Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands can be a John Wick power fantasy

polygon.com:

There’s a moment in any good action-RPG where things start to click. The numbers, percentages, and color-coded loot finally crystallize into a strategy. You understand both what the game is expecting from you, and how you can meet those expectations on your own terms. In Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, I arrived at that moment when I realized I could role-play as John Wick.

Gearbox Software’s newest outing combines the “guns meets Diablo” formula of Borderlands with the storytelling flexibility of a tabletop role-playing game. The result is a fever dream of explosions and narrative left turns. There are also plenty of systemic nods to classic TTRPGs, two of which — dual classing and melee weapons — upended my longstanding Borderlands habits.

As is the case with most action-RPGs, you begin Wonderlands by selecting a character class. There’s the Spellshot, whose focus on guns and magical curses can finish a firefight in seconds. There’s the Graveborn and their demi-lich companion, who sacrifices their own health to charge powerful dark magic attacks. Then there’s the Spore Warden, a long-range hunter class who can summon icy tornadoes while their bipedal mushroom friend poisons foes up close.

Although I never planned it this way, I’ve built almost identical characters in every previous Borderlands game. I preferred long-range summoners who could keep their distance while calling friends in to help. Those abilities lined up perfectly with how I tended to navigate firefights; I could summon a rocket-firing turret to cover one flank while hopping between points of cover on the other.

I assumed Wonderlands’ firefights would unfold just like those in its numbered predecessors, so I chose the Spore Warden for my first foray. I could