SKILL YOUR DARLINGS
While each class in the previous
games had multiple skill trees, here
they’ve only got one (though they do
unlock a second active special, like
the stabbomancer getting an option
to turn invisible instead of throw a
knife tornado). Instead, build
diversity comes from multiclassing
once you’ve hit higher levels, picking
a second class to bolt
on. My Spore Warden
multiclassed into
Spellshot, becoming a
sporcerer. I mostly just
stuck to reliable fungus
powers, though. After
playing a certain
amount of Pathfinder,
the thought of having
to galaxy-brain my way into
overpowered class interactions ever
again makes me feel ill.
On my RTX 3 080, Tiny Tina’s
Wonderlands ran at over 1 00fps most
of the time, though cutscenes are
locked to 3 0fps. The only time it
stuttered was when I’d get error
messages saying my connection to
the Shift network, which you need to
sign up to for the multiplayer and
sweet loot scored via redeeming Shift
keys, was down. Another message
saying the connection was back up
would immediately follow,
accompanied by a lurch. Oddly, it
never happened in multiplayer, but
was a regular occurrence solo.
Like previous Borderlands games,
you’ll want to push the FoV up and
the look sensitivity down. Weirdly,
the hotspot for the left arrow on
every menu slider is slightly off. You
can click on the right arrows fine, but
have to click sort of near but not
actually on the left arrows.
One last change worth noting has
to do with the overworld map. Rather
than zooming across empty spaces in
vehicles, the areas between zones are
filled by a tilt-shifted, top-down
tabletop world covered in dice,
big-headed figurines, and spilled junk
food. It’s super cute, and full of
sidequests as well as random
encounters that trigger combat
arenas when you’re walking through
patches of long grass.
That’s a Pokémon reference of
course, but a lot of the trademark
Borderlands reference-heavy humour
in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands goes for
targets that aren’t RPGs. There are
extended storylines that riff on The
Smurfs, Don Quixote and Monkey
Island, among others. The last one’s
especially baffling, since Monkey
Island was a pretty funny game to
begin with and redoing it with
Guybrush Threepwood as a skeleton
named Bones Three-Wood is
substantially less funny.
Every now and then a bit lands
with startling precision, though,
usually when your advisors – two
fellow players voiced by Andy
Samberg and Wanda
Sykes – riff on
roleplaying stereotypes.
They’ll be familiar to
anyone who has played
D&D or games like it.
He’s the one who cares
about backstory and
wants to solve every
problem via seduction;
she’s the one who knows all the rules
and how to efficiently kill everything.
Sometimes it’s painfully accurate
to the experience of tabletop RPGs,
like when the players fixate on
minor NPCs they’ve decided to
distrust for arbitrary reasons while
Tina fails to convince them to move
on. That made me wince, but I was
smiling through the pain. To its
credit, and my surprise, Tiny Tina’s
Wonderlands actually does find some
fresh angles to come at a comedy
about roleplaying.
It’s funnier than Borderlands 3 ,
that’s for sure. It helps that Will
Arnett, as the Dragon Lord, makes an
amusing villain. Because of course he
does: He’s Will Arnett. Smug
monologuing is his entire thing, and
if he never quite equals HandsomeJack from Borderlands 2 that’s only
because nobody will.RETURN TO OZ
I went back to the Borderlands 2
DLC that inspired Tiny Tina’s
Wonderlands to see how I felt about
it today, and while I missed some of
the quality-of-life features added in
Borderlands 3 that made it into Tiny
Tina’s Wonderlands – like mantling,
not having to hold down E to pick
up ammo, being able to fast-travel
from anywhere, and only having to
do side quests to be appropriately
levelled for the main questline
occasionally rather than all the
bloody time – it was a riot.
If anything, I like it even more
now. That DLC wasn’t just a bundle
of jokes about the guy who throws
his dice too hard or what it’s like to
fumble a skill check to do something
so basic you probably shouldn’t have
rolled for it in the first place. It was
also a fantasy retelling of Borderlands
2 , the cast reimagined as knights and
sorcerers like it was The Wizard of
Oz. The thing it most effectively
parodied was itself.
Meanwhile, Tiny Tina’s
Wonderlands is largely disconnected
from the Borderlands games it slots
between, with only a handful of
cameos (including Claptrap, sorry to
all of you haters). That feels like a
missed opportunity, given that
Borderlands 3 was kind of a disaster,
and a follow-up that took the piss
out of it would have had a lot of
material to work with.
It still succeeds more often than it
fails, though. That’s partly just
because of how the Borderlands
formula has been honed over the
years. While other looter-shooters
bolt on crafting systems or try to
make you care about gear levels and
repeatable activities and collecting 15
different kinds of shards (why is it
always shards?), Tiny Tina’s
Wonderlands is simply another game
of shooting bad guys with ridiculous
guns so you can take even more
ridiculous guns off their corpses. And
sometimes, in-between that, it
delivers a gag about what a mess the
average game of D&D is that hits me
like a knife in the heart.70
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
is better than
Borderlands 3 , but
doesn’t quite reach the
heights ofBorderlands 2.VERDICT
Sometimes it’s
painfully
accurate to the
experience of
tabletop RPGsMONSTER MANUAL
Meet your new targetsSKELETONS
We’re all skeletons
on the inside. Weak
to cold, because
they have no meat.SKELETON
ARCHERS
Give a skeleton a
bow, and they think
they’re hot shit.NOT SMURFS
I think they’re called
Yurfs or something.
About asannoying
as the real deal.GOBLINS
Some of them
aren’t evil. I still
hate their guts.WYVERNS
I just learned how to
pronounce their
name. Thanks!EVIL TREE
Made of evil wood.
Perfectfor making
evil dining tables.Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands