Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is the most recent installment in the Borderlands franchise. Though nominally a spin-off, it is closer to the Pre-Sequel in its role as an alternate viewpoint on the main characters that uses the same core gameplay principles as the main franchise (unlike Tales from the Borderlands).
Wonderlands is very similar in feel and style to Borderlands 3, though it has some minor incremental improvements. Very little feels like a step backward, though there are a couple of small nitpicks.
Overall, though, Wonderlands gets more right than it gets wrong, and fans of the franchise will find more to like. Those choosing it as their first entry to the series will probably find themselves lost when trying to follow the story, because it relies heavily on knowing the characters of the previous games.
The scenic vistas of the Wonderlands are a major lure back into the game whenever I step away.
As a Borderlands game, Wonderlands fits firmly in the looter-shooter space. There are some alterations made to the core mechanics, but they’re incremental rather than radical changes.
And that works. If you like Borderlands and you’re a manic completionist of the series like I am, you’ll probably like Wonderlands. The shift to fantasy theming on weapons doesn’t mean that they lack the oomph of guns, and the addition of a robust melee mechanic is a welcome addition to the series—they use a new slot and don’t take away the four-guns formula of previous titles.
My experience with almost full-completion has taken me to about 35 hours of playtime on the game. There are a couple side quests that I have not yet completed, and I have not finished all the collectibles, but I’m probably at about 80% on the collectibles (if not more) and have two or three side quests left.
Wonderlands feels faster than its predecessors, with a lot more of an episodic focus to its content. More of its side-quests feel like actual full-fledged storylines, which is where past Borderlands games have sometimes lacked consistency.
Some of this comes from the fact that a lot of the game has optional areas. You’ll hit the level cap well before hitting the end of the game’s main storyline if you wind up going through the game in a completionist style.
This is one place where the game shows its limits compared to predecessors. 40 levels of character development go pretty quick, and the new character system has cool ideas while also shooting itself in the foot.
The addition of attributes to the game, which offers a secondary performance layer so you can customize and tweak things, gives a lot more options to diversify play styles. As I stated in my first impressions, these are actually significant—messing around with them more leads me to conclude that there are no attributes that don’t have a significant impact on the game.
However, the character skill trees can feel unimaginative. The inability to respec the primary skill tree makes little sense, since the player character is not defined by their role as the named characters in the previous Borderlands games have been, and there is relatively little incentive to replay on a new build—especially because the collectibles are lost between play-throughs. Keeping these could help players speed through early content.
The mythic ranks, which are earned after hitting the level cap, feel a lot crunchier than previous Borderlands’ mechanics, and let you feel significantly more powerful after hitting the level cap.
However, the looter-shooter element falls away. If the core gameplay were less satisfying, I might be more bothered because I got my current favorite weapon not all that long after hitting level 40 and have since played another five or six hours. An end-game system lets players re-enchant weapons, adding random bonuses, but this is an update of the Anointed system from Borderlands 3. Unfortunately, since items only get one enchanted effect and the system is truly random, the odds that it offers meaningful options are nil. It’s a nice thought, but poor execution.
Especially because Wonderlands involves weapons built from random parts, it might be nice to offer the option to customize weapons in more significant fashions. The underlying system works by picking parts for weapons from dozens of options, and all that would be required is to add a UI.
Alternatively, the adoption of ARPG-derived sockets with player-chosen effects would be a neat way to handle this without the randomness of rolling irrelevant effects on items. This could even be an end-game addition to give players more options as they enter the Chaos mode (returning from Borderlands 3).
One unfortunate trend of Wonderlands is that it borrows quite heavily from the Borderlands franchise to the point of repetition.
The armory is the only point where I think this is a problem—the light platforming, the visual style, and the gunplay all hold up.
But the weapons are, frankly, somewhat played out. And that’s a sort of whiny complaint, because Borderlands probably has as much weapon diversity as any other game out there, but the really imaginative stuff is rare or sub-optimal (though loot rolls mean that you’re likely to get stuck with a certain amount of sub-optimal stuff even from the better things that drop). You can get into a groove with a particular style through the entire game and still appreciate the action, but it’s straightforward play and doesn’t open up a lot of cool opportunities in the same way other shooters with more distinctive and scripted weapon-sets can use their arsenals to inform level design.
However, the saving grace is the new focus on melee and spells.
Spells replace grenades, and Borderlands already had some interesting ideas there. Now they’re on a cooldown instead of using ammo, and they have more support effects. I played as the Spellshot class, sacrificing an action ability for a second spellbook, because I enjoyed the dynamic they added so much.
Melee weapons feel meaty. It’s not strategic swordplay by any means, but giving things a good thwack has been a hallmark of the series.
Now it’s just official. Good melee weapons offer a lot of opportunities, including vampiric swords, swords that buff spell or ability damage, and just pure frontal assault behemoths.
