Borderlands 3: Guns, Love and Tentacles (DLC)

Guns, Love, and Tentacles is Borderlands 3's second story DLC, and it's the one where Gearbox finally figured out that character writing matters. The setup: Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs are tying the knot on Xylourgos, a frozen planet draped in eternal twilight and wrapped by a colossal dead god's tentacles. It reads like someone fed a Lovecraft anthology and a rom-com into the same generator, and somehow it works. The mission names alone are a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft's catalog - "The Shadow Over Cursehaven" riffing on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, "The Call of Gythian" nodding to The Call of Cthulhu - which gives the whole package a literary texture the base game never quite managed. The new planet delivers seven distinct locations, including Cursehaven (a cursed harbor town sitting under a frozen tentacle colossus), the Dustbound Archives (a genuinely eerie cursed library), and the Cankerwood. The enemy faction here is the Bonded, cult followers of Gythian who bring real mechanical variety to combat: some channel resurrection spells that convert downed allies into one-shot suicide bombers, others stack supernatural health buffs, and the melee units will punt you across the arena with tentacle swings. It forces you to actually prioritize targets rather than spray everything in sight. On the loot side, the DLC ships with over two dozen new Legendary items and bumps the level cap to 57, so builds you've been nursing since the base campaign get meaningful room to grow. Standout weapons include the Gatlin' Clairvoyance, a full-auto cryo Jakobs assault rifle that pairs well with Zane's clone and barrier builds, and the Binary Dangerous Insider, a Maliwan shotgun that fires a spread of radioactive and corrosive projectiles. New exotic drops from Bonded enemies hit frequently enough that loot farming never feels like a dead grind. The writing is the real upgrade. Hammerlock and Wainwright are the most genuinely likable characters Borderlands 3 has put forward, and the DLC actually lets them be afraid - of not being enough for each other, of what commitment costs. That's a surprisingly sincere note for a franchise that usually communicates emotion through explosions. Side quests hold up their end too. "The Nibblenomicon" (cursed library book, book club of the damned, one of the funniest sequences in the whole game) and the three-part "Cold Case" arc, which starts as a mystery and ends as a quiet story about grief, are both worth doing before the credits roll. Gaige returning as wedding planner is a BL2 fan-service moment that lands softer than you'd hope, but Mancubus Bloodtooth, the lodge owner who wears his villainy like a comfortable coat, more than picks up the slack. The criticism that sticks is fair: the DLC does not reinvent the formula, and veterans with hundreds of hours in BL3 will clock the seams quickly. A boss fight requiring precise platforming in a first-person shooter is exactly as painful as it sounds. A few bosses still lean into bullet-sponginess, and the absence of Lovecraftian-themed weapons in a Lovecraft DLC is an odd gap. The run clocks around ten hours for main quest plus side content - shorter if you skip the Cold Case quests, which you absolutely should not. If you burned out on Borderlands 3 before finishing the main campaign, this DLC will not cure that. But if you cleared the base game and wanted more story with sharper edges, Xylourgos is the destination.

Monika · Scout Team

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