Return to Form? More Like Return to the Crash Screen.
5 start review lie. I got scammed.
PS5.
Whoever said this “return to form” must’ve been paid to chill.
Loaded the game with my wife, hoping for that old Borderlands magic after getting burned by Tiny Tina’s Wonderland (the $120 “fantasy scam”). This time, I played it safe — standard edition, $70. Game downloaded fine. Fired it up. Crash.
Okay, good start.
Second try — made it to the Gearbox logo, main menu appears, crash.
Third time’s the charm? Made it to character select. Yay.
Now the fun part: picking which disappointment to play.
Vex — the “not-a-siren” siren. Feels like a recycled Moze design with a Mordecai/FL4K combat mix. Wife picked her because she thought she was a siren. Spoiler: she’s not.
Rafa — looks like a discount Salvador you’d find on Temu. The Spanish voice lines were so bad I started regretting ever learning Spanish. Switched character just to stay sane.
Ammon — imagine a melee-focused version of Krieg, but with half the personality and twice the bugs. His “rage mode” feels pointless when enemies just hover out of reach.
Hallowed — the one who should’ve been the real siren. But nah, Gearbox said “we already had a dark skin siren, Amara.” So instead, we get diaper pants and a secondary outfit that looks like she dumpster-dived through Promethea.
I wanted to quit. My wife did quit. But I powered through this disaster out of pure stubbornness — and pity from her.
Gameplay?
Absolute mediocrity. The gunplay feels weightless, like every weapon was designed by AI on a coffee break. Enemies are dull bullet sponges, the loot lacks excitement, and even the explosions sound tired. When your looter-shooter can’t make shooting or looting fun, you’ve failed the assignment.
And the leveling system — easily one of the worst I’ve seen. Leveling up feels like punishment. If you want to feel powerful, stay level one. The higher you go, the weaker and buggier everything becomes. The skill trees are useless; most upgrades either do nothing noticeable or make your character worse. I spent most of the game sitting on six or seven unspent skill points because the abilities were worthless — or, even better, spending them would crash the game. That’s not progress, that’s a trap.
Playing co-op somehow makes it worse — quests bug out, progress resets, and we spent more time reloading saves than shooting anything.
The writing? Dead. The humor? Forced. The story? Forgettable. The side missions? I couldn’t tell you what they were ten minutes after finishing them.
Now, to be fair — there is one thing that earned this game its single star: you can redo monster fights and teleport back without restarting the entire game. It’s a small mercy, but after everything else, it feels like finding a clean glass of water in a landfill.
After finishing this mess, I realized: I wasn’t playing for fun. I was playing out of obligation.
Gearbox, it’s time to clean house. Hire writers who care, designers who innovate, and someone who remembers why Borderlands 2 was special. Because right now, this franchise isn’t just on life support — it’s flatlined.
We’re done.