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Battlefield 6
Essential Hardware
Borderlands 4

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Harvey Randall

9 September 2025

Rickety foundations, but a solid build on top of ’em.

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(Image credit: Gearbox)

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 More importantly, they don’t oscillate between outdated memes and unsuccessful melodrama—they just grab a solid pitch and run with it.

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Borderlands 4 devs want to redeem the series’ story, which is a tall task, since it’s always been all over the place

Borderlands 4 certainly looks like it’s taking its story more seriously: ‘We wanted to go back to this sense of dread about the villain of our game’

I’ve already spent hours making builds, but I’m worried Borderlands 4’s endgame isn’t going to give me anything meaningful to do with them at launch

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.

Borderlands 3 – Moxxi’s Heist of the Handsome Jackpot Official Reveal Trailer – YouTube

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.

Borderlands 3 – Guns, Love, and Tentacles Official Reveal Trailer – YouTube

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.

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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.

When the Hunter Came to Town – YouTube

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.

Borderlands 3 – Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck Official Reveal Trailer – YouTube

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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Harvey Randall

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Staff Writer

Harvey’s history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he’s since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G’raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He’ll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don’t ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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Borderlands 4 devs want to redeem the series’ story, which is a tall task, since it’s always been all over the place

Borderlands 4 certainly looks like it’s taking its story more seriously: ‘We wanted to go back to this sense of dread about the villain of our game’

I’ve already spent hours making builds, but I’m worried Borderlands 4’s endgame isn’t going to give me anything meaningful to do with them at launch

Borderlands 4’s campaign skips could be a double-edged sword for Gearbox

Borderlands 4 hands-on: Yeah, it’s just ‘more Borderlands,’ but Gearbox’s consistency is respectable and there’s a cool hoverbike

Borderlands 3 ‘sometimes felt like parody’ of itself, say writers, but 4 aims to fix that: ‘If I tried to put a meme in the game, he would come to my house with a baseball bat’

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