Recent reviews by CCP115

The first act is great, because you can watch all the cutscenes and treat it like a movie. Once the game starts asking you to play, you realise how terrible the gameplay is. Narrative is interesting enough, world seems cool, and the dialogue is alright, but that's about it. This genuinely should have just been a movie.

Excellent boss rush game, tight controls, well designed fights, and a great soundtrack to boot.

The game's main story is a bit short, and the story is nothing particularly riveting. The combat is alright, it has some depth to it and it is pretty fun for the most part, but it can be a bit easy.

But by far the best reason to play this game is for the environments and the storytelling done through it. Reading journals is actually both funny and emotional, and it creates a really believable LA that was full of normal people, at least before the outbreak.

The maps are gorgeous, and incredibly detailed. The game also runs insanely well, Unreal Engine 4 was quite a beast. The environments are so intuitive to explore, and the game never has anything as egregious as yellow paint to guide you, the quest prompts and map design is good enough that I never (maybe once) needed a guide to figure out what to do next.

The Haus DLC is peak as far as this is concerned, with some of the most disgusting yet compelling setpieces I have seen in a game. When the game is (rarely) not trying to be kind of funny, and mostly failing, it can deliver some actually impactful story beats, and most of them lie in the Lost and Found quests and the Haus DLC.

I picked this game up for like 5 bucks on sale with both DLCs, and for that price, I can recommend it as a guilty little zombie romp.

Borderlands 1 is old, and it hasn't aged well. Enhanced Edition provides some much needed QoL, but it can also muddy what you might consider the original experience.

That being said, this is one of my favourite games of all time. The sheer atmosphere you feel walking around? It is dreary, it is hopeless, and it is dusty, but it is gorgeous. The music, the sounds, the blood, the screams of the psychos, it is just a delight to walk around and cause mayhem. Reading the flavour text of everything you pick up, choosing to walk instead of driving to explore every little shack and hut you see, this is a game that you can really get immersed in. And the loot? Don't even get me started.

Play this game slowly, and savour every minute of it, the series hasn't been the same since.

EDIT: Start of Dec 2025, the game is still good, but the lack of endgame content is a bit blatant here. 4th game in the series, and Gearbox still hasn't realised that a good chunk of the playerbase want endgame. Not a single raid boss on launch is kind of wack...

TLDR: 8/10. Borderlands 4 is good, dare I even say great, and a worthy successor to the series. The meat of the series is alive and well, guns are plentiful, builds are varied, and combat is just so addicting. I can't stop shooting things. The thrill of clearing an area of enemies, seeing a purple or orange drop, and immediately looking for another cluster of enemies to try this new gun on? That loop is very much alive an well.


The game is fun, but don't feel the need to buy it right now. Performance is not great, largely due to the fact that raytracing is always on (Lumen UE5) even on the lowest settings. Wait for 1 or 2 years and nab the GOTY on sale, the overarching plot here is honestly not very important to the series story as a whole so feel free to wait.
Also fair warning, this game is lowkey kind of hard when compared to BL2 or BL3, at least in the very early game. End game is about as tough as the others.



Combat & Loot: Fantastic. Shooting things feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing, and guns are interesting. Finding new loot is great, legendaries are reasonably paced, and the wackier gun combos are fed to you at an appropriate pace as you level up. If you don't care for story then this is still 100% a great looter shooter to jump into. Builds are also varied, I have barely scratched the surface and I am 50 hours in.
It's hard to emphasise just how good the core gameplay loop is, and words cannot describe it. Just know that while I cover a large chunk of negatives below, they pale in comparison to the sheer fun I have playing this game. I haven't been this horny to hop on a game since Borderlands 2, it's just that good.

Writing: When I say writing, I refer to everything written, meaning ECHO logs, main story, side missions, NPCs, dialogue, voice acting, and even flavour text for Legendaries and Quest Items. This is a great return to form, which is to say the writing is... fine. Borderlands has never had great writing, but this is closer to BL1 than any of the other titles. There are plenty of moments that try to be serious and heavy, and some of them actually land. There aren't many attempts at humour, but I would rather not laugh due to the lack of jokes, then not laugh because the jokes are genuinely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like in BL3.
Vault Hunter dialogue is plentiful. I picked Harlowe, and her voice actor does a great job making her endearing and engaging, and there are so many quips in combat and when exploring that just bring Harlowe to life.
The new characters are generally alright, shoutout to Levaine and Zadra, and my waifu Callis. I will say the main story was a bit limp, and I wish they did a lot more with Callis in particular, she genuinely might have been the most interesting character in the game, but oh well, the story is about on par with BL2, just without the great villian of course. But will anyone every live up to Handsome Jack? Probably not.


