The first Story Pack for Borderlands 4 does several things better than the main game, while introducing one of the best new vault hunters in the series.

When Borderlands 4 was released in September last year, it may have felt like something of a throwback, as a story-led first person shooter designed for single or co-operative play, with its familiar cel-shaded visual style and wacky humour. But it was a lot of fun, and highly successful, with developer Gearbox endowing it with an ever-expanding, endgame, along with a surprising level of replayability.

Now Gearbox has released Borderlands 4’s first substantial chunk of DLC; the first of two mooted story expansions, this one entitled Mad Ellie And The Vault Of The Damned. It introduces a whole new area to the planet of Kairos – mainly a glacier, but with way more character and content than you would expect to find in a snowy waste – as well as a new story arc and a new vault hunter, called C4SH.

The Story Pack invites you to use whatever save you might already have going in Borderlands 4 and it starts you off at level 13, which is handy since that gives you some points with which to upgrade your vault hunter’s abilities. You can pick any vault hunter, but obviously it makes sense to play as C4SH.

In terms of story, as the DLC’s title suggests, some familiar characters from the Borderlands universe feature prominently, notably Ellie, Moxxi’s feisty daughter; Moxxi herself; and the sinister Mancubus, who didn’t feature in the main game.

The story starts off slowly, by introducing the new environment and its deadly flora and fauna to you, as you pick up Ellie’s trail. It’s pleasingly different to that of the rest of Kairos: a much more anarchic space, in which various giant spaceships and pods have crashed, and a mysterious megalith is warping everyone’s minds, causing them to hear ghostly voices.

Gearbox has availed itself fully of the weirdness that such a set-up allows. For example, your vault hunter gets dragged into dream sequences involving the captain of a doomed, crashing spaceship and his cryogenically frozen son. After that slow start, the story explodes into weirdness (much of it explained by Mancubus, a connoisseur of the weird) and only improves as it continues.

It takes around six hours to complete the main story, but a wealth of side missions add anything up to another nine hours. Plus, there are bunkers to discover and claim (by killing their resident bosses), along with all manner of environmental encounters, so there’s close to 20 hours of new gameplay in the Story Pack, which is pretty meaty – but then again, the price tag is substantial.

The side missions are well worth pursuing; some are primarily designed to make you laugh, while others are more convoluted and introduce you to previously neglected parts of the map. Their general diversity is notable, with some encouraging you to perform ridiculously odd tasks, which is exactly the sort of thing most crave from a Borderlands game. Pretty much all of them give you the impression that Gearbox had great fun crafting them.

The new vault hunter, C4SH is definitely one of the highlights of the DLC. He’s a robot and a former professional gambler. He’s not visually that interesting but his action skills may just be the best of any of the game’s vault hunters.

He has three: the ability to whirl around in a frenzy shooting revolvers from each hand, rolling three dice and spawning a golem (whose level depends on what score his dice throw up), and the ability to chuck cards dealing various types of elemental damage at surrounding enemies.

The latter was by far our favourite, as certain coloured cards wreak vast amounts of damage and they can be wielded with precision so that you can use one timed period of card-chucking to reduce a horde of surrounding enemies to near death. And as you level C4SH’s action skill up, it grows even more powerful – you can, for example, unlock red cards that deal instant-kills to the more basic enemies.

The DLC’s environment also impresses; it has more verticality to it that the main areas of Kairos and points where you really have to use all the tools at your disposal – hover jumps and grapple hooks included – to get to hidden places. Plus, it has diversity: there are lush underground oases in the glacier and pools through which you must swim to access certain places, along with giant wrecked spaceships which also offer traversal challenges.

Overall, the level design feels tighter than that of the main game, perhaps an indication that that aspect of Borderlands 4 – whose map, of course, had a much greater surface area – was a tiny bit rushed. Whether or not that was the case, this is pretty much an essential purchase if you enjoyed the original game. It’s meaty, beautifully designed, and much more uninhibited than the main game; it also has the best vault hunter and is generally up there with the finest parts of the franchise.

If you haven’t played Borderlands 4 but are contemplating it, then it’s a good idea get a version that includes the story DLC. Another reason why now would be a good time to do so, is that Gearbox has worked hard to improve the game technically since release, and it’s noticeably slicker and smoother than it was last autumn.

