Forget scary, Borderlands 4’s Halloween event is just depressing

I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting too much from Borderlands 4‘s Halloween event. After all, it’s a free, two-week affair simply made to inject some light-hearted festivity into Kairos before it vanishes for a year. And yet, somehow, I’m still left wondering what the point of it all even is.

If you’re yet to play it, I’ll save you the effort: the Borderlands 4 Horrors of Kairos event is just the usual Rift Champion ‘boss bubble’ world events, but the sky is red (yes, this is the promised “new seasonal weather variant”). Oh, and there’s a chance to get two new items, the Murmur assault rifle and the Skully grenade, both of which are pretty terrible. In fact, the Skully is so abysmally weak that I’m convinced it’s just bugged.

After farming Battle Wagon (the Big Encore this week) and its surrounding Rift Champion spawns for just an hour or two, I’ve already had my fill, and the lacklustre loot certainly isn’t going to pull me back in.

Oh, but what about the festive customisation? Ah, yes, how could I forget, collecting unique headwear and costumes is one of my favourite hobbies in Borderlands. The thing is, these rewards are actually from new Borderlands 4 Shift codes, and so don’t require you to play the Halloween event itself.

It’s hard to complain about free stuff—it’s free, I have no stakes in it—but when we’ve had such good seasonal events in the past, like Borderlands 3’s Bloody Harvest, I struggle not to just feel let down.

For those who haven’t played it, or simply can’t stomach the energy to cast your mind back to 2019 when it was first added, the Bloody Harvest event added the ‘haunted’ modifier, a new area (albeit small), a new boss named Captain Haunt, and four festive gear items to chase. Haunted enemies would release one of three types of ghosts on death that would add a spooky spin to gameplay. Compare this to Borderlands 4’s equivalent, and it’s no competition whatsoever.

The real kicker for me is that I’m now much more sceptical of future content in the roadmap. For example, Bounty Pack 1, How Rush Saved Mercenary Day, is a Christmas-themed paid DLC that was already looking rather slim on content and is more what I’d have expected from a free festive update like Horrors of Kairos. There’s another free content update after that, which adds the first Invincible boss, an additional UVHM rank, and at least a few new legendary weapons, alongside another freebie that adds Pearlescent rarity gear.

Outside of the Story Packs, which are the main expansions, I’m not as hopeful that I should be, knowing there are major upgrades to Borderlands 4 post-launch. It’s even more of a shame considering I think its base offerings are the best in the series, so far being sold short by a slim endgame and roadmap.