Recent reviews by Awaken_Magic

let me get Straight to the point:

Gameplay = Perfect 10/10

Randy Pichfork = Horrible -1/10, Someone... Please... give this man a suppressor, A big fat one, By letting him speak to Borderlands fans in such way, his mouth will be the sole reason of the game negative opinion/reviews. just accept the lack of optimisations and do what you can to try and optimise it to usable state.



Let me explain in detail:


__The Goods__

Game-play is awesome, story is awesome, The concept of having an "Open World" in a Borderlands style was a really good call, it was a good idea with good execution of the concept. let the player go where he wants, let them re-farm the Bosses without having to quit to Main-menu, and the players will be happy.



And there's also Claptrap.. that's that, well, anyway, back to review,



Game mechanics are now better than ever, way more variety of possible builds to make to melt enemies/bosses.

Game-play is basically Borderlands 3 but on Steroids, add to it the addition of the "Grappling hook", "Double Jump", "Hovering", "Swimming" and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "Diggirunner" available at any times for the user, And it makes the whole movement feel fantastic, after you get used to it, it becomes a second nature.



Characters ARE a step-up from the Borderlands 3, Still not as good as Borderlands 2, I don't think no other Borderlands will beat that.

My current and first Character of choice was Vex, a Siren, and It is a very fun character to play, with a new addition of a new damage type 'Kinetic Damage', think of it as a status effect, but only for non-elemental weapons, but those apply 'bleed' as a status effect damage. Just once of the choices for a character build, with many more I can't cover since I have not yet played other characters.

Talking about weapons itself, there are some new additional weapon manufacturers like:

Ripper - Offering spin-up time before a continuous full auto firing mode
Order - Charged weapons, high-precision burst weapons.
Deadalus - Allowing the player to switch ammo-type for the gun, e.g using sniper ammo with an SMG rifle.

But probably the most coolest feature.. See how in borderlands different weapons could have had other manufacturer parts, changing the gun specs depending on the part, usually by changing the accuracy, mag size, or damage, depending on the part.. Now, a weapon, can have parts from two different manufacturers, a base component and a licenced component, to make it more simple, one weapon can have abilities of two different manufactures, e.g A Vladof Assault rifle could have a Jakobs part, allowing to ricochet bullets on a headshot, while also getting attributes from base Vladof Parts like faster fire rate, e.t.c.

This alone can change the types of build's one can make drastically.

There is also an introduction to three new types of gear:

Enhancements - giving buffs to speicifc weapon manufacturers
Repkits - Basically heal iteams on cooldown, giving various buffs.
Ordnances - a slot replacing Granade slot, allowing for holding either a 'Granade', 'heavy weapons' or 'projectiles (such as throwable knifes)'

Legendaries… There are different opinions about it, but with Borderlands 4, the chance for Legendary drops now has been drastically reduced, making it feel a lot more like Borderlands 2, which does encourage Players to farm for Legendaries a lot more if they want the Specific loot drop.



Story itself, I have not yet completed full play-through, but thanks god, so far, the story and its main villain feel a lot more... serious.. feels a lot more tense, having its main Villain take its role seriously, and not take it like a Vlog, (Yes, I'm taking about you, Tyreen & Troy), and leaving out all the usual crazy & fun missions across side-quests that so far do seem fun and enjoyable to complete.

I will not talk about the Villain as to not give spoilers, but rest assured that the Villain character development, is significantly better made compared to previous game.


For me, Personally?, Jack is still a better villain, at least as far as I am in the game as of now which can change soon, after which I will update the review with new thoughts. Jack just had a more well developed character, Knowing when to take things seriously, and when to have some fun talk, a perfect 50-50 balance, as should things be.



Now, about Named Enemies, another new feature in the game, is that through-out the world, as you travel, you can find those so called 'World Bosses/Named enemies', which randomly spawn within a 'bubble' and as soon as you enter it, the 'boss' spawns. The trick though is.. When the player enters, he is not allowed to leave the area, and have to fight the boss within a specified area if they want a chance to get better loot (both as a drop as well as a random reward claimable in the Inventory starting from Rare-Legendary quality) while also being on a timer, which if ran out, the 'boss' will de-spawn. a little more challenging, but awarding.





Now, probably the part that mostly everyone will agree with... __The bads...___

game performance to CEO ratio attitude:

There is no denying to say that the game is really not well optimised, as probably most people are aware the game is developed with Unreal Engine 5, which is a very powerful game engine, but with great power comes great responsibility, in this case a matter of good optimisations, which this game clearly lacs.

With my experience, owning an RX 9070 XT, a £650 GPU, a Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB DDR4 3600Mhz System, To be able to play the game with AT LEAST the 60 fps on 4K, You won't be able to achieve it playing on High settings, and forget about Ultra or Baddass settings, without the use of Frame Generation. there were parts in the game, the FPS was running as low as 25FPS without Frame Gen, This is just unacceptable. I had to go down to 1440P in resolution to be able to hit the 80-144 fps mark on Ultra Settings, which for a GPU worth nearly a grand, is not very good.

