Borderlands 4 leaves Pandora behind and locks the whole story to Kairos, a once-hidden planet controlled by the Timekeeper through implants, surveillance, and a synthetic army called The Order. Your job as a new Vault Hunter is to tear that control system apart, region by region, while rallying locals who’ve been kept in check for years.

The structure shifts from traditional hub-and-corridor maps to massive, interconnected zones with dynamic weather and minimal loading. You’re not just clearing one arena at a time — you’re pushing through layered spaces, climbing, gliding, grappling, and chaining traversal into combat entries. A compass-based HUD replaces the old minimap to support vertical, multi-level spaces without turning your screen into UI soup.

On the build side, the Licensed Parts system is the headline change. Weapon manufacturers still have their identities, but now certain traits can appear on guns from other brands — sticky Torgue-style explosives on rapid-fire rifles, ricochet effects on non-Jakobs weapons, and other cross-breed setups. High-end loot drops less often, but when it does, it’s tied to activities, silos, world events, and endgame systems instead of mindless vending machine spam.

The four new Vault Hunters — Vex, Rafa, Amon, and Harlowe — are built around deeper skill trees, movement options, and synergies. Expanded branches, traits, and capstones let you create much more specific builds, and co-op now supports per-player difficulty so everyone can push at their own level without wrecking the squad’s experience. Endgame leans into modes, weekly Wildcards, and a reworked Ultimate Vault Hunter layer instead of just asking you to replay the campaign again.

In the Vault, Borderlands 4 is the “evolution” entry: still loud, still absurd, but more confident in its systems. It’s the one you point to when you want to show how the looter-shooter idea that started in 2009 finally grew up without losing the mayhem at its core.