This article contains affiliate links. If you’d like to support us, feel free to use these links 🛒 to buy books, dice, or similar products. Thank you 🙂
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a loot shooter developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games. It’s a spin-off of the popular Borderlands series and revolves around the character Tiny Tina, who was a side character in previous Borderlands games.
This article contains affiliate links where we receive a portion of the purchase price. If you want to support us, feel free to use these links to buy books, dice, or similar items. Thanks 🙂
What is Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands?
Tiny Tina leads a pen-and-paper session called Bunkers & Badasses, and players take on the role of player characters in the pen-and-paper game. Very meta! The PCs are called Fatemakers.
With Tina as Dungeon Master, the Fatemakers don’t fight through a post-apocalyptic world like in Borderlands, but through a medieval fantasy world full of magic and monsters. The game still offers a variety of (fire)arms, spells, and abilities that players can use.
The charm of the game comes from the combination of Borderlands gameplay and the theme of fantasy pen-and-paper. Role-players will recognize themselves and their dice sessions in many moments of the game.
Like the other Borderlands titles, the game has a 4-player co-op mode, so you can play with friends and master the challenges of the fantasy world together. That’s how the game is most fun, in my opinion.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands 🛒 was released in March 2022.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: Is it actually fun?
I played through the main story of the game with 3 friends in co-op. We completed some, but not all side quests and haven’t tested the DLCs yet. If we ever play through them, I’ll update this review accordingly.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is simply fun! As someone who hasn’t played the previous Borderlands titles but now plans to, the combat system immediately captivated me. The Borderlands series doesn’t take itself too seriously and convinces with over-the-top battles and weapons! While there’s usually so much happening on the battlefield that it’s hard to tell friend from foe, this doesn’t dampen the wild joy of emptying magazine after magazine into hordes of enemies! What’s also great about this gameplay is that the weapon selection never gets boring. Since enemies drop weapons and you can also get weapons from chests and vending machines, you’re always fighting with new weapons and therefore different play styles.
Additionally, as a pen-and-paper fan, I loved the setting. The setting in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is an imaginative world full of magic and monsters created by the young explosives expert Tiny Tina. She guides her players and thus us, the Fatemakers, through a game world that, like our homebrew worlds, rarely makes sense. It’s a world of knights, castles, and princesses, but full of steampunk ideas and over-the-top weapons. A rainbow-colored unicorn named Butt Stallion rules this land. You just have to love it.
Furthermore, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands incorporates classic pen-and-paper mechanics into the game: There’s extensive character creation where everyone must choose a class for their Fatemaker. Additionally, each character has various stats like Constitution, Dexterity, or Strength. This was oriented very closely to the Dungeons and Dragons template, which brings genre nerds like me much joy. There’s also an overworld in Tiny Tina’s where the party can walk around and then essentially roll initiative for encounters. Just like in our campaigns.
The dialogues and quests are also top-notch in this regard! Sometimes you notice that Tina didn’t prepare this dungeon, or that there are logic errors in her explanations. Sometimes the players kill a tragic NPC that Tina actually wanted to keep alive, and sometimes the party pursues an NPC with a blue hat very intensively who actually has no significance for the game’s main story. I know all these moments from my own sessions and I’m happy that my pen-and-paper experience is accurately reflected.
The Story (Spoilers)
The shooter’s story is also worth praising. Yes, it’s short if you don’t do all the side quests, and yes, it’s fairly simply constructed:
The story begins with the players about to defeat the Dragon Lord. They’re helped by Princess Butt Stallion with the mighty Sword of Souls. After the Dragon Lord is defeated,
But years later, the Dragon Lord returns and steals the Sword of Souls, with which he decapitates Princess Butt Stallion. He disappears and takes the sword and head back to his stronghold, the Fearamid.
On the way to the Fearamid, the Dragon Lord secretly speaks with the player and reveals that he knows exactly that Wonderlands is just a game. He also reveals that he plans to collect a large amount of soul energy to use the soul sword to break Tina’s control over the Wonderlands, as he considers her unsafe and quick to anger. Before entering the Fearamid, the Dragon Lord tells the player his backstory. He was originally Tina’s personal character when she was first introduced to Bunkers & Badasses by Roland. However, after she misused the Sword of Souls to eliminate all evil, her character became evil, which angered Tina. She vowed to only play as a Bunker Master from then on and created a world where only heroes win and the Dragon Lord as a recurring villain always loses. When the Dragon Lord realized that his actions weren’t his own, he swore revenge on Tina.
After entering the Fearamid and defeating the Dragon Lord, the players are encouraged by Tina to misuse the soul sword again and kill the Dragon Lord. However, the player uses the sword to revive Princess Butt Stallion and neutralize the Dragon Lord instead of killing him. The Bunkers & Badasses party decides to continue playing. The players are officially knighted as Knights of Brighthoof, while the Dragon Lord is sentenced to 200 years in prison for his crimes but is allowed to live.
So the story is short and simple, but somehow also heartwarming. I liked it.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: My criticisms
I have two criticisms of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: The enemies and the weapons.
The enemy selection isn’t diverse enough for my taste. For a shooter where you fight so much, it’s monotonous and tiresome to always fight the same types of enemies. The random encounters in the overworld don’t help here, as you almost always fight the same enemies on the same maps. Skeletons, mushrooms, trolls, pirates, crabs, wyverns, and snake people may sound diverse, but make almost no difference in combat. We’ve slaughtered all these enemy types countless times in large numbers. And no strategy or finesse was necessary. I would have liked more different, more challenging fights.
The many weapons are always an argument for games in the Borderlands series. In Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, they fall short in my opinion. The medieval setting would have offered great opportunities for melee weapons. Instead, Tiny Tina’s has numerous firearms and crossbows that all somehow feel the same. My friends, veterans of the Borderlands series, confirmed that the weapons in previous titles were significantly cooler. Unfortunately, Gearbox missed an opportunity here. To make matters worse, for a loot shooter, you get surprisingly little cool loot. In our playthrough, we only received one golden firearm. These legendary weapons are exactly what players look forward to most. After thousands of chests that only contained crappy green weapons, enthusiasm for chests or loot dice was no longer there. Shame!
My conclusion
Nevertheless, I can recommend Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands for friends of pen-and-paper gaming. Especially in a group of four people, it’s fun to fight through hordes of enemies in classic Borderlands fashion. Plus, you’ll love the role-playing flair. If that flair isn’t as important to you, however, you might consider playing the old Borderlands titles instead – they’re just as fun, cheaper, and have better weapons and a cooler loot feeling.
This might also interest you:
