Borderlands 4 Complete Guide: 4 Traversal Abilities Fix the Series — Except the One Critics Call “Tacked On”

Vex grapples to a ledge, holds the glide, and drifts down onto a Ripper camp before anyone below has looked up. That single move — grapple into glide — is the clearest evidence that Borderlands 4’s movement overhaul is a real design shift, not a marketing bullet point. Every reviewer who spent real time with the game agrees the traversal kit is a genuine leap over earlier entries: TheGamer’s review states there’s simply “no comparison to prior entries” once you’ve used it, one reason the outlet scored the game 9/10 [5]. DualShockers, less generous overall, still singles out the new dash for letting you “avoid damage in situations that would have otherwise thrown you into Fight for Your Life mode” — an escape option that didn’t functionally exist before [6].

This hub covers the complete movement system: what each ability does, how they chain together, which Vault Hunter moves best, and — honestly — the one piece of the kit that a chunk of the critical press thinks Gearbox never finished. Future Switchblade Gaming guides will dig deeper into class-specific mobility builds and per-boss grapple tactics; this is the one page that covers all of it at once.

Verified against Patch 1.9 (July 30, 2026). Grapple point placement, glide stamina values, and specific interactions get adjusted in most major updates — check the official update notes before treating any number here as permanent.

Why Verticality Was the Series’ Actual Problem

Borderlands 3 already added mantling and sliding — both return unchanged in Borderlands 4 [9] — but neither gave a Vault Hunter a reason to leave the ground mid-fight. Combat across the first three games happened on a flat plane: you strafed, you took cover, you occasionally climbed a ladder. Grapple, glide, dash, and double jump are the first mechanics in the series built specifically to make the vertical axis part of a firefight, not just a way to reach a loot chest.

That’s the honest version of “fixes the series’ biggest flaw”: it isn’t that Borderlands 1 through 3 were broken, it’s that four games in a row solved gunplay and loot without ever solving movement, and reviewers now treat that specific gap as closed [5][6].

The Five-Move Traversal Kit: What Actually Changed

Borderlands 4 gives every Vault Hunter the same base traversal kit, on top of whichever Action Skills their class uses. None of it existed in this form in Borderlands 3 [1].

The table’s single biggest takeaway: every move except mantling is something you actively trigger, and almost all of them are designed to feed into each other rather than work alone [9].

Quick Start: Your First Hour With the New Movement

Do these seven things before you form an opinion on whether the overhaul works:

1. Watch for ECHO-4’s on-screen markers — grapple points show up highlighted in green alongside ladders and interactable switches, so you’re never guessing where the kit applies [10].
2. Remember the ground-dash split: on foot, dash only goes sideways or backward. If you want to dash forward, jump first.
3. Practice the double-tap for double jump, then hold the jump button again mid-air to catch the glider — the timing window is generous, but it’s a genuinely different input from a single jump.
4. Try a slide into a jump into a glide on flat, open ground once, just to feel how much distance the chain covers compared to sprinting [10].
5. Grapple to the nearest marked point and hold glide the instant you detach — that’s the traversal loop the entire kit is built around.
6. Watch the glide stamina bar the first few times you use it. First-time players consistently underestimate how fast it drains, and running out mid-air over a drop is one of the most common early, avoidable deaths in the game.
7. Don’t judge the grapple hook on its combat usefulness alone yet — as the next section covers, that’s exactly where critics split.

The Split Verdict: Is the Grapple Actually “Tacked On”?

Glide, dash, double jump, and mantling draw close to universal praise. The grapple hook is where the critical consensus breaks in half, and it’s worth reading both sides before deciding for yourself.

The case for it: TheGamer’s review calls the full traversal suite the best the series has ever played, awarding the game a 9/10 overall and singling out how the kit keeps combat “moving, moving, moving at all times” [5]. Space4Games’ hands-on grapple guide agrees it has a real learning curve — “pulling objects, throwing them and shooting mid-air feels tricky” at first — but treats that as a skill ceiling worth climbing, since a mastered grapple lets you expose boss weak points from behind and clear grouped enemies by hurling explosive barrels [11].

