Since its inception Borderlands has a good formula when it comes to making post-launch DLCs, a nice small bite of the same looter-shooter goodness for those who are up for seconds.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands experimented with a more lightweight offering of DLCs, for the worse, but it’s nice that Borderlands 4 is back again with offering an expansion-style DLC: A new location, new characters and standalone story, a good number of quests and things to do and new loot. It isn’t as many as Borderlands 3 or past titles, a lot of Borderlands 4’s DLC drops are of smaller scale, but two of these now-dubbed Story Packs are still a good amount.
Story Pack 2, titled FL4K And The Last Resort, marks the final paid content drop for Borderlands 4’s first year of post-launch support. It’s the second to add a new standalone map and story, and it comes together with a new Vault Hunter as an optional bundle.
Borderlands 4 had a rough launch, but it’s in a much better state, albeit still not perfect. I don’t think Story Pack 2 will convince anyone who haven’t played Borderlands 4 to pick it up. But if you’re still enjoying Borderlands 4, this is a splendid little detour and time sink that, while not essential, gives you a good reason to keep looting and shooting for at least another 10 hours.
Return Of The FL4K
Here’s the setup for FL4K And The Last Resort. FL4K, the previous Vault Hunter from Borderlands 3, has now returned and is stranded in Providence Island, a weird little resort island away from the mainland of planet Kairos. It’s supposed to be a retreat for the Electi Elite, those loyal to the villainous tyrant Timekeeper from the base game, but he just left them for dead, with no supplies. And now armies from the Tediore corporation is swooping down and kicking a dog while it’s down.
Speaking of dogs, FL4K is here to rescue his pet skag Mr. Chew, and asks for the current roster of Vault Hunters for help.
It’s a simple premise that allows for two new additions. First, the new standalone map of Providence Island. It’s supposed to be a resort, but it’s now all dilapidated. The other is the addition of new enemy types, the Tediore soldiers.
First seen in New Tales From The Borderlands, they regularly throw out their Tediore guns that float about and shoot you—how the tables are turned as players should be familiar with this gimmick before that works on their side—and also deploys mechs and exosuits that can operate when the human is dead. These Deadframes have their armoured health bars behind the normal health bars, which is an interesting twist.
I Rate Dispensable Tediore Goons 5 Stars
While we have killed off various corporate-backed troops before, Tediore goons feel a bit more corporate than usual, in a lovable way. Their last words on deaths includes asking to rate them 1 to 5 stars, asked to check their stock options, and admitting they prefer a different corporation after all. The corporatism expands to the main mission design. Once you complete the first few linear missions, the game branches out and asks you to take on not three, not four but five different middle managers before you can get to save the metaphorical damsel in distress. Well, technically you have to only do three, but it wasn’t revealed from the get-go as such weirdly enough.
These middle managers, bosses in their own right, feature some interesting gimmick or boss fight, some more memorable than others. The Brand Manager has you go through a Tediore team building exercise to reach her. There’s a timid, incompetent manager that wants to quit his position so badly that he summons easy, dispensable goons. Some of them are bland, though. But they all come with boss fights with their own gimmicks.
But I need to ask the question: what’s with this obsession with invisibility powers? Regular Tediore soldiers regularly cloak themselves and they do blend well with the surroundings. So during all the hectic chaos of a Borderlands 4 gunfight I regularly get confused of not seeing anyone despite the radar being filled with red dots. It’s a little annoying.
But you know what’s more annoying? Bosses that go invisible. You have this big massive target that should be easily be shot at, but not only these pesky bosses get to be invisible, but also move around quick and fast that you I can’t possibly keep track of unless I just look at the top left of the screen all the time instead of, what’s actually on the screen. Once you depleted their shield health bar, they’re back bein visible, but dally for too long and they’ll go invisible again with a full shield health bar. I’ve seen this archetype of boss fight in the base game, and there’s at least one optional fight in Story Pack 2, and I’m not convinced that I like it.
There’s another variant of this that’s just as bad. There are bosses that requires you to destroy some floating drone that keeps them shielded, and they can resummon them again, so your window of opportunity to actually do damage on them is limited.
I get why these encounters are designed as such. It’s a supposed to be build checks, to see if you have created a good enough build that can stack buffs and bonuses to melt these pesky replenishable damage blockers consistently. But dude, I’m grinding through a new character, I have no idea what build I should be gunning for until I hit the level cap so I’m just going through the motions. So these fights can be mentally draining when running on an unoptimised build that can’t just deplete those pesky replenishable health bars in one shot. If they can make these fights as a tougher version you can opt in to from Moxxi’s Big Encore Machine for boss refights, I wouldn’t mind. These are not as fun when playing a new character that’s still just leveling up through the game.