Plus, it contains vastly more to do when you finish all the storylines. Mad Ellie And The Vault Of The Damned does a fine job of emphasising the fact that Borderlands 4 is a game that is improving over time, a testament to its solid infrastructure design when it was first released.

Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5*
Price: £26.99
Publisher: 2K
Developer: Gearbox Software
Release Date: 26th March 2026
Age Rating: 18

*Nintendo Switch 2 version has been indefinitely postponed.

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The esteemable George Pell, owner of the Suffolk in Aldeburgh, has bought a pub. We expect you’ll want to head that way with determined regularity in the summer. But until Pell’s place opens, try the Dolphin Inn in Thorpeness, a village north of Aldeburgh once owned by the Ogilvie family, which made a fortune in railways in the early 1800s. Most of the land was sold off in the 1970s, but descendent Hamish Ogilvie still owns the Meare, an artificial boating lake.

Asian markets that were open for trading mostly rose Monday, as investors continued to closely watch the war in Iran, soaring oil prices and what President Donald Trump might say next.

Japan‘s benchmark Nikkei 225 rose nearly 1.1% to 53,692.42 in morning trading. South Korea’s Kospi gained 1.5% to 5,460.24. Trading was closed in Australia for Easter, and in Hong Kong and Shanghai for a traditional Chinese holiday.

The Tuesday deadline Trump has given for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz is looming. Some analyst fear the war may escalate after that. Over the weekend Trump made more threats against Iran, even as the bombing continued in the region. The United States rescued two aviators whose fighter jet was shot down by Iran.

The key market focus continues to be on oil prices.

Benchmark U.S. crude gained 38 cents to $111.92 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, added $1.71 to $110.74 a barrel. Energy markets were closed Friday, but the prices have been surging lately on fears that the Iran war will drag on longer than expected.

The U.S. relies on the Persian Gulf for only a fraction of the oil it imports, but oil is a commodity and prices are set in a global market. Some nations, like resource-poor Japan, import a large portion of their energy needs and rely heavily on access to the Strait of Hormuz.

“As we kick off the first full trading week of April, the word uncertainty is paramount. Last year it was centered on the impact of ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, this year it’s uncertainty surrounding the ongoing Iranian War,” said Jay Woods, analyst at Freedom Capital Markets in New York.

U.S. markets were closed for Good Friday and will reopen Monday. Some markets in Europe also did not trade on Friday.

In currency trading, the U.S. dollar inched up to 159.65 Japanese yen Monday from 159.63. The euro cost $1.1509, down from $1.1517.

___

AP Business Writer Matt Ott in Washington contributed.

Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama

The Monday letters page discusses how to handle a Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake, as one reader thinks Sony should copy Nintendo’s approach to making movies.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

No show
I’ve seen some new rumours about the Mass Effect TV show at Amazon, which I’d completely forgotten was a thing. Apparently, they want to change the script so that it’s easier to get into for non-gamers. I can’t help thinking that’s probably a bad thing for authenticity, which is not a direction you would’ve expected after Fallout proved how important it was.

I’m not really that interested in the show though, as I can’t imagine it’d ever do the games justice, given what kind of budget it’d have to have. But it’s sad that we’re hearing more about the show than we are the new game.

I know EA said last year that it hasn’t been cancelled but I’m not sure I believe them. Is this not cancelled, like Beyond Good And Evil 2 isn’t cancelled? All I’m asking for is a sign of life and I’m not seeing anything, including any leaks about it being shown this summer. If It’s not, then I think I’ll just give up hoping for it. And then I’ll probably play through the trilogy remaster one last time…
Zeiss

Remaking expectations
Nice Reader’s Feature at the weekend, about what to do with a Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake. I’m still not convinced it’s going to happen and if it does my guess would be it ends up as basically an upgraded version of the 3DS remaster.

The idea of a Capcom style full-on remake sounds ideal, but I just can’t imagine Nintendo paying for that or even wanting it. It doesn’t seem their style at all. If that is what they go for though I will be very impressed, as it’s something I couldn’t imagine them doing in any other generation.

I just hope that, whatever it turns out to be, they don’t sand off all the interesting stuff. Like the reader said, the weirdness and unexpected horror moments were a bit part of the appeal and would be sorely missed if taken out.
Godgem

Peace offering
I’m not sure what to think about the rumours of a new Uncharted game. First of all, I’m shocked that Sony has been so slow to even announce one, given they did have that movie (which I assume is never getting a sequel now). I get that Naughty Dog didn’t want to make it, but do I believe that they would change their mind?

