Tiny Tina’s fantasy role-playing game was actually additional content for “Borderlands 2”. Then it became a fan favorite. Now the developers are devoting their own work to the terror dwarf – and that’s really fun.
First of all: Under no circumstances should you take “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” seriously. That’s not even possible. The latest offshoot of the “Borderlands” series takes up well-known patterns and mixes them with a medieval role-playing game. This fits extremely well, as the test shows.
This is the game fans of the “Borderlands” series have been waiting for. As early as 2013, “Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina’s Storming of the Dragon Fortress” was practically the first part of the story in the form of an expansion, now it’s set “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” seamlessly as a separate game.
The “Borderlands” formula
The offshoot only has something to do with the “Borderlands” universe and the topic is quickly ticked off in the game. You are stuck with three other characters in a cave that is locked, end of explanation. To pass the time, play a game of Bunkers & Badasses, a sort of Dungeons & Dragons. Tiny Tina – seen here in the lead – is a playmaker and storyteller.
The game itself then remains true to the “Borderlands” DNA, so it’s essentially a shooter. The developers deliberately kept the story simple. You must defeat the Dragon Lord, a nasty antagonist who wants to take over the world. To prevent this, use magic and shoot your way through a wide variety of scenarios.
The game can be played alone, locally on split screen, or with multiple people in co-op mode. And even via crossplay, i.e. independent of the respective platforms on which the other players play. A game between PC, Xbox and Playstation is therefore possible.
So after you’ve created your hero from a seemingly endless selection of visual idiosyncrasies and chosen a class, the story begins. The game is divided into two main parts: the upper world and the individual instances that you visit there. The overworld is the game board where you take your character to the different locations, build bridges and interact with other characters in the story. But there is actually only collecting, rarely fighting and sometimes puzzles – always in a bird’s eye view.
Shoot, collect, run
The actual game runs in the instances and in the first-person perspective. The worlds can be great castles, peaceful villages, rugged mountain valleys or just a city. There you run, your weapon always at the ready, for a variety of tasks from place to place, fight big and small monsters and – of course – meet old acquaintances from “Borderlands” who often give you new tasks.
Of course, the hunt for the Dragon Lord also serves, as with every “Borderlands”, to constantly improve your own equipment. Because at its core, “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” is also a “loot shooter”, i.e. a game in which it is mainly about picking up what opponents drop. A correspondingly infinite number of useful and also useless weapons are of course part of it – even if your character rightly complains that firearms don’t really fit into the Middle Ages.
Even if the weapons in “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” are quite modern – the opponents are intentionally not.
©PR
Tina appears in her game again and again as a narrator who accompanies you through the story. And it is not only here that the game shows its greatest strength: it never takes itself seriously, plays with surprisingly skilful adult humor and actually makes the adventure seem like a game night with friends. Because not only the playmaker talks to you, but also the other players and even the Dragon Lord himself.
Great narration of monotonous missions
The characters are really well done, even the neighing horse queen “Arschgaul” grows on you at some point. But you’ll probably only make it to the end if you don’t mind the less than creative missions. At its core, the game consists of an endless amount of shooting, even more collecting and just as much running around. The game often manages to pack the same tasks, i.e. shooting, in such a way that you enjoy doing it, but you rarely endure it for more than a few hours at a time.
No joke: The bicorn reigns as queen in “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” and is called “ass horse”.
©PR
Technically, the title is well implemented. The typical comic book style looks great as always, and the landscape really has something to offer graphically. The soundtrack, the characters, the entire story make for a well-rounded experience if you always keep the big picture in mind and don’t see missions that tend to be very similar as tiresome work on the screen.
Conclusion “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands”
It remains to be seen whether “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” will be able to attract a new fan base and attract even more players to “Borderlands”. At its core, the game stays very true to the DNA of the series, even if it’s packaged in a completely different way than its post-apocalyptic predecessors.
That means: shoot, loot, run. Just in a different setting with some new characters and some acquaintances in funny disguises.
For long-time fans of the series, the game couldn’t have gone better: Basically, it’s exactly what has been demanded since the release of the first additional content: more of everything!
“Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” will be released on March 25, 2022 for Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC. For Windows, the game will initially appear exclusively in the Epic Games Store, with other digital shops to follow “over the course of the year,” according to the publisher. At least: The hardware requirements are not particularly high, even mid-range computers (AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel i7-4770, AMD Radeon RX 590 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060) can cope without any problems.
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