I will not-so-briefly vent out my frustrations in the newest series of my reviews, because it seems way too convenient to provide myself a moment of relief in doing so.

I spent two birthdays with this franchise as two completely different persons. Trust me, BL couldn't possibly have changed enough compared to me. Yet, I absolutely don't see that ''soul'' or whatever you want to call it that once made me care for the franchise. I may never articulate on that idea properly and it won't matter in the grand scheme of things. Franchises do move on and it's better to innovate bit by bit than completely getting stuck in a comfort zone even if it comes at expanse of some of your playerbase. I get it. But I also want to say: This game is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I hate to love Borderlands and I love to hate Borderlands.

Let's get the obvious one out of the way: There is no memory leak in BL4 but there is some BL4 in the memory leak. That said, I have played Arkham Knight at launch. I have a 5080. Frame Generation stutters and I still get crashes even after 3 updates or so. Arkham Knight was better, lads. Quite a statement to make.

The game is also plagued by a whole plethora of bugs to choose from. The most annoying ones are those that softlock you (ally AI freezing, enemies vanishing out of the map, and missions not progressing as a result). The mission load for the Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode (UVHM) requires you to play from start to finish; if you get a crash or encounter a gamebreaking bug (both of which happened to me), you lose all your progression. It really tests your patience again and again.

The core looter-shooter experience has seen some questionable changes. You don't get a legendary drop every five minutes, which is good. In return, you get a bunch of blue and purple items that eventually drive you to not even bother checking them out (or even selling them). Give credit where it's due, they can carry you through a bunch of levels. However, most of the legendaries suck, and you don't get specific rewards for quests; instead, you get reward chests with a random weapon inside. How this helps a sp/co-op PvE game and why is it so hard to give unique rewards as in, yk, recognizing your player's efforts?

This makes farming bosses a necessity (which is something prolly wanted by Gearbox), which is funny because waiting for SHIFT keys is still far more beneficial. That said, there's nothing more insulting than getting a bunch of useless ♥♥♥♥ from a red chest after completing a vault. Furthermore, world bosses will despawn immediately if you play (and touch) too close to their bubbles. Why is that?

Endgame is lacking. UVHM is boring. You repeat selected missions and bosses (from open-world activities) to complete challenges. They are relatively easy, and things get stale fast. There is no proper endgame content besides weekly challenges, which essentially recycle the UVHM content. No, thanks.

There are only three (primordial) Vaults, and all of them are small arena encounters without anything barely exciting. That's a joke. The firmware transfer mechanic adds a fun layer to build-crafting, but I dislike that it's mostly an endgame feature. This game has a habit of taking the worst out of Destiny 2 but end up ignoring the best parts.

The move to a true open world is my biggest ache. Older games had smaller, more instanced slates. I recognize there was too much dead time in BL3, some consecutive driving sections and dead zones in each game yet each section in previous games felt more hand-crafted. Here, you'll be marking more and more objectives as you dreadfully stare at your screen.

The new vehicle system, akin to Destiny 2's sparrows, is welcome, and I'd prefer calling them anytime over going to Catch-A-Ride spots. However, they struggle with BL4's geometry. The Terminus Range is particularly unsuitable. The GPS routing can also be annoying, often failing to plot a reliable path especially if it leads to an interior area, you'll need to map them out yourself. It's what happens once you have a map with lots of interior and elevation but visualize it in only one layer...
I particularly love Dominion and would have preferred if the whole game was like that.

On the positive side, the movement is the best the franchise has ever been. It's fluid, with great additions like grabbing stuff with the grapple to throw at enemies and gliding mid-air to pop headshots. It's also great how the Vault Hunters now interact with characters and join conversations.

The story has a solid foundation. It plays like Far Cry 5, where you take on three different opponents and then the Timekeeper himself. However, the last act feels rushed, and I don't think the Timekeeper (or by extension Arjay ) ever reaches their full potential. The visuals for their fights were good, but they were trivially easy and forgettable. All other bosses (minus perhaps the Vile Lector) were pretty much ♥♥♥♥♥♥, including the characters themselves.

The introductions of the characters are weak. I can easily name 15 characters from Borderlands 2 in a minute and I don't think BL2 was a fluke like some. You can't coincidentally create an entire iconic cast. In BL4, I don't really care who Zadra is (she makes a handful of appearances anyway) or even Rush, whom people seem to like. The Vault Hunters themselves are a mixed bag. Rafa is fun-ish but a generic Spanish dude. Vex is a likable character and far better than Amara, but she's not on Zane's level. Her abilities were resourceful, but not the engagement level I'd expect from a Siren. I also hate how Gearbox failed the recognize how BL3 was memed as Dialogue: The Game and kept their characters yapping and refusing to give your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ objective.

