A Vaguely Familiar Fantasy Adventure

Released three years after Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands had a pretty big role to fill. It needed to be more than just another sequel in the franchise. Borderlands 3 hadn’t exactly been a favored game among the fans; for all the action that the game provided, it had a weak story and even weaker villains that dragged the whole game down. The gameplay was great, but everything else about it was lacking, and even now, years later, it still doesn’t rank as anyone’s favorite game in the series. The next game in the series, which just happened to be this standalone RPG adventure, needed to nail the formula.

But beyond that, this spinoff was also acting as a sequel to one of the most beloved expansions in the franchise. Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep was the last main expansion for Borderlands 2 (at least until Commander Lillith and the Fight for Sanctuary came out a few years later) and it not only tied up many storylines for the game (including giving the characters time to finally grieve the death of Roland) but it also had this well constructed fantasy world that remade Borderlands 2 in its own image. It was a fantastic expansion that ended up being so well loved that it was later packaged as its own standalone release soon after publication. It was that good.

So along comes Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and needless to say it had big shoes to fill. It had to live up to Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, it had to improve on Borderlands 3, and it had to show fans that the franchise was still worth paying attention to. Was it able to do that? Absolutely not. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands isn’t a bad game as it still has solid gameplay, stolen largely from Borderlands 3, along with some improvements to the story that Borderlands 3 was lacking. But it sits in a weird place where the things Borderlands 3 got wrong this game got right while, at the same time, the things Borderlands 3 got right, this game gets very wrong. It isn’t an improvement, just a different version of the flawed Borderlands 3 experience, and no amount of fantasy polish can paper over the flaws in the game’s foundation.

We join Tiny Tina and two crew members, Valentine (Andy Samberg) and Frette (Wanda Sykes), on their stranded ship while they wait for rescue. Having nothing better to do, the group decides to play a rousing game of Bunkers and Badasses, Tiny’s favorite tabletop RPG. She has a quest already set up, with the evil Dragon Lord (Will Arnett) looking to take over the world of Brighthoof, which is defended by the glorious Queen Buttstallion. Thanks to the help of Valentine and Frette’s characters, along with your own character played by the Newbie, called “The Fatemaker”, the world is saved and the Dragon Lord is defeated.

Except, on the eve of your characters getting knighted, the Dragon Lord returns. He steals the fabled Sword of Souls and uses it to behead Queen Buttstallion. He steals her head, and her power, and flies off to his evil base, the Fearamid, waiting for the players to come to him. Why? Because the Dragon Lord knows he’s just a character in an RPG, and he wants you to know it, too. He wants you to break free of the cycle of good vs. evil, battle after battle, and throw off the yoke of Tina’s adventure. But is his heart in the right place, and is this a battle where you should align yourself with the bad guy? Only your fate can guide you…

The core gameplay of Borderlands 3 is maintained here in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands because, clearly, this game was built on the same engine. You have your Fatemaker (the characters in place of the standard Vault Hunters) and you take them out through a series of interconnected zones, shooting guns, using your melee attack, and firing off special skills and spells, all while running, jumping, and climbing around the terrain to defeat bad guys. Collect experience, level up, and increase your skills and stats to be more powerful so you can do it all over again, and again, and again, until the game is over. Functionally, if you did it in Borderlands 3 you know how to do it here.

That’s both the blessing and the curse of this game because for all the little things the title adds on, and all the little options that it tweaks, it’s still functionally the same old experience you got in Borderlands 3. If the gameplay loop there entertained you then it will likely entertain you here as well. But if by the end of that game you were starting to get bored with the whole experience (as I was right around the time I entered the last expansion of my playthrough, Bounty of Blood), then you might find the experience here wears a little thin.

I think if I had played this game after a three year break from Borderlands 3, like how it would have happened if I’d been keeping up with the series properly over the years (instead of getting super annoyed with the third game in the series, setting it down, and ignoring all of it for a while) I might have liked this game slightly better. But, note, only slightly. The core gameplay is fine, and it does all the standard looter-shooter goodness fans would expect. It’s just that there’s something very off about the game, especially once you start digging in and doing anything outside the main quest line.

The game, structurally, is kind of imbalanced. Most BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. titles measure about a 60:40 side content to main content ratio. There’s plenty to do off the beaten path, but the main story is still meaty enough that you feel like you got a full experience even if you don’t do everything. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, though, is more like 80:20 side-to-main. If you ignore everything, hit just the main plot, and do only that, you’ll find your game experience is over in a few short hours. Everything else is optional side content that, frankly, you may not want to do at all.

I can hear you saying, “it’s side content so of course I’m going to do it. I’ve done all the side content in all the other games so far.” I understand as I was the same way. But Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands actively encourages you not to do that. The first reason is because most of the side content is awful. See, the main story is fantastic with solid writing, a creative story, and really great character work from all the main actors. If the game was all main story, and they found a way to carry that energy through a meatier, lengthier experience, I’d have nothing to complain about. But that isn’t the case.

