For too much time, Gearbox has limited the Borderlands formula of wacky guns, cheeky humor, stats-driven character building, and not-actually-cel-shaded art style to its corpo-apocalyptic, Mad Max -inspired sci-fi realm of Pandora and beyond. But rather less than a decade ago, the Dragon Keep expansion for Borderlands 2 hinted at what that formula would look like in a Dungeons & Dragons -style fantasy setting, and also the outcome was promising.
With Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, Gearbox has basically taken the idea behind that expansion, combined it using the gameplay evolutions of Borderlands 3, and transformed Dragon Keep right into a full-blown spin-off-and the outcomes are predictably mixed.
I say predictably because Borderlands has never been a series that's totally hit it out of the park. It came close with Borderlands 2, but as a far more casual fan who plays for the main campaigns plus some of the side quests, it certainly is been a series which i enjoyed but could never fully embrace. A number of my hesitation has to do with the attention roll -inducing humor, but a lot of it must do with the way that its obsession with loot has a tendency to overshadow more important things like character development or standard gameplay. In some ways, the series has vastly improved through the years, but it is always fallen just lacking the objective for me personally.
Likewise, the overall issues that I have with the Borderlands series as a whole are still contained in Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. As the entire premise from the series is dependant on the idea of loot there being a shit-ton from it, the majority of that loot winds up being virtually worthless and feeling a lot more like a burden that takes up space inside your inventory instead of useful bits of your arsenal. Wonderlands didn't have to go that route, seeing as its premise is that you're playing a TTRPG called Bunkers & Badasses with Tiny Tina becoming the Bunker Master. If there was ever a time to reassess the series' legacy issues, it might have been in a spin-off such as this, but Wonderlands doesn't make the most of that opportunity.
Maybe asking Gearbox to consider beyond the piles of colourful loot for a meaningful reward product is an excessive amount of for any Borderlands spin-off, but we could have at least gotten a better way of managing all of the crap you earn that you don't want. If there is a method to simply cash-in the weapons you don't want from the inventory screen, that would go a long way. Instead, you still have to stop by a vending machine any time you want to get eliminate loot without wasting it. Even more annoying is always that a cosmetic item you choose up will just take up space inside your inventory if you don't make sure to “claim” it, which requires you discovering it inside your backpack and pressing the appropriate confirmation button. Why not let players automatically claim cosmetics once they pick them up and only put them in the inventory when the items are duplicates that they can sell?
On another hand, this series is still online resources giving players loot that really feels meaningfully different when it comes to gameplay. Sure, you might have to dig through tons of garbage before you decide to discover the weapons that click, however when you finally do, the rewards feel worth it. When I rolled credits on the main campaign, I was using an assault rifle that shot bursts of electricity, a submachine gun that fired beams of poison goop, a shotgun that unleashed beams of dark magic instead of buckshot, along with a rifle forum that used buckshot instead of single rounds. As always with a Borderlands game, I felt such as the loot I selected to make use of was really unique and, more importantly, mine. Combine that with the other gameplay advancements that Borderlands 3 introduced like sliding and mantling, and you have the very best FPS action within the series to date, if not appreciably different from its predecessor.
Other aspects of the Borderlands formula happen to be slightly transposed to fit an illusion theme. Rather than grenades, you can equip spells that you simply shoot out after a cooldown, which you'll reduce by leveling up the requisite attribute. There's also a slightly bigger emphasis on melee combat, with weapons like axes, swords, and maces that have different abilities and stats. Wonderlands also expands the series' traditional class system from four Vault Hunters to six different classes: Brr-Zerker, Clawbringer, Graveborn, Spellshot, Spore Warden, and Stabbomancer. Even more interesting is that, fairly early in the sport, you have the opportunity to take on a second class as the subclass, allowing you to combine different skills and passive perks from both classes' skill trees. As someone who find the Graveborn and Spore Warden classes (a “Morticulturist”), I additionally had use of two different AI companions to come me around who poisoned and cursed enemies for me personally, which was quite useful as a solo player.
What's disappointing about Wonderlands' different classes-and its RPG system in general-is how little it felt like an actual tabletop experience. The spells I acquired as loot weren't only at my Morticulturist build, and so i would frequently get spells that did elemental damage that weren't suitable for my concentrate on dark magic and poison, both in relation to my stats and the type of character I had been performing. I definitely felt like I was in a position to create a cool Borderlands build, but I did not really feel like I had been totally able to roleplaying. Likewise, as the character creator was a lot more open and customizable than it has been around past games, I never felt like I had been able to make the sorts of choices you'd expect to cover the cost of when playing a Dungeons & Dragons -inspired project. Was I expecting Larian Studios-esque depth when it found making choices like a character? Away from all-but I had been expecting to at least have some influence on the plot. That, sadly, wasn't the situation.
Really, this is the biggest disappointment with Wonderlands: It doesn't at all seem like the genre of RPG that it's using for context. The idea of playing a tabletop game narrated by Tiny Tina (played excellently by Ashly Burch), where the rules around the globe are totally subject to her whims and fancies, is actually fun, especially with humor that feels less referential and much more character-driven of computer did in Borderlands 3. But there's not even dialogue options or something that provides you with the sensation like you're determining which way the storyline goes. There are sendups of certain fantasy tropes, having a unicorn named Butt Stallion (a weird holdover in the Dragon Keep expansion) acting as the queen and killer skeletons all very much conscious of their station in (un-)life. However, the fantasy aesthetics around the globe get stretched quite thin, especially in a mid-game that seems awkwardly obsessed with swashbuckling pirates-not the type of motif you usually see inside a fantasy world. The only real change which makes Wonderlands feel a lot more like a TTRPG is the overhead Overworld map that you employ to travel to each new location, but even that simply feels a lot more like a basic video game map than the usual tabletop game, whilst making it more annoying and time-consuming to get into the experience. Thankfully, the various side quests-at least the ones I played-are all well-written and fun, even when they are precisely the kinds of quests you'd expect from a Borderlands title.
In some ways, the lack of player choice does fit the general arc from the story. Framed as a Tiny Tina -hosted “Bunkers & Badassess” session, the player-known only as the “Fatemaker”-must defeat the Dragon Lord (voiced by Will Arnett) alongside party members Valentine (Andy Samberg) and Frette (Wanda Sykes). However, as the story progresses, the field of Tiny Tina's fantasy and her reality begin to converge, and questions of what this means to be in control as a player in a game start to pop up. It never gets too outlandish, but it also doesn't invariably nail the subtle emotions or totally navigate the sticky layers of meta-narrative that it creates. Ultimately, the storyline seems almost hindered because it's a spin-off of the spin-off, though Burch and Arnett do turn in fantastic performances, with Samberg and Sykes very rarely showing more than middling enthusiasm for the material.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is fun in all the ways that Borderlands is fun, and Gearbox's talented environmental artists also got to stretch their wings a little bit and test out settings you might not find in a mainline entry. Ultimately, players who're perfectly content with more Borderlands will find a lot to like about Wonderlands, but there definitely seems to be a missed opportunity to inject more actual role-playing into this action role-playing series.
