Games like Borderlands 3: guns that roll, trees that branch

A Borderlands 3 gun is rolled, not designed. Gearbox assembles each one from parts and an element and hands you the result on a card, which is how you end up with a shotgun that grows legs and insults people while it chases them. Every few minutes the game asks the same small question: is this new thing better than the thing already in your hands? Games like Borderlands 3 are the ones that keep asking it — most shooters hand you a rifle in the first hour and never mention it again. Our Borderlands 3 page carries the live sellers for the base game.

The lowest price we logged for each game between 26 September and 30 October 2026, read on 6 November 2026. Offers before 26 September are left out because the feeds then still carried Steam accounts, console keys and region-locked keys, so the low shown on a game page can be lower than the figure here. Live prices sit on each game page.

Game	Runs or campaign	Low	Date	Store
Gunfire Reborn	Runs	$9.13	9 Oct 2026	Driffle INC
Torchlight II	Campaign	$2.54	10 Oct 2026	Gameseal
Borderlands 2	Campaign	$1.11	13 Oct 2026	Eneba
The Division 2	Campaign, then endgame	$2.70	26 Sep 2026	GreenManGaming
Risk of Rain 2	Runs	$4.65	6 Oct 2026	Driffle INC
Remnant: From the Ashes	Campaign, worlds reroll	$3.90	9 Oct 2026	Eneba
Monster Hunter Rise	Campaign, then hunts	$3.40	23 Oct 2026	GreenManGaming

Gearbox's own developer trailer, for the game these seven are measured against.

Games like Borderlands 3 that roll the gun as it drops

Gunfire Reborn

Nothing else here is this open about what it borrowed. Weapons drop at random through procedurally generated levels, each hero carries a distinct set of abilities, and four players can run it at once — the Borderlands loop stripped to the two parts people actually replay it for. Over a hundred items sit in the pool, and the game's own pitch is that you construct a build through the death cycle — so a run's shape arrives from what dropped rather than from anything you intended.

The break is structural: there is no Pandora to save. Each restart is a fresh set of levels and a fresh weapon pool, so what carries over between attempts is unlocks and knowledge, not a character sheet you keep thickening across a campaign. That makes this one the better fit for someone who wants twenty-minute sessions instead of a seventy-hour story, and the worse fit for anyone who liked having a map with named places on it. Its readings across the window above moved by about a third, so the figure in its row was a good day rather than the going rate. Destiny 2 is the game most often placed next to Borderlands 3, and it is free to play, so there is no price to put beside it here.

The cel-shaded outlines are doing deliberate work: this is the closest any non-Gearbox shooter gets to the Borderlands silhouette. (Official Steam screenshot)

Torchlight II

Runic's action RPG is built on the same promise from a different camera: randomised levels, randomised enemies, randomised loot, four classes, and co-op over the internet or a LAN. Click-to-move isometric combat is obviously not a first-person shooter, which is the whole objection — but the moment where you compare two drops and respec around the better one is identical, and Vilderan hands it to you faster than most.

Pandora, with three other people in it

Borderlands 2

Handsome Jack is the reason this one still gets recommended ahead of its sequels, but the mechanical case is simpler: it is the same four-slot co-op, the same shoot-and-loot rhythm and the same skill trees, one game earlier and far cheaper. The four Vault Hunters are a different set — Siren, Commando, Gunzerker, Assassin — and the Gunzerker's dual-wielding of any two guns in the game has no equivalent in Borderlands 3, which makes it a genuinely different build space rather than a rougher draft of the same one.

What it cannot do is feel new. If you have finished Borderlands 3 you have almost certainly been here, and it shipped in September 2012, which you notice in the presentation well before you notice it in the shooting. Taken on its own terms the second game is the strongest comedy writing the series has managed, and its row above is the cheapest on this list by a wide margin, though the window spread was wide enough that the figure shown was not a typical day.

The skill trees are narrower than Borderlands 3's, which makes a dual-wield build arrive sooner. (Official Steam screenshot)

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

Washington D.C. is the loot-shooter city nobody else built: a real street grid where factions fight over map control and the weather turns while you are in a firefight. Gear rolls, you craft toward the rolls you want, and Specializations push you into a defined role — long-range marksman, demolition expert, survivalist. Ubisoft's fights are cover-based and tactical rather than Borderlands' sprint-and-spray, so the pace is the adjustment. It is on Game Pass, which makes the Washington campaign the cheapest look on this list if you already subscribe, and the endgame starts where the story stops.

Mayhem, turned into a dial you can push

Risk of Rain 2

Items here never stop stacking, and neither does the threat: the scaling system raises you and the monsters together without limit, so a run ends when the curve finally outpaces your pile of effects. Borderlands 3 sells that escalation as Mayhem levels; Hopoo makes it the clock. Eleven survivors, more than 110 items, and Artifacts that let you switch on modifiers like friendly fire. There are no guns to compare at all — the item pool replaces the gun card entirely, which is the one thing a loot-shooter player has to make peace with.

Remnant: From the Ashes

Third-person shooting, heavy build variety and co-op for three rather than four. Its worlds are generated fresh on each playthrough, so a second run through the ruined earth deals you different maps and bosses. The difference worth knowing is pressure: it is billed as a survival shooter, and it plays like one, sending hordes at you between bosses that arrive with reinforcements of their own.

Bosses arrive with their own add waves, and the arena changes shape between playthroughs. (Official Steam screenshot)

Gear you make instead of gear that drops

Monster Hunter Rise

Fourteen weapon types, each a separate discipline, and a bestiary of monsters with their own behaviours to learn — this is the long chase for better equipment that Borderlands players already live in, pointed at a single target rather than a crowd. Capcom inverts the drop, though. Nothing rolls on the floor here: you kill a monster, carve the parts you need and build the gear deliberately, which turns the loot loop from a slot machine into a shopping list. The flagship wyvern Magnamalo is what the new storyline is built around, and that storyline gives Rise the one thing Gunfire Reborn lacks: an ending.

Fourteen weapon types means fourteen separate ways to open the same fight. (Official Steam screenshot)

Gunfire Reborn's trailer, mirrored on the GameTrailers channel rather than the developer's own.

One pick to take off Pandora

Gunfire Reborn. It is the only game above that asks the compare-the-drop question at Borderlands' own tempo, with four-player co-op and heroes worth relearning, and it does it without pretending to be a seventy-hour campaign. The exception is obvious: if you somehow reached Borderlands 3 without playing Borderlands 2, that is the better next game, because it is the same loop with the series' best villain attached. Monster Hunter Rise is the pick if the shooting mattered less than the grind.

For the wider sweep, our co-op round-up and discounted shooters cover most of the rows above, the roguelike list handles the two run-based picks, and our note on Risk of Rain 2's expansions matters before you buy that one. If you are shopping the cheapest seller in the table, read whether keyshops are safe first.

We wrote this from store pages, published reviews and our own price record, not from playing each game for this piece. Some store links on our game pages are affiliate links, so playze may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.