It’s… okay. Which is actually kind of an accomplishment given the risks Gearbox took with it.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (TTW) is a non-baseline Borderlands game with the same general conceit as Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, a DLC from Borderlands 2. The eponymous Tiny Tina is running a Bunker & Badasses (e.g. D&D) game and all of the action takes place within that setting. The first few guns are repeating crossbows and there is actually a dedicated melee weapon slot that is useful to most characters, but there are eventually regular guns, rocket launchers, etc. The grenade slot has been replaced with Spells though, which is basically what grenades have turned into in the series anyway.

What is interesting though is how… distilled the Borderlands experience is in this game.

In the mainline titles, you spend a lot of time working through certain locations, and then traveling vast distances via vehicles to reach the next biome. In TTW, the overworld is literally a tabletop you navigate your bobblehead figurine around. It didn’t take me long to realize that I actually preferred this method of getting around Borderlands – the vehicles were always the weakest part of the gameplay.

Walking in tall grass in TTW will sometimes spawn enemy figures, but if you punch them before they fully form you can avoid the random battle. Getting into these battles (or any of the side-quest dungeons) presents you with one of a half-dozen arenas filled with random themed opponents (e.g. pirates, skeletons, sand-sharks, etc). There is nothing to “explore” in these specific areas, so you just blast away until the meter says you have killed enough to move on. Again, basically Borderlands.

To be fair, there are actually a lot of traditional, hand-crafted areas of the game that do feature a lot of exploration. Not only are these areas large, they are also seeded with special loot D20s that will permanently increase your loot luck each time you find one. There are other collectible widgets too if you so desire. A few of these areas are completely optional side-quest zones, which is kind of impressive when you consider that they can easily be skipped entirely.

Another thing that worked out well was the class system. You choose a class at the beginning and see a traditional Borderlands talent tree. Once you reach a certain stage in the game though, you get to multi-class. In the mainline games, each character had 3-4 talent trees, sure, but their main ability and general role was locked down. Here you could mix and match and take some classes in radically different directions.

Having said all that, there are a few things that bring the experience down.

First, character and gear progression is locked behind the main story, rather than levels. What this meant is that I was stuck with just two weapon slots until level 15+ which just felt awful. Considering that you can pause the game at any time and swap out weapons in the menu just meant I had to constantly interrupt the action once I ran out of ammo of a particular type.

Second, TTW continues the unfortunate series tradition of punishing you for doing side-quests. Everything scales with your level, from enemies to rewards, and since side-quests can grant you unique weapons, you are either getting a neat weapon to use for half and hour or “saving” the side-quests until after the main story is completed, so you can guarantee a max-level roll.

Finally, while the quality of the Borderlands series writing is an acquired taste at the best of times, the disadvantage here is that the story doesn’t “matter.” For as widely panned as the Borderlands 3 plot is, it at least moves a narrative forward. I actually like Tiny Tina’s character (and humor) in the series but TTW doesn’t really explore anything new. “She’s lonely.” Okay. “People don’t stick around.” It’s a cave. “She’s just 13 looking for friends.” Yeah, as established in Borderlands 2 & 3, the DLC, and the Pre-Sequel.

It really wasn’t until the credits at the end that I sort of realized what was really going on with the game. No, not some extra post-credits reveal – the devs just thanked everyone for playing and explained that they built the game during the pandemic while working from home. Suddenly the whole “power of friendship” throwaway storyline, the bold design decisions (e.g. cutting the overworld, etc), and the truncated post-game support made sense. Regarding that last point, the mainline games typically allowed you to do a New Game+ equivalent so you could farm Legendary drops from specific bosses and/or negate the penalty for doing side-quests below level cap. In TTW, that doesn’t happen. Instead, you can play in Chaos arenas against random enemies waves with random buffs for your random loot. Similar, but very much not the same.

So, yeah. If you’re not a fan of the series, this won’t change your mind. If you are a fan, this is… fine.