Borderlands 4: A Loot Shooter’s Midlife Crisis

“Welcome back, Vault Hunters!” croons the game, as if we hadn’t already been Stockholm Syndromed by three sequels, a pre-sequel, and enough DLC to choke a Skag. Borderlands 4 doesn’t just arrive; it staggers into the room like a drunk uncle with a duffel bag full of guns and trauma, daring you to pretend you’re still impressed.

The world is bigger, uglier, and more grotesquely neon than ever. The NPCs still shout at you with the fervor of coked-up Twitch streamers, vomiting memes that were outdated when Vine died. The humor? Imagine a group of writers locked in a room, forced to subsist on expired energy drinks and Rick and Morty reruns until one of them snapped, and then used that breakdown as the final script.

The loot system? Infinite guns, infinite disappointment. Yes, you’ll find a rifle that shoots explosive clown shoes while screaming your ex’s name, but you’ll scrap it 15 minutes later because it’s two levels under. The “innovation” is a new currency, because Gearbox knows that nothing gets your dopamine receptors twitching like more grinding.

Narratively, the game takes you on a journey that could generously be described as “a Mad Max parody, written by someone who’s never seen Mad Max but has read the Wikipedia summary while blackout drunk.” Your choices matter about as much as a claptrap unit’s feelings, and the villains once again mistake loudness for depth. And yet – you’ll keep playing. Because that’s the Borderlands promise: not satisfaction, but compulsion. The real loot isn’t the guns, or the XP, or even the endgame grind. It’s your time, siphoned away in neon spurts until you realize the punchline isn’t in the game at all. The punchline is you.

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