The tone has surely overcorrected from BL3. I'll take the more serious tone over what BL3 was, sure, but even the character introduction cutscenes lost their satirical tone. There are some clever jokes, but the flavour feels missing.

A few other points stick out:

No "The Heavy" song and no memorable OST at all, especially compared to tracks from BL2.
No dueling & trading for co-op.
Each gun has to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nowadays: shotgun-snipers, autorifle-shotguns, etc. Some will gel with your playstyle and be mechanically sound, but many have uninteresting designs, especially in visuals. I miss Jakobs' junker designs too.
Skills often outpower guns, and I can't tell if that's intended.
The visual design no longer represents a performance-friendly/low-end rig philosophy. You get wholesale ray tracing & post processing for almost no visual gain.
The faction side quest chains have interesting premises but are weak (ends up being too short). Claptrap's missions are ridiculous, and the gameplay during them is tedious.
Blackmarket is the Xur at home (or open world, so to speak). I have no clue why it was required and it's not a fixed spot. You don't need to imitate every unnecessary ♥♥♥♥ to keep your players log in weekly if you can't give them simple reasons to do so.

In the end, BL4 feels like a filler that sets up the ever-coming "Great War." At some point, I felt I was too primed to hate it because it fundamentally clashed with my expectations. I'll admit the gunplay is a beast in its own league, but I fear it will slowly decline into irrelevancy or try to stay relevant with expansions (and will eventually get bundled), which is frustrating as it's the cycle we've been going through the past decade. No franchise should need expansions for solid endgame content.

I don't know what I'll remember from BL4. Selective memory and all. I wonder what will become of it once the honeymoon phase ends, which was already quite rough, everything considered. It's hard to not take BL4 as another stepping stone in the franchise and I got burned out of it.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Please take a moment to check out my curator for more in-depth reviews

It’s often difficult to articulate the cyclical experiences you go through in games. The feeling is even stranger when you find yourself perched on the edge of giving one a grudging respect. That's where I land with The Beast (DLTB). The returning Kyle Crane lived long enough to not stay human but become a beast, I don't know what I'll become if I play another DL like this.

I’m giving it a 'respect' recommendation, largely because of its history. While the €60 tag is daring for a game of this scale, it's mostly given away for free to Dying Light 2: Ultimate owners, a move I respect. As a spin-off based on a previous expansion, it gets some leeway. It would have been easy to dismiss it outright, but it at least runs decently. Jumping from the mess of BL4 to DLTB brought on an "Oh right, more open-world shenanigans" moment, but at least Techland knows how to make the most of the format. Well, at least they did, sometime ago.

I never truly cared for DL1, though I acknowledged its massive leap over Dead Island. Conversely, I’m in the apparent niche that genuinely likes DL2, warts and all. DLTB feels like a step back from the sequel's carefully curated, decision-altered cityscape. I guess I just have a thing for big, vertical cities. That said, I recognize that smaller landscapes can work wisely, allowing for better free-flowing parkour, as seen in WD2's San Francisco and obviously DL1's Harran.

While Castor Woods is beautiful —not only in optics but in its craft, with dense urban areas with those tity European streets and wider rural zones— the lack of fast travel irritated me. The game offers a car, and the driving is miles better than DL1, but it's still useless. Constant management (eased by perks, but not enough) and streets crowded with zombies in tight areas make it more trouble than it's worth (plus some slight geometry issues). The parkour is still a beast (intended to keep the puns), freed from the tyranny of a stamina bar. However, it grows annoying when combat, which is all about stamina management, devolves into getting grabbed and stun-locked by zombies every few seconds for a tedious QTE. My position is clear: get rid of it. It's bollocks.

Speaking of basics, this reminds me why I don't remember Dying Light fondly. DL1, and by extension DLTB, has a gun problem. It makes an utter fool of its human enemies. The gunplay is serviceable, but you’ll constantly find melee-wielding maniacs charging you, only to be deleted with a single shot. Even armored foes are a paltry 2-3 bullet affair, and ammo is so plentiful you’ll never feel the pinch. I thought DLTB might be more scarce, but it’s not nearly enough to stop me from abusing my arsenal. However, the visuals of combat (whether against humans or zombies) remain visceral, and the visual feedback is great. You can see skin peeling off and intestines spilling from your opponents.