I haven’t played Borderlands 4 since I wrapped my review a year ago, so I lost track of the good loot or any new variation of weapons and weapon parts since. But from what I gathered from my playthrough in Story Pack 2 is that there are still fun guns and items to equip, and the licensed parts that can randomly spawn on a weapon are more prone to have more positive synergies this time around.
Oddly, towards the end of my DLC playthrough, which is about 10 hours, which raised the Level 12 fast-tracked character for those who want to jump straight to the DLC to level 31, Legendary loot drop quite often. Legendary drops in the base game back at launch was something you probably need to grind for, or be really, really lucky. But by the end of my DLC playthrough here I got at least 10 of them from random drops.
Whole Lotta Loveless
Speaking of new characters, let’s talk about the new Vault Hunter, Loveless The Hacker, which is released as part of a bundle for Story Pack 2, but also available a la carte.
For a character named as such, the team sure put a lot of love on her visuals, she sure will perk up folks who adore feminine figures.
Loveless can be toxic, as in she deals out ridiculous amount of extra Corrosive elemental damage, she can swap that for the Nuke elemental. She can summon a Wyrm, which she shares consciousness with (to the point that her first-person pronouns are we and us, like a royal we). She can summon clones with a VPN (she’s a Hacker, a lot of her abilities are computer puns), or throw a shuriken that deals elemental damage. The action skills themselves feel derivative of past Vault Hunters, similar to the base game Vault Hunters. But the way you build them through the passives make Loveless feel so much different.
I’ve stuck with the appropriately green Virologist tree and Loveless can spread around Contagion. I can be getting those ticks that you can hear and see at the aiming reticle that I’m doing damage to something I’m not even aware of, as the virus have spread around so far and wide to enemies not in my field of vision. Plus, she can also execute those Contagion stacks that were dealing damage-over-time into one synchronised explosion and it’s beautiful to see, now more than ever as the game’s performance on consoles have been more or less fixed.
Loveless doesn’t move the paradigm in Vault Hunter design as much as previous DLC Vault Hunter C4SH, which I think is more wild and inventive. But Loveless, both as a playable character and a character, is very charming. She can be a bit sadistic and amoral (I can see her turning coat if she reappears in the next Borderlands), her quips is a good balance of stoic royalness and sassy girlboss, and she’s just mean, toxic if you will. Personally, it’s a nice change of pace from all the rainbow and sunshine when I played as Harlowe.
Surprisingly, she is not a weeb given here Action Skill weaponry (must be just an Anshin thing, her previous corporate employer), but I presume she calls other hackers “nerds” which is one funny way of making sure all the story interactions when playing as other Vault Hunters remain the same but flavoured differently. There were definitely some story beats in this DLC where a hacker and hacking is involved and I like to think she simply refuses to acknowledge the word that is her Vault Hunter descriptor.
Speaking of, it’s nice that there are audio logs that shows off more interactions between the current roster of Vault Hunters. It’s the best thing to come from those character shorts, and since interactions between Vault Hunters in-game are limited, especially for those playing solo, it’s a nice way to flesh out these characters more. A good set-up when they become NPCs later on, should the tradition of bringing back past Vault Hunters as NPCs, like what Story Pack 2 is all about, continues.
Harmony Harmony Oh Love
FL4K has a character arc in Story Pack 2, and for fans of the non-binary robot, you’ll be glad to know what they will be going through in this side adventure. Fans of Moze, the only part of the Borderlands 3 quartet to have yet showed up in person in Borderlands 4, unfortunately are only left with crumbs still.
But what really stole the show is one Lieutenant Harmony, the big baddie of this DLC. Harmony appears as a proper threat, competent at leading her troops, makes it clear she wants to kill you and FL4K, and has the presence to boot. But in private conversations, Harmony is this awkward fangirl who follows the tales of all the past Vault Hunters. What do you mean the leader of this Tediore goons is a gooner?
The hidden audio logs are hilarious in that it captures the energy you would see in fandoms. She’s a proper fangirl in the current, modern context of such. In fact, she actively engages in such fandom activities—the main villain that’s out here to genuinely kill you so she can continue an evil corporate agenda is also the same person that can, will and might have written spicy fan fiction about any of the Vault Hunter you play as is one hell of a dichotomy yet it comes off genuine. To put in another way, if a race war is happening, Harmony won’t hesitate in the slightest to kill Tony Hawk despite being a big fan of him (and, well, on the same side of the war), which is wild.
The writing team at Gearbox are really good at writing characters, let them cook.
