Borderlands 4: Mad Ellie And The Vault Of The Damned review – essential DLC

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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