Performance: The elephant in the room. It's pretty bad for how the game looks. Gearbox clearly designed the game with 60fps in mind, either at 1080p or 1440p, but they forgot to look at the current state of gaming, where 120fps is honestly starting to become the norm. I mean ♥♥♥♥, even phones are 120Hz these days. I have a top of the line AMD PC, and I run High settings at around 80-100 fps. This is totally playable for a singleplayer game, but considering that BL4 doesn't really look any better than BL3, it's not a great look. The graphics settings are also largely just placebo, as the game has Lumen on all the time. For those that don't know, Lumen is software raytracing, and is built into Unreal Engine 5. Does it make the lighting in BL4 look good? Yes, but did BL3s baked lighting look bad? No, not really. What this means for you the player, is that turning graphics settings to low will improve FPS, but not by a lot, and Lumen + real time lighting will still be on. Good luck running BL4 on anything older than 2 years.
In 2 or 3 years I imagine the improved hardware available will largely make running BL4 at 120+ fps trivial, but in the current market, I would avoid playing this game unless you have a VERY good graphics card, and are fine to play with sub 120 fps. Also, expect to use an upscaler. FSR4 works fairly well, but you aren't running anything at native resolutions in 2025.

OST: Calling the OST bad would imply it's there. There just isn't a score to speak of at all, just some combat music which is kind of mid. A huge downgrade from the amazing soundscapes of BL1 and 2, and the actually good score of BL3.

UI + UX: How the ♥♥♥♥ does the UI get worse from game to game? I never though I'd miss the UI from BL3, which at launch I thought was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible compared to BL2. At this point just give me the text interface of BL1, whatever the UI designers at Gearbox are smoking is not doing them any favours.

Animations: I am nitpicking a bit here but some of the animations are a bit worse than 3, some guns look wonky when firing, and lots of NPCs still have that classic Borderlands jank. Not really a negative, I just like good animations.


The Open World: I enjoyed my time with BL4's open world, though I think this can vary from person to person. I have never played a Ubisoft formulaic open world game, like Far Cry 4, but I think that is kind of the vibe going on here. The number of collectables feels appropriate to me, world events are reasonably paced and actually have good loot, ECHO logs are interesting for lore nerds like me, and the other events that occur at just more reasons to engage with the great combat system. The map doesn't feel that dense or that hard to navigate, and it is nice to just wander through. However, I do kind of miss the sheer creativity of the old compartmentalised maps sometimes, so honestly if BL5 went back to smaller maps, I wouldn't mind. Overall the open world is pretty good, but I don't think it is a make or break feature of BL4.

QOL:
I will frame some of the major things here in a list that you may dislike about the game, be warned:
Good QOL Changes:
- NPCs run very fast now, escort missions are rare and when they occur they are painless
- Timed missions are pretty absent, no more mandatory ♥♥♥♥♥♥ car driving sections
- Pick up as Junk and Sell All Junk are one button press, so money is never an issue

Bad QOL Changes:
- Auto sell loot immediately on pickup is gone, not sure why they removed it
- The game does sometimes ask you to hold an item manually, meaning no grappling, driving, or mantling, and then it asks you to run a few hundred metres. I actually kind of enjoy the challenge, though I know many people will not
- Grappling hook only grapples preset points, nothing like Just Cause or Spiderman. Not that big of a deal
- No Minimap. I am enjoying the compass, it does force me to actually navigate the environment intentionally, though there should be an option for those that want it


Borderlands 4 is good. It doesn't run well, but if you are a super fan like me and want to get your dirty mitts on a fresh looter shooter experience, then I can wholeheartedly recommend it. For those who are more on the fence, feel free to wait. Assuming the DLCs and context expansions are as good as BL3s, then BL4 will age like fine wine.

This is the freshest, most creative, expressive shooter to come out in years. If you like Team Fortress 2, Dirty Bomb, or even Apex Legends, you cannot afford to skip this game. You owe it to yourself to try this.

It genuinely feels like it could have been a Portal 3. Excellent mod and well worth the time playing.

Short, sweet, and fun.

Fallout New Vegas is the third Fallout game as far as I'm concerned. This is a post-post-apocalypse game, where the plot revolves more and more around the Old World and what lessons should be taken and what should be left behind. A large focus of the plot is also on political systems, and things such as rebuilding, trading, and re inhabiting the wasteland an odd 200 years after the bombs dropped. Don't be fooled though, as the writers do an excellent job making an otherwise seemingly boring subject into an incredibly addictive experience. The only true downside to New Vegas is the gameplay, as the engine it runs on is old and beyond jank. Well worth the time and price, I mean 70 hours for a palythrough? Incredible. Get some community patches and quality of life mods before playing, and you will love this game.

This game can barely scrape a recommended. An unfortunate entry in the series, being almost a sidegrade to Serious Sam 3 overall. Sure the weapons are more varied, the enemy designs are better, and the soundtrack is decent, but the animations continue to be awful, and the increased emphasis on the side characters and plot detract from the overall game.

If you liked the previous Serious Sam games, you'll probably put up with the flaws and enjoy this one, but man, I wish we could get another classic Serious Sam. It hasn't been the same since SS3.