But please don’t let them make the same millennial jokes over and over. There’s a quest called Rescue Rangers and one of the first people you come to rescue is a guy named Chip and my immediate reaction is to be apologetic because no one outside of millennials would find it funny. In fact, that side quest probably won’t land well outside of its target demographic. Do people still laugh when a comically heavy object falls down precisely on someone when a lever is pulled?
(On the same note, I too must also apologise for the litany of millennial jokes and references throughout this piece.)
Not On The Level With The Level Design
If there’s another thing to complain about Story Pack 2 is the level design, like base game Borderlands 4, remains lacking. Providence Island has more verticality, but it also leads to more likeliness you would climb up and float down to a place no one intended to go so there’s nothing there.
The way the game adds verticality is through the use of zip lines that can quickly zip you horizontally and vertically. It’s repurposing the grappling hook feature, and a genius move in making new game features without adding too much bespoke work. There’s no specific animations for the zip line traversal, and you know what, that’s fine. It’s be more useful if you have all access to guns and abilities while zipping across distances.
Alongside grappling hooks, zip lines are placed around combat encounter areas and arena as another option to quickly move around. It doesn’t change much of the gunplay and combat dynamics, the new stuff introduced in base game Borderlands 4 are already game-changing enough as it is, but it’s nice to see the team experimenting on what can be added more with less.
The waypoint system, while now improved in usability, still regularly misdirects you by pointing the arrows through impassable walls or upwards when there’s no way to climb up.
Exploring doesn’t feel exciting as the points of interest in Providence Island don’t really catch the eye or inspire curiosity. All I see most of the time is similar-looking Order buildings with those golden accents and some military industrial complex, over and over. I only stop at one of the dilapidated villages on a beachside filled with Rippers because I saw an Echo Log collectible appeared in my map.
It doesn’t help that the Digirunner, the vehicles you can summon in most areas at any time, by default will see you driving with a camera angle that obscures the horizon, so if there are buildings and monuments intended to catch the eye of players from afar, they’ll likely won’t see it when driving, which is so off.
There’s a good example of this lack of level design prowess I encountered when I tried to engage in an Occupied Sector activity, which reminds me a lot of Destiny 2’s Lost Sectors (a lot of Borderlands 4 should remind you of Destiny, as a matter of fact). After opening the door that leads to it and getting a checkpoint, I didn’t know where to go. The room lacks a door, you can see there are things beyond the wall which should be part of this activity. The only thing that made me think is where I need to go is this bit of hanging platform on the right, which you can’t reach in any way. Even more troubling is that the waypoints keep pointing through the right side, which implies I can get where I want to go, through the next room, by jumping upwards.
That’s not what I should be doing. On the left, actually there’s a hole. A lift down that leads to where the actual critical path is, that will eventually loop back to that out-of-reach platform, which is the exit to this theme park ride.
Look, I’m not saying they should be yellow paint or overly sized arrows pointing down that hole. It’s made clear on socials and online discourse that gamers wish not to be coddled and babied to such extent. But what I’m saying is that gamers can sometimes be stupid at navigation, some games call for gamers to turn off that bit of the brain which is fine as long as they can be invisibly guided on to the right path. This was such a momentum killer, that I turned off the game and boot it back the next day to only see that hole that you can’t see from when you approach the area.
There are ways to subtly guide gamers to ehre they need to go and be while making them look smart as if they figured it out themselves, but I don’t think the development team has mastered such dark arts. They should, though. The crutch to solve this issue, the waypoint system, unfortunately is still not robust enough to counteract this deficit.
That being said, similar to my original review of Borderlands 4, the game feels at its best when you are just going through a linear level with the occasional rounds of shooting and looting in arenas with more and more interesting layouts as your make way to the boss fight. The final mission sequence that takes place in a separate level, where the waypoint system is not as bugged, feels like good ol’ classic Borderlands to me, it brought me back to a happy place, and thankfully the level designers are still good at constructing linear sequences with in-world cinematic moments. The finale is worth playing through.
Closing Thoughts
Borderlands 4 Story Pack 2 FL4K And The Last Resort should satiate fans of the base game. Some issues unfortunately persists, but if you’re asking for more Borderlands 4, you’re getting a good lot more of Borderlands 4.
The core gameplay loop still rocks, now with more loot variation. The story and character writing shines. But the level and open world design still suffers, and there are still weird bugs here and there—I haven’t tested this for but I heard multiplayer with this DLC is not in a good state, which is, well, not good.
Borderlands 4 Story Pack 2 is more Borderlands 4. It has made the game bigger, somewhat better.
Check out our original review of Borderlands 4, as it was on launch here. Here’s our updated thoughts on the state of the base game a year later.
Played on base PS5. Review copy provided by the publisher.