I enjoyed playing that trifecta of gun-spell-melee combat out in a more dynamic manner than I’d played with guns, grenades, and melee attacks in the previous Borderlands games, and it added to the experience and let me think more about how I tackled particular situations or enemies.
A small but significant portion of Wonderlands differs from traditional Borderlands content because it is arena-style combat in specialized areas (linked by portals and the over-world). Although these lack some of the magnificence of the larger areas, they offer a rapid-fire approach to combat that has less of an exploration bent.
At first, I had mixed thoughts about these, but they grew on me over play. The factor that ultimately won me over was that it gives a lot more to the action-combat-maneuver part of the gameplay loop than the larger sections.
It also means that you can encounter different enemy types, spawn configurations, and so forth as opposed to the more static environments of the main sections of the game.
Wonderlands also has its own specialized end-game mode, Chaos Chambers. While these are pure combat encounters and lack the story element of the main game, they’re still satisfying arenas to fight enemies in. Previous Borderlands games have had their own end-game and late-game arenas, but these feel more vivid and rotate through the arenas.
The Chaos Chambers are superior to the over-world random encounters and mini-dungeons because they add on mutator-style gameplay and throw in all the different options for locations and enemies instead of just the local ones to keep fights fresh.
The over-world system is interesting. My first impressions were perhaps a little more positive than the system deserves.
On one hand, the Overworld is beautiful and lets the Borderlands graphical style shine. It’s also home to many references to tabletop roleplaying, and when it’s tied into the story, it has merit.
But the mechanic itself is a little tedious. Although it probably never takes more than a minute or two to get to one section of the over-world to any other section, thanks to a robust network of shortcuts and the ability to use a town portal to travel between Brighthoof—the hub city of the game—and your most recently visited location.
Even the camps and crypts scattered around the map lose value at the end of the game, since the Chaos Chambers offer the same experience with an added punch.
A result is that the Borderlands 3 style fast-travel system may be superior. Fortunately, it has returned, and it has its own wonderful illustrated map. For actually wrapping up collectibles, this is a lifesaver, but it’s also buried where people who don’t know how or where to look might miss it.
Writing has always been hit-or-miss for the Borderlands franchise. Some characters, like Claptrap, are very much love-to-hate at the best of times, and there have been several missteps and other complaints with the setting.
Fortunately, Wonderlands gets around most of this. With new characters and a focus on more referential humor rather than over-the-top character designs, the story is much more centered on the player’s adventures without relying too much on gimmicks and forced humor.
This is a strength of Wonderlands, and one of my complaints about the end-game is that the absence of the story removes some of the fun, even where it was relatively unobtrusive on the first time through the game.
The one caution I would make is that obviously, Tiny Tina is the central character for the whole story. I know some people find her a little annoying, though the character has developed and matured over the last couple games and she undergoes a major arc in Wonderlands.
One of the common complaints with the humor in previous Borderlands games is that it’s often pretty cheap—and even though Borderlands hasn’t been known for pushing the boundaries with the most crass humor it tends toward toilet humor and zaniness.
Wonderlands is zany, but it treats the subjects of its jokes with a little more respect.
It rarely beats dead horses—where it has a longer referential humor, like a version of Don Quixote who appears round half-way through the story, it makes it much easier for players to skip ahead—and the sort of humor which may go too far winds up relegated to the side-quests, making it possible to avoid overdone references.
However, most of the references are shorter and occur in passing.
And Wonderlands treats its source material—the tabletop roleplaying games that inspire it—with enough seriousness to be funny.
The humor is never random for the sake of randomness. There are inheritances from other Borderlands titles, such as Butt Stallion, which hark back to some of the older Borderlands’ less mature and balanced approaches to writing, but these don’t intrude into the enjoyment of the more elegant attempts at humor elsewhere.
And the references are on point. It’s not exactly a secret that a lot of programmers and writers play tabletop roleplaying games, but Bunkers and Badasses (another Borderlands 2 inheritance which occurs only a couple times in the story itself—although Tina is referred to as the “Bunker Master” throughout) has the feel and charm of all the adventures you would expect, from the classic days of “I attack the gazebo” to more modern references, puns on notable franchises, and classic roleplaying table issues (such as the conflict between roleplaying and “rollplaying”).
It works.
While some new characters come up and develop throughout the story, Wonderlands relies on showing some familiar Borderlands characters in a new light (Claptrap, fortunately, returns only for a few scenes), especially through the characters they inspire within Tina’s universe.
A lot of the characters are pretty minor and only pop up once or twice, but the collectibles throughout the game tell some drawn-out narratives and a lot of the memorable characters are notable.