The case against it: DualShockers’ review calls the grapple “the biggest disappointment” of the whole kit, writing that it “really felt like it was tacked on midway through development” [6]. Critic Jim Sterling goes further in a dedicated review, arguing Gearbox “couldn’t think of a single creative use” for the hook beyond scattered preset points, and that its main job in practice is ferrying quest objects between two spots — fetch-quest busywork dressed up as a traversal tool. Sterling’s specific comparison: “Bulletstorm did a dozen ways better back in 2011” [7].

Neither side is wrong, because they’re grading different things. As an exploration and combat-repositioning tool layered onto an already-strong kit, the grapple earns its keep. As the signature new mechanic Gearbox built an entire marketing beat around, it hasn’t produced the one showcase encounter that would settle the argument — and a year of patches, covered further down, hasn’t added one either.

The wider numbers back up a genuine critic/player gap, not just a grapple-specific one: Metacritic’s aggregate sits at 81 (“Generally Favorable”) from critics, against a 4.8 user score (“Generally Unfavorable”) from players, with 47 percent of user ratings citing performance issues and gameplay mechanics [4]. Movement isn’t the only source of that split — launch-window optimization problems get named constantly too [3] — but it’s a useful reminder that a strong critic consensus on the traversal kit doesn’t mean every player experienced it the same way.

Chaining Movement for Combat: A Decision Tree

The kit rewards combining moves, not using them in isolation [9][10]. Use this to decide fast, mid-fight:

• Airborne, enemies closing in below: hold glide immediately to gain height and distance rather than falling straight back into the fight.
• Grounded, need to close a gap fast: slide first to build momentum, then jump and glide to stretch the distance — covers noticeably more ground than sprinting alone.
• A marked grapple point is ahead: grapple to it, then hold glide the instant you detach instead of letting momentum drop — this chain covers the most ground of any combo in the kit.
• Taking fire in the open with no cover: dash sideways or backward on the ground, or in any direction if you’re already airborne, to break the enemy’s angle before it turns into a Fight for Your Life situation.

Gearbox has kept tuning the reliability of this chaining rather than leaving it alone: the May 28, 2026 update specifically fixed jumping and dashing so they “work exactly how you expect, even if you change your crouch settings” — confirmation that input conflicts were a real, patched problem, not a player-error myth [1].

The chain-first design also explains why the grapple’s critics and defenders are both right about different fights. In an open arena with multiple enemies and no marked grapple point, the kit still gives you glide, dash, and double jump to work with — plenty to reposition around. The complaint is narrower than “the grapple is bad”: it’s that Gearbox never built an encounter that specifically requires the grapple’s swing-and-reposition loop, the way a traversal-focused game leans on its own signature movement tool. Everything else in the kit gets used constantly by design; the grapple gets used only where the map happens to place a point.

The Glide Pack Upgrades Most Guides Don’t Connect to the Kit

Three optional bosses called Primordial Guardians each drop a permanent Glide Pack upgrade the first time you beat them, and stacking all three changes how the entire traversal kit feels [8]:

This matters for the split-verdict debate above: a lot of the “the kit feels shallow” criticism was written by reviewers working the base, un-upgraded Glide Pack against launch deadlines. Farm these three vaults before you finalize an opinion on how far the traversal kit can actually take you — Radix’s 50 percent stamina-usage cut in particular changes the math on every chain in the table above.

Which Vault Hunter Moves Best? Class Notes

The base traversal kit is identical across all four Vault Hunters. Only one of them has a passive that stacks a real bonus on top of it — the other three lean on their Action Skills for combat mobility instead, and it would be inaccurate to imply otherwise [2][12].

Practically: if pure traversal speed matters to your build, Vex is the only class with a mechanical reason to pick her for it. Everyone else moves at the same baseline and differentiates through combat style, not mobility.

Player-Type Priorities: What to Focus On First

How This Stacks Up Against the Rest of the Genre Right Now

Borderlands 4’s newly vertical combat space is worth weighing against where the rest of the genre is pulling players’ attention this year. Extraction shooters take the opposite approach to risk: in ARC Raiders, every extra second spent airborne or off the ground is a second closer to a rival squad catching you exposed and wiping your entire loadout — there’s no respawn-and-retry safety net softening the vertical repositioning Borderlands 4 rewards freely. If you’re deciding between the two, that risk-profile difference matters more than which game has the better grapple.

