Borderlands 4 finally dropped on Steam—and immediately faceplanted into a pit of crashes, regret, and disbelief.

But before we dive into the disaster zone, let’s talk about what this was supposed to be. This is the fourth mainline entry in one of the most iconic looter shooters of all time. A series that helped shape the genre.

Borderlands didn’t just ride the coattails of Diablo and Doom—it welded them together, painted it neon, and gave it a gun that screams insults when it fires. And for better or worse, Borderlands 4 doubles down on that formula.

You crash-land on a brand-new planet called Kairos as one of four new Vault Hunters—Vex, Rafa, Amon, or Harlowe—each equipped with customizable Action Skills and full-blown movement tech like grappling hooks and air dashes. The main villain this time is the Timekeeper, a tyrant obsessed with enforcing a rigid, “perfect” Order. Naturally, things go sideways. Vaults open. Reality bends. Mayhem ensues. You know the drill.

From a distance, the game looks good. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, and it shows. The colours are vibrant. Environments have real scale. The characters are sharp and stylized in that classic Borderlands way, but now with better lighting and more detail. Accessibility options are solid: subtitle scaling, UI contrast tweaks, camera shake toggles, motion blur off-switches—the works.

It supports both stereo and surround sound, complete with separate volume sliders for voice, music, effects, and ambient noise.

Gamepad support is native for Xbox and PlayStation controllers, and the mouse/keyboard controls apparently feel tight out of the box.

You can save anytime. Difficulty is adjustable. Cross-play is enabled on day one. Online co-op is available for up to four players. On paper, it’s exactly what a modern sequel should be.

And critics seem to agree: Destructoid handed it a 9/10. IGN gave it an 8.5. GameSpot praised its “refined systems and confident pacing.”

So what the hell went wrong?

Let’s start with the obvious: Day-one DLC. A full-price game launching with a Deluxe Upgrade and Season Pass already on the shelf—bringing the total price to C$140.96 if you want all the DLC. The "Super Deluxe Version", meanwhile, costs C$172.99. The moment you boot up, you're already being upsold. That’s never a good sign.

Then there’s the DRM. Denuvo is included, and while that might not surprise anyone, it’s still infuriating. This is a game that demands serious hardware, yet it ships with anti-piracy software that’s notorious for throttling performance. That alone would be frustrating. But that’s not even the worst part.

Crashes are rampant. People are reporting failure to boot. Game freezes. Memory leaks. Stuttering on rigs that should crush this game.

We’re talking RTX 3090s, 64GB RAM, NVMe SSDs—and they’re barely hitting 30fps. Players with Ryzen 7s and i7-12700s are having trouble maintaining consistent frames even at 1080p. The in-game benchmark is broken for some. For others, the main menu won’t even load. One player noted the game bricked their shader cache. Another had to force shutdown their system three times just to get past the splash screen.

This is starting to look like another UE5 casualty. Once again, a dev studio has built a game that looks great in marketing reels but runs like wet cardboard on the machines people actually use.

The minimum listed requirement is “an 8-core or equivalent CPU,” which is so vague it’s borderline meaningless. Even players who exceed that spec by a mile are finding the game borderline unplayable. Optimization just wasn’t done. Or worse—it was knowingly sacrificed for release.

At time of writing, Borderlands 4 has a 35% positive rating on Steam. That’s based on 577 reviews. And for a AAA title with this level of hype and legacy, that’s catastrophic. This isn’t a case of “mixed reception.” This is a literal failure to launch. An outright rejection by the player base. And if things aren’t patched fast, this could be the biggest AAA flameout of 2025.

Which, honestly, is kind of poetic considering the Borderlands movie was one of the biggest box office disasters of 2024. This franchise is in a freefall.

And it’s hard not to look at the recent Gearbox/Embracer/2K handoff and wonder if that had anything to do with it. Internal instability. A rushed timeline. Too many executives and not enough engineers. A game built for investors, not players.

I own the first three Borderlands games. Played them all. Laughed at the jokes. Farmed the legendaries. Had a good time. But this? Looks like a hollow impersonation of its former self.

And unless something changes fast, I’ll be skipping this one.

But hey—if you want to YOLO through the misery, the base game is C$89.99 on Steam. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1285190/Borderlands_4/

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