Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands expands on an expansion; the Tiny Tina’s Assualt on Dragon’s Keep DLC for Borderlands 2 first used the idea of transplanting the gameplay of the Borderlands series into a tabletop RPG game being run by a teenage girl with a twisted imagination. That concept will be expanded into a full-length game in the upcoming Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Screen Rant had the chance to play a preview build of the PC version game ahead of its March 25 release.
The Tiny Tina games take place within the boundaries of a fictional tabletop RPG, called Bunkers & Badasses. The full version of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands has different classes and the ability to customize the player character, but the preview only had access to two pre-made heroes: the Graveborn and the Stabbomancer. The Graveborn comes with a demi-lich companion that fights alongside them, as well as the ability to perform powerful Dark Magic attacks at the cost of their health. The Stabbomancer might sound like a full-on melee beast, but they’re more of a sneaky assassin-type class. The Stabbomancer has passive abilities that boost their speed and melee attack strength, but it has a special skill that conjures a massive spinning blade, which the player can teleport with a button press, giving the class an excellent ranged option.
The preview build of the game was focused around a quest involving a goblin named Jars, who wishes to free her people from the control of a dragon named Vorcanar. The gameplay loop in Tiny Tina’s Wonderland will be instantly recognizable to fans of the Borderlands series, as it’s a looter shooter at its core. The player fights groups of enemies and steals their stuff, equipping any gear that has higher numbers than what the player character is already using. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands uses a fantasy world for its setting, with all of the gear that entails. Laser cannons and missile launchers are replaced with crossbows, axes, and firearms that are powered by magic. The foes also hail from the fantasy genre, with the preview featuring wyverns, skeletons, trolls, and goblins using all manner of gear.
One addition to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is Spells, which are equipped as gear and act as Action skills that can be switched out. Each class has two built-in Action Skills, but only one of them can be equipped at a time, such as the Stabbomancer having invisibility or a rotating magical blade. The Spells generally have much shorter cooldown times than the built-in Action Skills and can be extremely effective in combat, especially in situations when ammo is running low. The Spells include being able to summon meteors anywhere on the battlefield, which can collide with groups of foes and send them flying around the map.
The preview of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands featured a handful of quests contained in several connected areas, though the overworld from the main game wasn’t available in the build. The bulk of the quests involved fast-paced battles with groups of goblins, who were sometimes accompanied by heavy units (usually trolls with a boatload of hit points). All of the foes had their own gimmicks, such as conjuring tracking bombs, teleportation, or summoning fire-breathing devils to the field. The player character only has access to two ranged weapons, a melee weapon, a Spell, and the Action Skill, but these limitations work in the game’s favor.
The combat can be overwhelming with the different enemy types, so restricting the player’s options forces tactics to be switched or made up on the fly. The preview was only a few hours long, so the addictive gear-gathering loop didn’t have time to fully set in, but the combat is still awesome, and the glut of new gear thrown at the player means that there’s always new stuff to experiment with.
Like Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, the story of the game is narrated by the titular Dungeon Master, with Valentine and Frette acting as two of the players. Like a Dungeon Master performing the voices of his NPCs, Tiny Tina provides the voices for quest important NPCs (with the returning Claptrap as a notable exception), and the whole group provides a running commentary about her story and the events transpiring within it. The humor in the game is on-point, especially for fans of fantasy tabletop RPGs and their many tropes. The classic Borderlands gameplay loop is still here and as enjoyable as ever, but it’s the good-natured poking fun at dice slingers and their poorly defined realms that make the game worth experiencing.
The preview of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands proved that the expansion has been expanded and that a light-hearted DLC pack does have the potential to be spun-off into its own game. The improvised storybook world of Tiny Tina’s creation has what it takes to go from a standalone adventure into a full-blown campaign that players won’t forget, especially as it’s backed up with such a great gameplay loop that people are familiar with.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands will be released for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on March 25, 2022. Screen Rant was provided with a digital copy of the PC version of the game for the purposes of this preview.
