5 Best Gearbox Software Games of All Time

These days, Gearbox Software is best known for its Borderlands series, but it has a long history before finding its biggest series. The studio started by producing several Half-Life expansions before porting several top games like Half-Life and Halo: Combat Evolved to various platforms. However, it’s also built up a solid catalog of great releases (and a few stinkers). Gearbox has, relatively recently, been publishing games as well. The list below includes games developed and published by Gearbox to give a broader picture of everything the team works on.

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Here are the five best games from Gearbox Software.

5) Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway

Before starting the Borderlands series, Gearbox was all-in on the Brothers in Arms series. I waffled between giving Hell’s Highway and Road to Hill 30 the fifth slot, but decided to go with the former because of how great it looked with Unreal Engine 3 on PC.

Compared to the previous games in the series, Hell’s Highway is a little short and a bit too easy, but it makes up for that with excellent cutscenes that popped off the screen back in 2008. It’s still a solid squad-based tactical shooter, but Hell’s Highway features a great destructible cover system that keeps you in the action. The regenerating health bar annoyed some veteran players, but all-in-all, Hell’s Highway is a worthy successor to the cult classic series.

4) Borderlands 4

Borderlands 4 is the newest game on this list, and had the unenviable task of bringing fans back into the fray after the disappointment that was Borderlands 3. Thankfully, Gearbox mostly knocked it out of the park. The team didn’t re-invent the wheel, but BL4‘s gunplay feels great, and the scaled-back humor makes the story easier to stomach.

Gearbox has also done a solid job thus far of supporting Borderlands 4 with great post-launch content. Loot shooters often live and die with their endgame, and Borderlands 4 is slowly building something that should keep players coming back for months. With two more Story Packs dropping in 2026, fans should have plenty of reasons to hop back in with their souped-up gear.

3) Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood

Earned in Blood is hard to rank. On the one hand, it is the best Brothers in Arms game Gearbox ever made. The team made big improvements to the enemy AI and gave players tons of new options for approaching each scenario, thanks to the more open-ended level designs.

On the other hand, the story doesn’t hit as hard if you didn’t play Road to Hill 30. The story in Earned in Blood is essentially filling in the gaps from the first game, so it’s hard to say how well it would’ve been received without that context. That said, I think the improvements to AI, which make stealth and distraction much more important, are enough to overcome any “issues” I might have with the story. Here’s hoping that revival Randy Pitchford promised in 2021 actually happens.

2) Risk of Rain 2

Risk of Rain 2 is Hopoo Games’ follow-up to the fan-favorite roguelike platformer. It twisted the original, turning it into a roguelite third-person shooter. Gearbox stepped in to handle publishing duties, giving it another hit to go alongside the continuing adventures of Borderlands.

However, in 2022, Gearbox fully acquired Risk of Rain 2 and has been handling development ever since. Hopoo decided to stay independent, but eventually went on a hiatus with members of the team joining Valve in 2024.

Complicated development history aside, Risk of Rain 2 is an exceptional roguelite that sold extremely well for Hopoo and Gearbox. It’s an incredibly tough co-op shooter with several different potential final bosses. Best of all? Gearbox continues to support it with new updates, including the recently launched Alloyed Collective DLC, which dropped in November 2025.

1) Borderlands 2

It’s only right that Gearbox’s most successful series tops the list. And don’t think of this as a lifetime achievement award. Borderlands 2 took everything fans loved about the original game and made it bigger, better, and much more fun.

Everything is improved: the gunplay, the story, and even the characters are an upgrade on the first game. Sure, this was arguably the start of Gearbox embracing the cringeworthy humor that plagued Borderlands 3, but it’s subdued enough that most players were able to look past it.

Simply put, Borderlands 2 is the original idea of a loot shooter at its purest, most satisfying form. Gearbox has been chasing this high since 2012, but has never been able to perfectly recapture the magic. Thankfully, Borderlands 4 was much better than BL3, so we’re at least back on the right track. Hopefully, the team can keep up the momentum this time.

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