In Tiny Tina’s most recent Bunkers and Badasses campaign, the nefarious Dragon Lord looms over the peaceful kingdom of Brighthoof. With good and evil hanging in the balance, it is up to the fatemakers to take a stand against him. Embarking on an epic quest of mischief and mayhem, players craft their own fatemaker to fight against the forces of darkness and save the day.
“Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” is a hilarious and action packed looter-shooter adventure that manages to adapt and build upon the established format of “Borderlands.”
To start my adventure, I was given a character sheet to develop my fatemaker and choose my starting skills. I decided to go with the spellshot, a class that focuses on big magic damage, which allowed me to have more spells active at once than other classes. After reaching a certain level, I was able to unlock the ability to multi-class, meaning I could gain access to a secondary class tree on top of my skills as a spellshot. I spent some time checking out a few of the other classes, such as the clawbringer that gave me a wyvern companion who flew around attacking enemies and the graveborn that focused on health-based dark magic. These classes can be switched out at any time. This makes trying new things incredibly easy, and it was always exciting to gain another point to spend on getting more powerful.
As for the world itself, Tina has crafted an expansive table top filled with dungeons and different locations to visit. This board can actually be explored and served as the way to travel from place to place as my character took on the persona of a game piece. The levels were quite interesting to delve into, whether it be a sunken city inhabited by humanoid snakes or a castle besieged by a skeleton army.
With Tina providing narration as the Bunker Master, she also has the power to manipulate the environments to better fit the story she wants to tell as well. For example, one of the characters in the game mentioned that the forest wasn’t “dank” enough, so Tina swapped out nearly all the trees for towering mushrooms, all in real time. “Borderlands” has always been over the top, but the setting of the Wonderlands has really let the developers go all out with the environments and enemies, an addition I appreciated.
It wouldn’t be possible to talk about “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” without going over the loot. The amount of loot in this game is staggering, with hundreds upon hundreds of guns, swords and other equipment and gear. Not only is loot strewn about the lands within treasure chests and hidden areas, but it is also dropped from defeated enemies, meaning that there was an almost constant influx of new tools. Fans of the past “Borderlands” games will already be familiar with this, and I think that new players will be overjoyed with how many different weapons there are to use.
For some, the real fun of these types of games comes after reaching max level and finishing the game, and I’m happy to say there is plenty to do post-credits. There are of course more quests to pursue, as well as the ability to wrap up any collectibles you may have missed, but the real end game lies within the chaos chamber and the myth ranks.
Once I fully leveled my character, instead of letting the experience go to waste, it went towards myth ranks instead. These opened an entirely new skill tree to upgrade that gave out perks account-wide, meaning that these bonuses would be applied to any character I used that had reached max level. I loved this system because it incentivized me to keep playing beyond the main story to see just how powerful I could become.
I would need to be powerful to take on the chaos chamber, which is a new mode that is unlocked after finishing the final story quest. This is a challenge dungeon that has both curated and random rooms, with varying levels of difficulty. After besting the challenge, I was rewarded with a room that allowed me to target specific loot, meaning I could run the chaos room multiple times if I was looking for a certain item. This helped out with reducing the randomness of gear acquired, and helped to fine tune the perfect build.
I had such a blast playing “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” as I became the ultimate fatemaker, ridding the land of evil for sweet loot. The banter between characters is a bit cheesy, but there are some genuinely funny moments and situations that I found myself in. Ashly Burch also deserves recognition for her amazing voice work as the emphatic and sometimes unstable Tiny Tina, and it was great to see her at the center of the story. I believe this game is a great place to get into the “Borderlands” series because, while it is certainly inspired by the gameplay of the previous entries, this game stands on its own in terms of story and characters. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I think this was an excellent spin-off of a well established series that serves as a great jumping in point for both new and returning players.