Ordinarily no, but we’re in difficult times at the moment and I can’t imagine that cancelling The Last Of Us Online was something Sony was all that happy about. They allowed Naughty Dog to do it but Naughty Dog agreeing to make a new Uncharted as a way to make amends makes sense in theory. Whether that’s what’s going on, I guess we’ll have to wait and see but they can’t let the franchise die off.
Olliephant

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Unofficial price
The PS5 Pro is nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds on Amazon.

I’m struggling to see how the PlayStation 6 launches for less money. I started gaming in the mid-70s, first with Pong and then Atari VCS. I obviously still like my games.

But after paying for the hotel, a grand is good enough spending money for a pretty tidy weekend in Amsterdam. No way I could justify that to myself for a console.

How much of this do you reckon is Sony trying to recoup some of what it lost on that live service stuff they crashed out on?
Tom Twice

GC: That’s just a third party seller, not Amazon themselves, who seem to have run out of stock. Sony sees no additional money if a console is sold above the RRP, that’s the retailer’s business.

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Blade of nostalgia
I will never understand why Microsoft got rid of the Xbox 360 dashboard and blades. They’re the only iconic thing the Xbox has ever had, in terms of interface, and they’ve got steadily worse with every change.

I realise that’s a very Microsoft thing to do, especially in terms of Windows, but I’m not surprised to see people trying to recreate it. I think they brought it back for the 25th anniversary a while back too? I don’t know to be honest, I haven’t owned an Xbox in a long time and nothing they do has made me want to reconsider that.
Kosco

Parts and labour
As a commenter correctly pointed out with my weekend feature, the law of supply and demand relates to price, which I should’ve qualified at the start. The central issue, though, is with long term investment and the lack of flexibility to adapt to changes in the economy. While small price fluctuations can occur in the short term, as an effect of demand, the price at which a console sells for largely reflects production costs, specifically the cost of labour.

You get a sense of why labour costs are decisive whenever completing games such as GTA, Resident Evil or The Legend Of Zelda and the seemingly endless roll call of credits. Or, when to cut costs, there are mass layoffs.

The price at which the PlayStation 6 does eventually sell at when launched will not be determined by what consumers are willing to pay but mainly through labour costs over the duration of the cycle, from inception through to production and everything in-between. The fallacy in the law of supply and demand is that price is determined by whether a product is desirable and what relatedly people are prepared to pay, not the labour costs which determine the commodity’s value (hence why AAA titles tend to sell at a higher price than those made by small independent studios).

This is also why, even if there’s little demand for it, having already committed considerable amounts of capital, the PlayStation 6 will likely be launched in the next year or two to pay for all that labour and ideally profit from it. Sony could of course cancel it, as they did with The Last Of Us Online. They could, of course, exit the industry altogether.
Ciara

That old joke
Picked up a PS5 Pro before the price hike. Stuck it by the sofa as it didn’t quite fit in the TV cabinet.

Looks nice, very artistic.
Simundo

Hollywood synergy
I think the Super Mario Galaxy Movie was fine; my two kids certainly enjoyed. The post-credit reveal was a surprise though; I wonder if it’s hinting that the third movie will be a homage to Super Mario Land? As far as I understand we didn’t learn who exactly was trying to kidnap Rosalina in the first place so that could be a continuing plot point.

The important thing is that the movie has been another big success and that is going to encourage Nintendo to do even more, obviously, and also incorporate the changes into the games. I doubt it’ll be long till the film’s big lore drop is mentioned in a game and I expect all the characters to start looking like their movie versions sooner or later.

But because everything is so close to the games anyway that’s really not a problem, especially if it means bringing back more forgotten characters like Wart or even, if I dare say, Fox McCloud.

Star Fox was dead as a dodo before the film came out and now suddenly everyone’s talking about it and actually looking forward to the prospect of a new game this year. That’s got to be an absolute win for Nintendo and exactly the sort of benefit they would’ve been hoping from for these films.

I agree a live action Zelda is a lot harder sell, especially as they’re not using a well-known director or actors (a classic case of Nintendo penny-pinching I’d imagine) but we’ll have to see. At the moment they’re two for two in terms of hits.