Melee is almost always better against zombies, so you could call that a balance. The bosses are somewhat unique but none are true standouts; their patterns are quickly sussed out. One particular low point is a "pseudo-skill check" boss that locks your inventory, gives you a pre-determined weapon and three bandages, and has about three moves. It’s painfully boring and feels completely out of place for the supposed scale of the fight it is Aiden . And to those sickos who wanted a boss fight out of Rais. Here! You have one with Baron. You tag team the poor guy and spray bullet on him as if he is a Division boss. But it surprisingly works. Even if it's absurd, wish it was the only thing that was absurd.

I think some of my frustration stems from the eternal glazing that accompanies anything with a hint of "goated" or "peak." I don't know what people are smoking, but if someone brought me this script, I'd slap their teeth out. Kyle Crane is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tool, whose personality peaks at a bad sarcastic quip (and he is a bad one at that). Every other character is utterly forgettable, failing to reach the low bar set by DL1's Jade. You get betrayal after betrayal with no satisfying retribution, leaving Kyle as a perpetually victimized protagonist driven by the most basic of vengeances. The antagonist is a generic "mad control-freak," saved only by a final ''Last Supper'' scene so serious and unhinged that I burst out laughing. DLTB accidentally stumbles into so-bad-it's-good territory. I wonder if Techland too knows they create some of the most uninteresting characters so they kill them off in a quick succession but seriously both DL and DL2 had some gravitas meanwhile I cannot take DLTB seriously despite it being overly melodramatic. Hell, the game ends up with GRE showing up and Crane goes: ''You? Are you fkn kidding me?''. Yeah Kyle, way to break the fourth wall! My feelings exactly!
Also, a note to my dearest Techland: you can't create a grandiose villain by constantly telling us how menacing he is. Big Bad Baron. I get it.

There's a mission set in a mental asylum, a fantastic setting. A character you meet can control zombies through telepathy (and telepaths are some hippies). There's a constant, creepy whispering, akin to the psy-emissions in STALKER, which was great... until I realized it was broad daylight and the whole thing was a quick, poorly designed, Outlast-lite jaunt with no payoff other than a one minute escape out of the asylum to initiate another ''chase'' which I've been dodging for past 15 hours. And no, you don't need to complete it. Just die and you'll get respawned elsewhere, free of the chase. Maybe we'll get telepathy powers in the sequel, but here it's just a poor gimmick from a developer I know is capable of curated brilliance. I remember the tower missions from both previous games vividly; DLTB has no mission worth remembering. Its open-world mechanics often clash with its mission design too. Checkpoints are incoherent: sometimes you keep your resources, other times they're gone. Sometimes you respawn mid-mission, other times in a safe house. Sometimes cleared areas stay clear, other times enemies respawn.

It's also a shame there's zero reason to play at night. In DL1, Volatiles dropped unique glands; in DL2, they drop inhibitors and gear. In DLTB, they are still terrifyingly strong, but they don't drop anything worthwhile. The game's trademark tagline is "Good night, and good luck," yet I found myself sleeping through the nights! It never even forces you into a proper night mission.

Missions are level-gated, but you can easily tackle them while being one or two levels under. The side activities are bland, with the returning Dark Zones feeling like a ghost of their DL2 selves that is mostly on-rails stealth which is very boring. You get all your beast skills from the main story, making the lack of a hidden super-boss feel like a missed no-brainer. The side missions are whatever, and while I appreciated the simple pleasure of unlocking safe houses, the transformer stations are just a watered-down version of DL2's electrical stations.

Crane doesn't forget his capabilities from DL1 so it's good to see that once in a while. BUT! Once again you get grappling through after the first half, unnecessary. You get to decide when to trigger your beast mode after the first half, unnecessary. Valuables are also far too common to sell and you rarely find something to buy in return. So, as far as I am concerned Techland can keep listening to feedback as DLTB is still riddled with weird decisions that denies the agency and importance of the player.

I'm still curious about what a true DL 3 will look like (this ain't it, quit the thoughts), but I can feel the ice wearing thin, and I worry it's nearing its breaking point. However, I must acknowledge that DLTB's cramped design inherently constrains the room for maneuver.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Please take a moment to check out my curator for more in-depth reviews