Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands review – Tolkien-esque looter shooter

metro.co.uk:

The first standalone Borderlands spin-off is a loving tribute to tabletop gaming but is it still an entertaining action role-player?

We don’t think we’ve ever seen a publisher and developer less interested in promoting their own game than with Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. It came out last week to absolutely zero fanfare, with the only reviews being, inexplicably, for the PC version. We weren’t sent a PlayStation 5 copy until the day of launch and as we type this there are only five others on Metacritic; so it wasn’t surprising to find that the game did so poorly in the weekly retail charts it ended up being beaten by Kirby And The Forgotten Land.

All of this points to Wonderlands being a complete stinker, that all concerned wanted to forget about as soon as possible, but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s an overblown Borderlands 3 expansion, that gets old long before it has a chance to justify its outrageous asking price, but it’s still an above average co-op shooter that should’ve been an easy sell to Borderlands fans everywhere.

The concept behind Wonderlands is inspired by Borderlands 2 expansion Tiny Tina’s Assault On Dragon Keep, from 2013, which is now available as a standalone game and is basically the same idea on a smaller scale. Which is to say it’s Borderlands but set in a fantasy universe, with spells and crossbows, and the conceit that you’re actually playing a tabletop role-player similar to Dungeons & Dragons, where Tiny Tina is the Dungeon Master.

Considering how obnoxiously unfunny much of Borderlands 3 was, we feel we should already be sick of Tiny Tina, but we’ve always found her one of the more tolerable main characters. Her shrill voice performance can be grating but there’s an emotional vulnerability beneath