Borderlands 4 gameplay trailer sure does look like a Borderlands game (and I'm OK with that)

Borderlands 4 - Official First Look - YouTube Borderlands 4 - Official First Look - YouTube
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There are reasons to be cautious about Borderlands 4. Even if we forget about the execrable Borderlands movie for a second, since it's not like Eli Roth's going to be involved with the next game, Borderlands 3 was underwhelming and New Tales from the Borderlands didn't win folks back. But between Tiny Tina's Wonderlands and the surprisingly great DLC for Borderlands 3, there are reasons to be excited as well. That's where I'm at anyway, standing right between caution and excitement. On the border, as it were.

And now, direct from Geoffrey's Big Game Bonanza, comes new footage of Borderlands 4 and it looks… pretty decent, actually? There's a big battle going on between cyborg bandits and aliens—maybe the eridians the series has been teasing since forever—and a variety of locations that look a tiny bit more high-tech than we're used to seeing from Borderlands. But mostly, it's what you'd expect to see from Borderlands 4, right down to the color-coded loot.

There's a super quick look at the four new Vault Hunters we'll be playing, one of whom has laser swords, and a new vehicle that is literally just a pod racer right out of The Phantom Menace. I guess I would like to run over bandits in a pod racer. There's a laser grappling hook, and Claptrap is back too because of course he is.

According to the store page description we can expert "billions of wild and deadly weapons" and the ability to "Fight solo or in co-op with up to three other players". Sure sounds like a Borderlands game.

Borderlands 4 is scheduled for release in 2025 and will be available on Steam and Epic.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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