While the main story is great, the side content is about as disposable as you can get. You either get terrible side stories that go on for way too long (like a quest to help Claptrap become a blacksmith, or helping The Ditcher, a terrible The Witcher parody, fight a serpent goddess), boring you with their awful writing long before you complete their lengthy plotlines, or you get the most disposable dungeon crawling experiences that add absolutely nothing by tedium to the gameplay.

The game absolutely loves these dungeon crawling quests. Someone on the overworld needs an item, so you’re sent off to a cave to retrieve it. But the cave isn’t a real map. Instead you get two to three battle arenas that spawn enemies for a while until you defeat enough, and then you’re teleported to another room, and then another, until the game thinks that quest is done. It’s rote, basic fighting with no story and no reason for existing except to make you fight. That’s it. It’s so threadbare and soulless that it was shocking the dev team thought this was good enough to include in the main game.

One would assume, though, that you need to do these quests because you have to be at the right level for the main content, but that’s also wrong. After the first couple of zones, once I realized how boring and awful the side content was, I started skipping it. Enemies and areas were scaled to whatever level I was at, and once I had a good loadout, and the skills I felt I needed to carry me through the game, I realized there was no benefit to actually increasing my experience at all. I ended up with a couple of powerful orange guns halfway in, and if I power leveled like normal they would expire and I’d have to dig up replacements (if I even could, which we’ll get to in a second). If I just avoided all the fights that weren’t required, and skipped any optional quests, my guns stayed powerful and I didn’t have to worry. So I skipped everything that wasn’t on the main quest, ignored all the enemies I could, and beelined for the endgame, enjoying the story without any fluff.

It was only in the last set of missions, the last couple leading right to the final confrontation with the Dragon Lord, that the game finally had a set level in mind for where my party should be. I was three levels short at that point, so I said, “okay, I’ll go run a couple of missions, get myself to level 30 so I’m ‘on level’ for the game, and I can finish this.” I ran to the first mission I saw, which just so happened to be that one with The Ditcher, and it took me over an hour to complete that one stupid mission. Afterwards, I said, “well, the game certainly showed me the error of my ways. I’m not doing anymore side content.” I was level 29 by that point, figured that was good enough to take on the final boss… and it was. Ignoring almost everything worked in my favor.

That’s not how a game should be, though. I loved doing the side content in the first couple of Borderlands games as exploring all the stories, the characters, and the world was a treat in and of itself. But that’s not the case in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. Here the main content is the only part I enjoyed and the second I stepped off path towards shiny side content I was slapped in the face by terrible writing, awful characters, and horrible parodies. I hated the side content here, and considering how much of the game experience is locked behind side content (there are so many side quests I outright ignored and will never go back for) that’s a lot of wasted time and space in the game.

About the only side content even worth looking for were the Lucky Dice. These are scattered around the various zones of the world and you’ll want to find a few of them because they improve your treasure drops. At the start of the game you’re only going to get white items and the occasional greens. Once you find some dice, though, that will steadily improve. It was late in the game where I finally really started getting oranges, and even then I only had six or so total through my whole experience. Finding the dice was essential. Everything else, though… not so much.

And, really, the dice were only there to “balance” the drop rate from Borderlands 3 which leaned too heavily towards oranges. I wouldn’t even really call it a fix, just a bandaid to try and repair something some fans complained about. Now to get any good gear you have to go out and wander around the world, looking in every nook and cranny just in case there’s a die there. I would say the dice are more useful than the vault symbols hidden in Borderlands 2, but only slightly, and only to fix something that, in my mind, wasn’t really broken.

Of course, the other way to get better loot was to buy it from the shops, and I did that a lot. I spent more money in the game on item vendors than I did upgrading by bullet stashes. You could spend money to increase how much you could carry… or you could buy the shiny purple melee weapon that would greatly improve your Brrzerker’s special attack (oh, yeah, I played as the Brrzerker and I did enjoy them well enough). I knew what I wanted, and it was better gear. Full stop.

So yeah… this game didn’t really hit it for me. There were parts I really liked, such as the main story, and that was a huge improvement for me over Borderlands 3. Again, if the story were longer and I got more time to enjoy that part of the game experience, I’d likely be much happier with Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. But there’s so much about this game that just sucks. It feels like a lot of strange, weird ideas slapped together to try and make a spinoff with a name people would love. Some stuff works, but much of it doesn’t, and the bad very much outweighs the good in my mind.

If I had paid full price for the game when it was sixty bucks in the Steam store I’d probably be pissed off at Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. As it is I got it for cheap, part of a whole Borderlands package that I picked up for fifteen bucks total. Considering how much of the game I enjoyed, that feels about right. The game isn’t great, but for cheap there’s just enough main story here to get you a quick money’s worth. Just don’t go in expecting to have the same kind of deep, long-lasting play experience with this game that you would have with the best of the series. This isn’t that good of a game.