Review: Borderlands 3: Guns, Love, and Tentacles

More fun than Yog-Sothoth at a party

Borderlands 3 is off to a decent start when it comes to DLC. Moxxi’s Heist of The Handsome Jackpot was a slightly more than serviceable add-on, and the long string of free updates that Gearbox has implemented have mostly been for the better.

As we continue to truck on through that premium season pass, Borderlands 3: Guns, Love, and Tentacles vies for your attention with themes of love and Lovecraft. It’s a clever marriage.

Borderlands 3: Guns, Love, and Tentacles (PC [reviewed], PS4, Xbox One)
Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K Games
Released: March 26, 2020
MSRP: $49.99 (Part of the Season Pass, comprised of four DLCs)

The entire premise of Guns, Love, and Tentacles is kind of absurd, but I love it for that. The beloved Wainwright & Hammerlock are getting married, and they want to have their ceremony in a completely twisted, not-at-all-right haunted town that they initially don’t realize is haunted: Scooby-Doo vibes, check.

Not only does the aforementioned couple feel so natural, but the goofy concept allows former Borderlands crew member Gaige to enter the fray as a nutty wedding planner, which is also a win (I’m a bit biased as a FL4K player, but it was cool to kick ass with Gaige and her robot companion Deathtrap). It’s not all fighting, though. Some quests involve rote errands like setting up balloons for the reception: that sort of thing. It’s a nice change of pace from the go-getting, “always on” casino DLC.

There’s two main biomes at work: an icy wasteland and a creepy pink and green aura shantytown called Cursehaven. It’s in the latter that most of the narrative takes place, as you happen to waltz into a Cthulian summoning ritual and all hell breaks loose: not many games can pull this sort of thing off, but Borderlands leans into it with a healthy blend of mysticism and the occult.

Guns, Love, and Tentacles is less flashy aesthetically compared to the bright neon casinos of Handsome Jackpot, but it’s no visual slouch. The green and purple hues differentiate itself from the rest of the campaign, even if Cursehaven occasionally feels like a re-purposed Halloween DLC (remember “Headhunter Packs?” Man Borderlands 2 had a lot of paid DLC). Its greatest virtue? Providing us with tons of giant arenas to spread our legs out in, making it really conducive to multiplayer sessions.

This is a thick add-on that’ll last you at least 10 hours if you partake in the sidequests chains, with a nice little epilogue to top things off. Along the way some of its quests feel a little fetchy, and a little tedium will sink in; par for the course for several portions of Borderlands as a whole. The same goes for a few boss battles, which are basically just bigger versions of existing enemies.

Despite some lingering issues with the formula as a whole, Borderlands 3: Guns, Love, and Tentacles has a little more heart in it than the first DLC. It can drag at times with samey enemies, but the premise, and the smaller more intimate cast focus, carries it. So far Gearbox is two-for-two on the season pass, but only just.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}