands 4 doesn’t quite nail this. Gearbox has sprinkled collectables like audio logs and vault symbols all over the gaff. There are also random world events – spins of your average gunfight – that apparently pop up as you journey around. I only ran into one, a space ship you could float into and trash for slick loot, so much of those mindless drives remained uneventful.

It is good then, that once you actually do get into a firefight, Borderlands 4 retains that same caramel rich gunplay that its predessecors had. Weapons you pick up off the ground, snatch from chests, and pilfer from toilets are varied and punchy. The process of popping off headshots with a sniper or blowing folks away with a shotgun is still a blast, because your sniper can shoot elemental bolts, and your shotgun can be thrown out as a little guy who waddles around and murders haphazardly.

Borderlands 4 has abandonned the purity of guns dedicated to sole manufacturers, with each gun a loyal representative of a particular style, for a weapon part system. Now, rather than a Jackobs sniper pistol being just a high damage hand cannon, it can feature a high fire rate, an elemental weapon type, or a pre-fire charge. The desired effect of this is to stretch out the variety of each gun and indeed, going from one weapon to another feels less like bouncing between different distinct types to a swim across a vast soup of various flavours of gun, moored to foundational archetypes. A sniper will also be a sniper, but what a sniper can actually do is a tantalizing mystery at all times.

I’m torn on this change. Gearbox has succeeded in expanding the gun pool but essentially knocking down the walls between the manufacturers, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of the character each brand brought has crumbled away in the process. There are enhancements that provide bonuses to weapons with specific weapon parts, a remedy for players who find themselves stalwart fans of a specific type of gun, but does a percentage damage or fire rate boost really compare to the deliberate role the weapons used to fill? The melting barrage of Maliwan you could count on, or the explosive power of a Torgue? This, I feel, will be a system that pleases many, and I do appreciate that steps have been taken to preserve the experience for people like me. I would just ask this: if you put a Bugatti engine inside a Ferrari, is it still a Ferrari?

This is not the only area in which old Borderlands has been torn asunder. The tone, the humour and guile of old games has been replaced with a modern, mature vibe. The cringey ghost of Borderlands 3 haunts Gearbox like a specter, and it’s crytal clear that the approach to levity in Borderlands 4 is a reaction to that. This had to happen, when you’ve made a game where the yellow mutant SpongeBoss BulletPants emerges from a pinnaple made of meat, you’ve gone to far. However, this Newton’s Craddle of levity has swung a touch too far in the other direction. An overcorrection that edges dangerously close to making Borderlands – a series defined by being weird and a monster all on its own – into, well, like everything else.

In the preview we experienced a short main story mission, in which we meet Rush. Rush is a kind, polite meat-head, packing massive muscles and a heart of gold. He tasks you with taking out a boss called Horrace, and collect stolen packages in Horrace’s base of operations. All the while he quips about protein, the dice collection of one of his peers, and so on. [name] is fine, he’s unoffensive, written in such a way to be vaguely likable by pretty much everyone who will play Borderlands 4.

After this quest, I found Claptrap by a lakehouse. He asked me, a new recruit to the Crimson Resistance he can order around, to gather some of his possessions. These include a picture of Moxxi inside a hidden worship room, the voice module of Claptraps build-a-companion Veronica which you accidentally destroy to Claptrap’s dismay, and a classic Borderlands Psycho mask. This quest is hilarious, and perhaps worryingly, far funnier than the main mission I played a few minutes eariler.

Borderlands 4 is joke-shy. Optional missions on bounty boards are simple kill quests, and they don’t come with a side character quipping about how they want to bake an explosive cake for nearby bandits or whatever, they come with nothing. Just go out, kill a dog called Romeo, and get a gun and some cash. There’s no soul here! It feels as though there’s been an effort to bring the series back to the Borderlands 1 era tone, but forgot the reality that T.K. Baha would constantly make jokes about his own blindness, or that Erik Frank’s wife threw out all his porno mags.

I can only hope that, outside of the small window into Borderlands 4 that I played, things get significantly funnier. But I’m not sure they will. That Claptrap mission I talked about, it ends on a poignent note. You pile all of Claptrap’s stuff, including the OG Borderlands mask representative of the original trilogy, onto a boat and push it into the lake. You then blow it up, a symbolic farewell to the old before marching into the new. I was left impressed by the boldness and the faith in the team’s intended direction with Borderlands 4, it’s something you need to have when reinventing a beloved series. I was also left a little sad.

Sad because, while Borderlands 4 was great fun to play in my short time behind the controller, it is also so firm in its departure from old norms. Vaults are known as the ultimate goal, there is almost always one-per-planet, and act as a climactic fight and lootathon at the conclusion of a hard journey. Vaults are what Borderlands are all about. A big boss, and a bunch of loot.

I played a vault in Borderlands 4 – one of many that dot Kairos – and it was a seires of platforms on which a gaggle of enemies must be blown away. There is still a boss at the end, and thankfully it’s a damn great one. Killing it requires you to grapple to vines as to avoid the perilous thorny floor, as well as pulling open weak points on its body. It way the highlight of my preview, a monument to what Gearbox is doing right with Borderlands 4, a natural evolution on the gunplay and bosses I’ve fought in Borderlands for years.

But once the boss is down and the “treasure room” is reached, there lies only two chests waiting for you. I grabbed a green gun for my troubles, and left. It didn’t have that same feeling as killing The Rampager of The Graveward, because the vault I beat in Borderlands 4 is not a vault like those before. It’s a new spin, taking what’s good about the old ones and adding to it, improving on some parts, and cutting away bits deemed unnecessary. Borderlands 4 is the same way. It’s not a Borderlands like many – myself included – have grown to love. It’s a new Borderlands, for better and worse.

Sometimes when you preview a game you come away thinking, “God, I really need more than just two hours with this.” This is one of those times. Borderlands 4’s revolutionary changes on the series as so widespreed, so drastic, that I could really do with 100 hours before my feelings about it cement. I will end with this. If you are a Borderlands 4, know that the meat of what made the series great is still here, but that it’s being served in a form alltogether different. It’s a game to play with an open mind. If you think of it more as a second Borderlands 1, an entirely new venture without the trilogy looming over it, it’s fantastic fun.

However, if you’ve still got the series’ old hooks lodged in your heart, be warned that you may find them viciously torn from your chest. What’s worse still is that no one will even make a joke about it, you’ll just be sad.

Borderlands 4 was previewed at a closed preview event for press, and as such was experienced in a controlled environment.