Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

I have a soft spot for games that understand tabletop roleplay as a feeling rather than a ruleset, so Tiny Tina's Wonderlands had the right concept to get my attention. Gearbox took the bones of the Assault on Dragon Keep DLC from Borderlands 2, blew them out into a full standalone title, and set it inside a fictional tabletop game called Bunkers and Badasses, narrated by the loud, chaotic Tiny Tina voiced with genuine commitment by Ashly Burch. The premise, a "game within a game" where the dungeon master can rewrite reality on a whim, is genuinely clever setup for a shooter-RPG. The execution is... about 70% of that promise. On the mechanical side, Wonderlands does real work. There are six classes, including the life-draining Graveborn, the frost-fuelled Brr-zerker, and the poison-spreading Spore Warden, and crucially the game lets you multiclass once you hit the midpoint, stacking two skill trees into one Fatemaker. That multiclass system is the most interesting build-variety lever the Borderlands franchise has ever shipped. Swapping grenades out for spells is a clean upgrade in feel, and melee weapons, axes, swords, and the like, land with more satisfying weight than the Borderlands series has historically managed. The overworld map, a top-down board-game perspective you use to travel between missions, is a cute bit of tabletop theming that also happens to pad out zone transitions more than it needs to. Here is where the RPG fan in me gets restless. Wonderlands wears tabletop clothing but never actually plays like a tabletop RPG. There are no dialogue choices, no branching paths, no sense that your Fatemaker has any say in where the story goes. For a premise explicitly built on the idea of player agency inside a pretend game, the absence of even rudimentary choice feels like a missed swing. The writing is sharper than Borderlands 3 but still leans heavily on relentless comedy delivery, and if Tina's brand of chaotic-loud humour grated on you in past entries, nothing here rehabilitates her. The mission design compounds the issue. Side missions in the hub areas often recycle the same arena layouts with waves of enemies, which is exactly the kind of filler-quest padding I cannot forgive after Disco Elysium showed what side content can be. The loot loop is Borderlands-faithful, for better and worse. Guns pour out at a rate that devalues every individual find, legendary items flood in at higher Chaos Levels but most of them are off-build noise, and inventory management remains the joyless spreadsheet chore it has always been in this series. The Chaos Chamber, the post-campaign endgame mode, asks you to grind through repeating mirror-run stages for incrementally better gear, and the community broadly found it underwhelming. Co-op play, supporting up to four players online, is where the shooting and the build-showing-off finds its best home. If you have a regular squad who enjoys numbers going up together, the moment-to-moment gunplay is tight and responsive enough to carry a good 20 to 25 hours without friction. For a Borderlands-series veteran who has hit diminishing returns on that formula, Wonderlands offers a fun new coat of paint but does not fix the structural cracks underneath. For a newcomer curious about the universe, it is arguably the most welcoming entry point, no prior Borderlands knowledge required. For an RPG player hoping the D&D frame means actual roleplaying: adjust expectations significantly downward before launching.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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