It makes you wonder why Sony has been so slow to do the same thing, although they already tried that with the Ratchet & Clank movie and that’s really the only thing they’ve got that’s family friendly. Xbox hasn’t even got that.
Lucre

Inbox also-rans
Just found out that Little Mac and his coach from Punch-Out!! are in Super Mario Galaxy Movie, in the montage sequence with Yoshi in the city. Samus Aran’s ship is confirmed to be in it too, just like GC said. The film might be lightweight but the cameos are a lot of fun, if you ask me.
Wotan

The problem with Pokémon Pokopia is it may be too good. I can’t believe how addictive it is and I’m already far more interested in DLC for it than I am Winds and Waves.
Derbel

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North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service attended the incident on Danebury Drive in Acomb at 1.47am on Sunday (April 5), which had happened at around 9.30pm on April 4.

According to an eye-witness, the “chilling” incident involved a white Fiat and an e-bike on the junction of Ostman Road.

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They said: “Police arrived at the scene first, followed by two ambulances, with additional police units arriving shortly after to set up roadblocks.

“The area was cordoned off to allow officers to investigate the scene.

“A bus became stuck at the junction of Ostman Road for around an hour and a half due to the incident, although it was not directly involved.

“It was subsequently taken out of service, and the route was diverted for the rest of the evening.”

The incident was attended by two ambulance crews, four police vans and two police cars, the eye witness confirmed.

They added: “Officers at the scene were observed reconstructing the incident and conducting brake tests as part of their investigation.

“At approximately 1:50am, fire crews arrived and used jet sprays to clean the road of hazardous bodily fluids.

“The incident concluded at around 2:15am.”

A North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service spokesperson confirmed: “Crews washed down the road and left the incident with the responsible persons.”

The Press has contacted North Yorkshire Police for comment.

EXCLUSIVE: Midsomer Murders star Neil Dudgeon has paid tribute to his “fantastic” co-stars

Midsomer Murders actor Neil Dudgeon has paid tribute to his “absolute treasure” co-star as he discussed his return as DCI Barnaby in the popular ITV series. Filming for the forthcoming series of Midsomer Murders is currently in progress, with Neil reprising his role as DCI Barnaby alongside his sidekick Sergeant Jamie Winter (played by Nick Hendrix) and Dr Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland).

However, in an exclusive interview with Reach PLC, Neil revealed what it was like working with his cherished co-stars. When asked what it was like working with Nick and Annette “so closely”, Neil said, “It is great. Annette has played Fleur for years and years and is still there.

“Whenever we meet her, she’s saying, ‘Oh, you know, I’ve just come back from such and such, where I’ve been filming this, and I’m going to Manchester next week,” reports the Express.

“She’s in three or four days, and episodes in between, she’s going off doing all sorts of things, but she’s in great demand, because she’s such an absolute treasure.”

He continued, “And Nick is fantastic, and I feel very blessed. I’ve always felt very blessed because when I started, I had Jason Hughes, who was the Sergeant.

“And then when Jason left, I thought ‘Oh, it won’t be the same’, and then Gwilym Lee came along, and it changed him because Barnaby and Jason’s characters were more similar in age, they had a different kind of relationship, and me and Jason had a different kind of relationship, which was hilarious.”

Sharing an amusing behind-the-scenes anecdote, the DCI Barnaby star continued, “And we behaved terribly. I remember one day we were both so overcome with the hysterics that the director said to us, ‘You can’t carry on until you calm down…alright, both of you out’.

“And he sent us out of the location, and to the car park to calm down, which just made us worse.” Going on to heap praise on his co-stars, the actor added, “And then Gwilym came along, who was just wonderful and lovely and fantastic.

“And then when he left, I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t be lucky a third time’. And then Nick came along, and he’s just fantastic. He’s great to work with, and I think we get along pretty well, and it’s so important, because for the five months or so that we’re filming, you meet up at seven o’clock in the morning, and you’re standing next to each other, working with each other until seven o’clock at night.

“You know, it’s like 12 hours a day, five days a week for five months. During that period, I’m seeing much more of him than I am of my own family. I think if you’re doing that with somebody you didn’t get on with, that would be really, really hard.”

Midsomer Murders is available to watch on ITVX.