Borderlands 4 is on the horizon, but if your trigger-finger’s itchy, you might do some shooting and/or looting beforehand—and while I had plenty of fun with Borderlands 3, I wouldn’t recommend its base game without a huge asterisk. That huge asterisk being, “this story’s kinda insufferable and it’ll be buzzing in your ear throughout the whole thing”.
Yet if you happened to bounce off the game because of its story—something I couldn’t rightly blame you for—you might be surprised to find out that all of its DLC is… actually pretty good, all-told, and there’s a lot of it. Four solidly-stacked campaigns you might’ve entirely missed.
While Borderlands 3’s insistently wonky plot is otherwise a real obstacle, all of these DLCs stick to a theme and largely nail it. None of these things are winning BAFTAs, mind, but they all spin enjoyable yarns. More importantly, they don’t oscillate between outdated memes and unsuccessful melodrama—they just grab a solid pitch and run with it.
The first of these, Moxxi’s Heist of the Handsome Jackpot, sees you teaming up with Moxxi to raid Handsome Jack’s abandoned casino—alongside a cast of characters including Timothy, who was Jack’s doppelganger in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.
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It’s a silly premise done right. Feral casino-goers who’ve gone mad and violent, loader-bot security forces form a decent base for some solid gags. There’s also a cute little romance subplot where Moxxi sees Timothy for who he really is. A highlight is “The Plan”, a genuinely clever mission that, rather than funnelling you through a bunch of laborious fetch-quests to get ready for a heist, just drops you to the best bits of a planning montage.
Guns, Love, & Tentacles, the second DLC, is a lovecraftian romp where you’re also planning Hammerlock and Jakobs’ wedding—it’s cute and you shoot horrors from Beyond the Pale, there’s not much more to say about it, other than there’s a side-quest where you get to solve a supernatural mystery with a washed-up detective, then wind up shooting cultists in a ghost dimension. The conclusion of which—for Borderlands—actually winds up being pretty moving.
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My favourite out of the quartet, Bounty of Blood, actually delivers on Borderlands’ oft-promised, never-delivered space western premise by making, well, an actual space-western. You go to a frontier planet called Gehenna after a sheriff’s bounty, there’s a gang of outlaws called the Devil’s Riders, and the whole thing is accompanied by a wild-west style narrator called “The Liar” giving a saloon-story recounting of events as they happen.
It’s also got a really neat aesthetic going on—blending the Wild West and Japanese architecture, which is a nice nod given the cultural exchange that’s always gone on between samurai and cowboy movies. Also, “When the Hunter Came to Town” is a great ditty and sets the tone perfectly. Yeehaw, so on and so forth.
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Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck is maybe my least favourite out of this DLC campaign barbershop, but only because it centres around mind-hopping into Krieg and, invariably, getting into his unrequited love for Maya—and while it’s admirable to try and put a better capstone on a fumbled story moment from the base game? You are also reminding me of that fumbled story moment.
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I’m also just not into the psychedelia dream-romp concept, especially when the competition is a space western and a casino heist; but there’s some actually solid character work in here, and seeing other characters through the lens of Krieg’s addled mind is a neat touch.
The reason I haven’t touched on gameplay much in any of these summaries is because, well, it’s Borderlands. You shoot things and get cool guns—it’s the personality these DLCs have that shines in spite of the base game they’re latched onto. And despite my overall wariness of the promises that Borderlands 4’s story is going to make up for the mistakes of the past, these DLCs keep me hopeful that Gearbox turned that ship around years ago.
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