On the pure co-op side, readers weighing Borderlands 4 against other squad shooters should also check 15 Games Like Helldivers 2 Ranked by Co-op Loop Quality. Borderlands 4’s movement overhaul is one of several answers the genre has given this year to the same problem: making traversal feel as good as the guns do.

The distinction matters for how you should actually play the grapple and glide, not just which game to buy. A looter-shooter’s forgiving death penalty is exactly why Borderlands 4 can afford to let its grapple whiff on combat design and still feel fine day to day — the cost of a bad grapple attempt is a few wasted seconds, not a wiped extraction run. That’s a genuinely different design contract than the genre-neighbors above, and it’s worth keeping in mind before comparing Borderlands 4’s traversal directly against a game built around higher stakes for the same kind of vertical movement.

Version Note: What’s Still Being Patched

Movement in Borderlands 4 has not been static since launch. Confirmed changes across four major 2026 updates [1]:

• April 30 (v1.6): enemy AI gained a new Jet-Dash attack, meaning the game’s own mobility arms race extends to what you’re fighting, not just how you move.
• May 28 (v1.7): grapple points restored in Bloodstained Hollow and a new one added in the Heart of the Mountain “for smoother movement through the map”; jump and dash inputs fixed to work correctly regardless of crouch settings.
• June 25 (v1.8): a jump-pad interaction fix for C4SH’s Cross-Fire ability, and a Story Pack 1 jump-pad reliability fix on a specific mission.
• July 30 (v1.9): a slide-traversal smoothness fix in the Research Center B-0451 area.

None of the four patches added new combat design around the grapple specifically — the fixes are about placement and reliability, not the “creative use” gap critics flagged at launch. If that’s your main hesitation about the kit, a year of patches hasn’t resolved it yet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the grapple hook actually worth using in Borderlands 4?
Yes for exploration, loot, and repositioning against a single target — no, if you’re expecting the signature combat mechanic the marketing implied. Both are true at once, which is exactly why reviewers split on it [6][7].

What’s the single best movement combo to learn first?
Grapple into glide. It works on any marked grapple point in the game from the start, unlike the slide-jump-glide chain, which is a ground-only substitute for when no grapple point exists nearby.

Does every Vault Hunter move at the same speed?
No. Vex is the only one with a passive movement-speed bonus (“Hasty Friends,” +5% while her minion is active) [12]. That’s a real reason to consider her if a build leans on repositioning, not just flavor text.

Has Gearbox actually fixed the grapple’s biggest complaint since launch?
Partly. Four major updates have added and restored grapple points and fixed input conflicts, which is a genuine reliability improvement. None of them added a new combat encounter or mechanic built specifically around the hook, so the “no creative use” criticism from launch reviews stands unresolved a year later [1][7].

How does this compare to Borderlands 3’s movement?
Mantling and sliding both carry over unchanged from Borderlands 3 [9] — Borderlands 4 doesn’t replace them, it adds grapple, glide, dash, and double jump on top. That’s the actual scope of the “overhaul”: four new moves layered onto two that already worked, not a rebuild of traversal from scratch.

Sources

1. 2K Games. Borderlands 4 Update Notes.
2. 2K Games. Borderlands 4 Vault Hunters.
3. Wikipedia. Borderlands 4.
4. Metacritic. Borderlands 4.
5. TheGamer. Borderlands 4 Review — Treasure In The Vault.
6. DualShockers. Borderlands 4 Review.
7. The Jim Quisition. Borderlands 4 — Grap Trap (Review).
8. TheGamer. How To Find And Defeat All Guardians In Primordial Vaults In Borderlands 4.
9. Game8. Borderlands 4 Movement Guide.
10. GAMES.GG. Borderlands 4 How to Glide and Movement Controls Explained.
11. Space4Games. Borderlands 4 Grappling Hook Guide.
12. Dexerto. All Vault Hunters in Borderlands 4.

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.