That being said, and according to the Steam Hardware survey in August of 2025, the most common GPU used by the majority of users across the world, is either an RTX 4060/RTX 4060 Ti, and here is where it all gets even worse..

In Borderlands 4, at 1080p, medium settings, an RTX 4060 8GB verion, gets an average of 49FPS!, and 1% lows of 40fps!, that is not 'playable' in any sort of way.


This have really upset a massive fanbase around Borderlands Franchise, As a big Company as Gearbox with an estimated over $280 MILLION BUDGET! that is $120 Million more than the development of Borderlands 3, do not optimise the game to playable state, relying solely on Frama-Generation for 'Good' FPS performance.


Adding salt to injury, Randy Pitchford, single-handedly made the situation a multitude times worse by adding fuel to fire with his actions, by responding to fans in the most 'shockin' way a CEO in the current state of the game could have spoken.. a short recap:


"Borderlands 4 is a PREMIUM game for PREMIUM gamers"
"Code your own engine an show us how it's done"
“The game is pretty damn optimal”

I won't go in detail, but this should not be how a CEO talks to their fans in such way. full stop.

Most Likely over half of all the hate and negativity from fans would have been avoided, If at any point, Mr Randy would up to some degree accepted the lack of optimisations, and assure the 'Premium Fans' that they will try their best to optimise the game with the community feedback.




So to Summarise, The game itself is amazing, I wish I could recommend this game, as it is really fun, But solely because, This is such a BIG Company with such huge budget, and release the game in such poor state and the CEO attitude towards fans, I would not recommend to buy the game at full price of $69.99.

Games should not be released in such state for that price. So please, do me a favour, and do wait until the game will receive a proper performance optimisations, and do not buy it for that price.

"I LOVE" the game, It could be the best game for Campaign single-player so far, BUT, It's not like I want to be a dic*head or something, But it's just unbelievable how the developers just dumped the PC version of the game to trash, and just started working only on the Quest Version...

It's understandable that you also want to make other communities able to play your games, and that's very nice from you, But you can't just leave one community without a word, and polish a reloaded version on Quest while completely leaving us alone.

How hard is it to just keep updating both games, It's not like those are two separate different games, Those are THE SAME GAMES... just ported into Quest.

It's not a wise decision to leave such big community of players on PC without new content while the Quest players get regular updates, They just want to get bombarded with Negative Reviews.

The devs need to understand, not everyone owns Oculus Quest headset's, There is still a wide majority of players who use Rift S, Valve index, or HTC vive, and even if we wanted hard to just go and buy Quest version, we can't...

I hope the developers will soon start to understand the community frustration, and start actually listening to us. If not, People will start to just leave this game, forget about it, maybe another developer might publish a similar game with constant updates and this game with so much potential will just be buried somewhere on the market.


Devs, If you actually want to do something that would make the community happy on both PC and Quest, Please add Cross-play support between PC and Quest, and I CAN GUARANTEE YOU, if you do that, the game would have a significant popularity increase and you would make both communities happy without need to leave one just to make another one happier.

Even thought the game is superb, seeing how they just abandoned us for Quest community I sadly can't leave a positive review, at least not yet, I will see how and IF the game will still expand its features.

After about 1000hrs in my whole life, I can have a word about this game, I still remember times plying this game non stop, I fell in love with this game, but TBH, i cannot say this is a glitch or bug free game which is sad while it would be muuuuch better if they would fix the glitches, And i would bo even more than happy if there would be something like a remake of this game, At least Graphicly improved version.

Not my style, more of a movie style game. But quite nice, been playing it on Xbox for some time.

Gra jest nieziemska. Jezeli szukasz gry ktora jest na dlugi czas, Jest Zabawna I ma otwarty swiat to lepszej gry znalesc nie mogles. Gra ma 4 postace grywalne, gdzie dodatkowe 2 mozna kupic z DLC(Polecam) .Sama kampania jest bardzo dobrze zrobiona. Oraz od groma pobocznych questow ktore napewno nie jednego rozsmiesza. Mozna powiedziec iz sa tutaj Easter eggi z wiekszosci innych gier. rzadkosci Broni jest Multum. Zaczynajace sie od Bialych, Zielonych, Niebieskich, Fioletowych, Az po zoltych, Pomaranczowych, Ciemno Pomaranczowych i Perlowych. Same DLC to tej gry nie sa z byt dlugie ale zapewniaja duza ilosc zabawy i grywalnosci. Gralem we wszystkie czesci tej ze gry na PC oraz na konsoli, i smialo moge powiedziec ze ta gra jest jedna jak nie najlepsza gra ze swojego rodzaju jaka gralem.

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