The Jacobs’ One Shot Guarantee

Okay, it’s really starting to feel like these expansions are just meant to suck. While I liked Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck, that was mostly because of the storyline between Krieg and Maya. Outside of that, that expansion was just fine. And if I hadn’t accidentally played these expansions out of order I might really be questioning what Gearbox was thinking at all because, wow, the second expansion, Guns, Love, and Tentacles: the Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock, is pretty terrible.

The concept of it set the expansion up to fail right from the get-go. Sir Hammerlock was an amusing enough character in Borderlands 2, an amusing guy put in early in the game who only gave you occasional little side quests after that opening area. If you didn’t do sidequests you didn’t even have to interact with him again until his expansion, , and then that expansion showed a pretty major issue: Hammerlock isn’t interesting when the story focuses on him. He’s the kind of character you’re only supposed to hear from once every couple of hours so he can say something pithy, everyone can have a laugh, and then you go back to ignoring him. When he’s the focus of the story you realize there just isn’t much meat to his character.

He’s a big game hunter with a British accent. That’s it. That’s the whole of his character. Even when he showed up in Borderlands 3 the game struggled to do much more with him. In part that’s because the writing in the main game isn’t great, but it’s also because Hammerlock isn’t the kind of character that can really carry a chapter of the adventure. While I appreciated the game attempting to do something with him, making the character fall in love with Wainright Jacobs, it didn’t land the way I think the writers wanted. It was supposed to be like checking in on an old friend and finding out they’ve had this whole life. But none of the characters in Borderlands 3 are well written, and when we’re talking about a character without much substance to them like Hammerlock, that’s a combination that was never going to work.

And now, here we are, with a second expansion all about Hammerlock and, seriously, the game just feels lost. In the expansion, Hammerlock and Wainright are getting married. They’ve chosen, for some reason, the distant, frozen planet of Xylourgos as their destination. Gaige, creator of Deathtrap and former vault hunter, has signed on to be their wedding planner, and together the group is looking forward to fun, big game hunting, and relaxing on this icy hellhole. That is until a cursed rung enters the picture.

It seems that Xylourgos has been plagued by a pair of villains, Eleanor, leader of a cult worshiping the alien creature that enwraps the planet, and her husband, Vincent. Except Vincent died long ago and Eleanor has been putting his essence, his cursed soul, into other victims. And when Wainright picks up the cursed ring he becomes the next host for this foul magic. Now the vault hunters have to pick up the fight and chase off after Eleanor if they are to have any hope of breaking the curse and giving Hammerlock and Wainright the perfect wedding.

There are many issues with this second (in release order) full expansion for Borderlands 3, but the first big issue is that this expansion needed to focus on characters we actually cared about. I have no issue with the game having a big, gay, wedding as its central story point but I really wish it was for characters I gave a shit about. Hammerlock, as we’ve just discussed, really doesn’t have much substance to him, and he and Wainwright basically exist the story of Borderlands 3 halfway in and, frankly, I’d forgotten all about them by the time the expansion came along. There are plenty of characters we know better and like more than these two guys, any of whom would have made for a more interesting pair to celebrate on their big day. Hell, give Brick and Mordecai a big, gay wedding. I’d like that a lot more (plus you know the two are gay for each other).

Even if we accept that we’re going to do another Hammerlock adventure, this really wasn’t the story to do it in. Hammerlock loves big game hunting and, well, that’s about it. He has no connection to Xylourgos, as the planet was seemingly chosen at random for the story, and he certainly doesn’t have any connection to Eleanor or the events of the story he wanders into. Wainwright getting taken over by the curse is the only motivating factor we have, but it’s not like that’s really a major deal. If you don’t like Wainwright (which is fine if you don’t since, like Hammerlock, there’s barely any substance to his character) you might sit there going, “huh, Wainwright was turned into a cursed love slave… I wonder what other expansions this game has to tell…”

Everything in this story feels so slapdash and empty. Characters randomly wander to a world, a cult randomly happens to be there, one of the protagonists randomly gets cursed. Oh, and Gaige is here for no reason, doing a job she (seemingly) has no qualifications for. Everything in this story is slapped together, put in place because, what, Gearbox wanted to do an expansion about a Cthulu-like cult and they had no better ideas on how to do it? That seems to be the case, certainly, and that air of, “eh, we have no better ideas,” permeate every minute of this expansion.

When you think about it, this expansion doesn’t really do anything new or interesting. It’s a horror setting that you wander around in, which was already done back in the original Borderlands with The Zombie Island of Dr. Nedd. Hell, that expansion did more with its setting and concept, playing around with horror monsters and movie monstrosities, better than this third Borderlands 3 expansion ever does. All we have here is an icy planet, some tentacle theming, and a whole lot more of the same enemies we’ve been fighting since the very start of this whole game. It’s recycled content, spat out for fifteen bucks (if you bought it when it first came out), devoid of anything close to originality.

I was honestly so bored playing through this expansion. I wanted to like it. I wanted Gearbox to show me that there was something interesting the game could say about Hammerlock and Wainwright. I wanted the game to do something fun with Gaige since it decided to bring her back (after she made no appearance in the main adventure of Borderlands 3 at all). I wanted the storytellers to have something interesting to say about Xylourgos and this cult that populates this world. But they didn’t. Not once. Not ever.

Guns, Love, and Tentacles: the Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock exemplifies Borderlands 3 for all the wrong reasons. I struggled with this adventure because, frankly, the good gameplay of Borderlands 3 can only be stretched so far. This is a repetitive and boring mess of an expansion that barely skirts by because the gunplay is fun. If Borderlands 3 itself were a worse game I don’t think I could have completed this expansion. There’s no fun to be had here, and the longer I have to play through awful expansions the more I’m thinking I’m never even going to be able to convince myself to come back to Borderlands 3 at all. There’s a reason people went back to playing Borderlands 2 so soon after this whole game came out: it’s better constructed in almost every way.

I think there’s a little core, a kernel of an idea in Guns, Love, and Tentacles: the Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock that maybe could have been interesting if it were in the right hands. The version we got, though, sucks, and even if I go back to Borderlands 3 to play through the main adventure again I’m definitely not playing this expansion. I’ve already been bored by it once, and once was enough.