Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands review: We’re not on Pandora anymore

The most immediate difference between Wonderlands and other Borderlands titles is the amount of character customization players are given. Right at the start of the game, players can choose from a variety of physical looks for their character, which go as miniscule as choosing the color of their blush and the pattern on their tunic.

Wonderlands really does feel like an RPG, and it’s brought some of the best traits of the genre along for the ride.

While the gameplay is consistently enjoyable and interesting, the story is a little more uneven. Though Wonderlands brings back a handful of characters, most of the focus is on the new cast, who are playing the tabletop game Bunkers and Badassess with Tina in the “real world” while the player adventures in the game world. I enjoy the voiceovers a little more in the full game than I did in the preview, but they swap between funny and grating a little too frequently. If you’re not into the trademark Borderlands toilet humor and meme jokes, you might find them more annoying than anything. I was a little more interested in the Dragon Lord, the new antagonist, but he doesn’t play too much of a role until closer to the end of the campaign.

While the gameplay is consistently enjoyable and interesting, the story is a little more uneven.

As usual, the funniest parts of the game are in the tooltips, enemy quips, and player character lines. I laughed more while making my character and reading the funny class descriptions than I did during the entirety of my original preview — thankfully it seems like the side zone featured in the preview is an exception rather than the rule. You can customize the type of lines your player character says during fights and while exploring, and they’re pretty funny.

As usual, it’s also great hearing enemies’ lines, particularly their death lines. Some of the best one-liners are reserved for generic enemies as they’re on their deathbeds.

The one place where the game really stumbles is when it tries to tug on heartstrings. There are a few moments during the campaign and in sidequests that are supposed to be heavy and thoughtful rather than fast and quippy. Though they’re fairly spread out, these moments are frequently unexpected and unsatisfying. During one sidequest about a man whose son had been turned into a wooden puppet, I kept waiting for the punch line to fall, but it never did. It was just supposed to be sad, which is something you don’t really see from Borderlands titles.

The main quest also has a few moments like this, but they don’t make you think nearly as much as Assault on Dragon Keep did. I’m not saying a Borderlands game can’t deal with serious themes; I’m just saying this one doesn’t really know what to do when those feelings arise in the script.

Thankfully, Wonderlands knows exactly what to do with loot. There is a mind-bogglingly massive amount of loot in this game, enhanced not only by the new melee weapons and spells, but also by the greatly increased number of equipables found during the adventure. Players can find and equip guns, spells, melee weapons, wards (which work the same as shields in previous Borderlands games), rings, class mods, amulets, and more.

It’s a dizzyingly huge amount of things to pick up, and it turns every defeated enemy into a veritable fountain of loot. While most of it is worthless, the fun of Borderlands is sifting through the junk helped to find something that’s really valuable. The item score, one of the series’ best quality of life features, makes a return in Wonderlands, and it’s a great way to quickly compare loot without having to manually compare every single stat value.

Thankfully, Wonderlands knows exactly what to do with loot.

Quests aren’t the only place you can find loot. Instead of fast-traveling to different levels and locations from a hub world, Wonderlands gives the player access to a large world map that’s absolutely chock-full of random encounter zones, sidequests, loot opportunities, dice rolls, tough battles, and more. The game actively encourages players to seek out these extra experiences, dangling loot and stat bonuses in front of them like a golden carrot.

Traveling to other locations manually is cute and makes the world feel more expansive than previous games, but movement on the map is fairly slow and clunky. The actual environments themselves are varied, and they really make you feel like you’re in a fantasy world. Enemies are pretty standard, and bosses feel like little more than bullet sponges, but that’s less important when there’s plenty of cool stuff to look at as you shoot and loot. One of Assault on Dragon Keep’s funniest features — Tina’s on-the-fly manipulation of the game world — is on full display here.

Unfortunately, Wonderlands’ decision to incorporate RPG mechanics means that one of the genre’s worst traits is on display alongside its better ones. This game is grindy — more grindy than any Borderlands game before it. While you don’t necessarily need to grind for good loot unless you’re looking for something in particular, you do need to grind for XP. The game’s sidequests and other activities are ostensibly “optional”, but if you want to even have a snowball’s chance in hell of being leveled enough to take on the next main story area, you really have to do them. These side zones are fun, but they’re more of the same combat as the campaign, so if you’re looking for something completely different, you’ll be disappointed.