Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a fun fantasy romp – Review

gamepur.com:

Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon’s Keep, the Borderlands 2 DLC that inspired Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, surprised me with a heartfelt story about grief. Perhaps that experience shaped my expectations for the worse, but Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a game on the verge of telling an emotional story, but never quite commits. The story centers around Tiny’s latest campaign through Bunkers and Badasses with her new found friends Valentine, Frette, and you.

The setup is simple, the Dragonlord has been resurrected and is trying to absorb all of the soul energy in the Wonderlands, because that’s what evil villains do. While the narrative of the quest never really shifts during the campaign, the game constantly hints at more emotional beats for Tina, without ever letting them breathe. The emotional reveal comes late in the campaign and by the time it hits, it isn’t given the room it needs to really land. There are so many moments towards the end of the game where it almost deals with Tina’s grief, almost deals with Tina’s fear of being alone, and almost deals with Tina’s guilt, but instead all of that is left to be background noise for the game’s silly campaign. While it is narratively disappointing, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands does breathe fresh life into the Borderlands formula.

Borderlands is a series about absurd humor, bad jokes, and finding as much loot as humanly possible. With Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands taking place within a tabletop RPG, many of these aspects are turned up and improved in ways that wouldn’t be possible within the “real” world of Borderlands. This manifests itself in the overworld of the Wonderlands, which exists like a tabletop, with a bigheaded version of your character exploring it. This cuts down