Hands on with Borderlands 4 for Switch 2 - Preview

PAX Australia 2025 has kicked off and one of the games that is playable at the Nintendo booth is Borderlands 4, which I believe makes this the first time the game has been seen on the Switch 2 in public. With the games recent delay, I had some concerns going in that the game would not be that fun to play, or it would be rough. I was mostly right, but it was still fun.

The section of the game that was playable was actual a vault boss, so there was no chance to explore the open world, which is a letdown. This is primarily due to how much I wanted to see how the vast open worlds of Kairos faired on Switch 2. Now normally in the game, you need to make your way to the vault, which means you have time to understand your weapons and stats, this was not the case here, so I went in blind. I was able to pick any of the four Vault Hunters, so I stuck with Vex, as I knew her abilities and with that it was time to test my might.

The main things I was looking for from the Switch 2 version was how smooth it was and how the visuals faired, because lets face it on Nintendo Switch, the visuals are the biggest impact to the series. Now I am not a graphics person, games offer everything from photorealistic to abstract and everything in between, so my main focus was performance. Now I did not have any tools to count frames or such, not that I do that anyway, but I was honestly impressed with how smooth the game was playing. If it was running at 30fps or 60fps, I could not tell you, but it was smooth and I had no problems with that. The area that I was in, was limited in size, but the game did spawn a fairly consistent pace of enemies for me to fight and I never noticed any slowdown or chug when that happened.

When I was shooting enemies, swapping guns, summoning my spectral beast or any other combination of actions, the game did well. Now of course, this is in a small section of the game with draw distances that are locked off. So I fully expect that the world itself will have a number of issues, either more concessions on draw distances or more items to break up the open space. With the Vault itself, apart from trying to adjust to the controls, I had no issues with the game and how it played.

Now, we will need to address the games visuals, because there is clearly a lot going on here. The games visual style is locked in, there is no changing that and it would not be Borderlands without it. On Nintendo Switch, the series visual style helped it out quite a bit, but on Nintendo Switch 2, the extra processing power should mean that things look better. Right now, I don’t think that is the case, the game does not look bad, but you can see a lot of artifacting, and issues with explosions and other effects, looking weird. Now, this is an in-development build so it is not the final release and with the games recent delay, there is no telling when this build was locked down. But while I am always forgiving of these games when they are still in development, this is one that should honestly look better.

Right now, Borderlands 4 on Nintendo Switch 2 plays fine, but looks rough, but with the developers having more time, I fully expect them to be able to get things sorted right. If you are like me and waiting for this version of the game to release, just temper those expectations.