As in Borderlands 3, the storytelling has moved toward a more sophisticated style, and the Dragon Lord—the chief antagonist of Wonderlands—comes across as affably evil and has a dramatic arc of his own. Further, the actual relationships between characters make sense, with the conflicts between the protagonist, their allies, and the Dragon Lord all making sense within the narrative—whereas previous antagonists often felt too comic-book villainy (even given Borderlands’ graphical style).
The voice acting is top-notch, and a lot of the side-quests have fully developed dramatic arcs for their characters beyond the typical Borderlands humor and subversion of standard fetch-quest, escort-quest, and fight-quest formats.
Another strength of Wonderlands is that it has more thematic cohesion than some of the previous Borderlands games. It’s all a little whimsical and wondrous, so there’s no effort to shoehorn in a pathetic or “trying too hard” moment among a more serious milieu.
Wonderlands does a great job of making things work out together.
Not only does it start story arcs and develop them neatly, but most of the time it’s telling you a story that comes together in a neat package. It’s not exactly fine art (though there are some strong emotional moments, especially if you can overlook some of the zaniness) but it’s clear that the writers are professionals.
The meta-game framing device works out really well here, and Wonderlands takes full advantage of the storytelling format its framing device permits. Tina will ret-con or narrate things and they pop into existence, a delightful use of the technical options that video games offer that a more mimetic approach to storytelling misses out on.
Its ability to use its game world and storytelling together is fantastic, and it uses visual storytelling, voice acting, and the plot in perfect unison.
If we measure the quality of a story by its ability to suspend disbelief, it seems odd that a wisecracking, fourth-wall breaking, meta-narrative driven game would have such strengths, but the characters and plots achieve a life of their own.
Some of this is because of a very strong archetypal foundation of the story, but the reliance on tropes and conventions so dear to audiences doesn’t hurt.
I played Wonderlands on PC. I have a gaming laptop with a 11th generation Intel Core i7 and a RTX 3060 and was running from an internal m.2 SSD.
The hiccups with the Epic Store have largely gone away, and I found it to be a perfectly normal install and play experience.
Mouse and keyboard controls work well, though I didn’t test controller options. As usual, a fairly broad range of settings is available.
Graphically, Wonderlands is far superior to its predecessors.
And it doesn’t rely on any costly performance-draining technology to do this. The comic-book style of Borderlands carries over to the fantasy settings of Wonderlands perfectly—in fact, Wonderlands offers much more in the way of colorful visual spectacles, giving the universe a much better chance to shine in the distinctive style of the franchise.
On my machine, Wonderlands seems to perform a little better than Borderlands 3. This might be because of some added maturity to some of the tech in the pipeline, but as a PC game, it has relatively modest requirements for 2022.
I noticed some muddy textures while playing, but they popped in fairly quickly. This was primarily a loading issue and wasn’t consistent. A few seconds after the level loaded in, the thing worked fine, and they may have resolved it in a post-launch patch because I only noticed it the first couple of days I was playing.
I played at 4k with 50% rendering resolution, and the game looked great and felt smooth throughout.
More color and whimsy make Wonderlands stand out from its predecessors in a good way.
I didn’t test out the multiplayer options for Wonderlands. As usual, it has a co-op drop-in setup with cross-platform play, with options for level-adjustment to play with friends who have characters at different levels of progress.
I noticed I was connecting and disconnecting from Gearbox’s network services while playing, though this seems to have been a launch issue and either stopped happening or I stopped noticing it by the time I wrapped up the campaign a few days after launch.
I don’t know if that would’ve shut down a multiplayer session, but it’s worth bringing up. The server browser seems to permit direct LAN play, though probably not cross-platform, so it may be possible to work around any network issues that way.
I didn’t encounter any serious or game-breaking bugs while playing Wonderlands, but there were three issues worth mentioning.
The muddy textures I mentioned before were noticeable, but bearable and something that you basically can expect from games, and is not so much a bug as a performance limitation.
I did encounter audio/closed caption issues, with lines being skipped during dialogue. This only happened a few times throughout the game, but it was noticeable enough to be worth mentioning here.
The only bug that was serious was a saving issue where the autosave function (which occurs basically every time the player picks up any items, and also when anything story-related happens) started taking a noticeable amount of time—usually just a second but sometimes as long as five seconds.
Closing and restarting the game fixed this.
Wonderlands is a fitting addition to the Borderlands franchise. While it’s shorter than the other games, it’s certainly not the shortest game to command a full price-tag, and it feels like a full installment in the series.
With that said, it has the Borderlands flavor, and while a lot of the most childish or grating notes are inheritances from Borderlands 2 and probably couldn’t be avoided in their entirety given the existing lore that Wonderlands builds onto, it won’t appeal to everyone.
It also is very much for fans of Borderlands and tabletop-roleplaying games (or fans of those sorts of nerd comedy culture things that have become more popular recently), and if you don’t have backgrounds with the series and what Wonderlands references it will probably feel a little more flat.
