Video Game

Borderlands 4

Overly Dramatic Review in One Sentence

Lets combine Destiny 2 with the looter shooter style of Borderlands and you get, a surprisingly fun game.

The Actual Review

Game time:

PC: 45 hours (Single play through with a decent bit of side content + post end game material)

Gameplay

If you listened to Episode 1 - Destiny you know that I have a love-hate, mostly hate, relationship with Destiny 2, but this game is basically a Borderlands Destiny. That means you get these floating mechanisms, special attacks, all wrapped around the Borderlands floating and explosive loot.

The gun play is outstanding. I really enjoyed the fighting and I totally forgot about the "Second Life" mechanism that exist in the game. This mechanism is that if you run out of life, you go into a kneeled state. In this state, you cannot aim down your sights, but you can still shoot. If you kill someone while in that state, you are given partial shields and full health, allowing you to continue the fight which is important on boss fights.

You also have an abundance of different guns. I think in Borderlands 1, they touted over a billion different guns. I think at this point it has to be way more than that since there is a randomly generated attributes for each gun. This does mean that the guns that you enjoy do not scale with you which is both nice, in the fact that you are forced to find new guns, and terrible since you really enjoyed that one weapon. What I do not like is mostly a design element where the sites are all over the place. They fit the graphics style, but they can be so distracting or create an inability to see that some of them are completely unusable when not hip firing.

As of right now, there isn't a lot of endgame material so that portion is very lack luster. According to Carter, who loved Borderlands 3, that was how it started, but it is now one of his favorite games.

Graphics and Sound

We have to talk about the style. I think it is called graphic novel style, but I do not really agree with that. It is weird, but I don't know it just isn't for me. I really could take it or leave it. It isn't great, but I know I might be an outlier on this one.

What this does do well is the sound. The headshot sound is so satisfying. There is this substantial thump to it. The voice lines from the random characters are so dumb at times that you can't but laugh. There is also some great conversational lines from your character as you play. I have some issues with the vehicle noises mostly. There is just a whine to it when you are going for a long period of time that quickly gets annoying.

Story and Characters

I have not and will not play all 4 of the playable characters. I only played Amon and found him to be hysterical. This knight in a gun world that is part Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy where he doesn't understand things.

As for the main story, I am still not sure how people ended up on this planet and why the moon was there. I do know thanks to YouTube it was an event from the previous game, but without that I am not sure I would have understood the significance of that. The looming threat of the Timekeeper doesn't feel too significant as the games goes on. He is cool in design, but just not sure he as a looming threat was meh. His boss fight was super cool.

My Rating

I enjoyed the gameplay. It was how I remembered Destiny when I played the OG one back when I was in the Marines and living in the Barracks. The story is a miss though. We talked about it in Episode 15 - Mission Impossible and I haven't thought about it other than that context. With Battlefield 6 having recently come out, I've enjoyed that a lot more, but that is more my speed. I initially had this as a "GET THIS GAME," but I think because the comedy and story telling is very situational, it needs to be a "Worth a Playthrough."

Parental Rating

People are exploding, there is language, and sociopathic people everywhere as well as a LOT of innuendo. I mean there is a whole quest line where a dude is trying to mate a worm. It's a big worm, like the movie Tremors, but still a worm. Neither of them would be happy I was playing this if I lived at the house.