Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands brings one twist to Gearbox Software’s looter-shooter series: turn the series known for barren wastelands into a full-on high fantasy one. It’s a cool twist, cool enough that they’ve done it before as a Borderlands 2 DLC (which is now available as a standalone “one-shot” title).
So, what do Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands have to offer then?
Well, a lot, apparently.
This being a standalone spin-off rather than another DLC allows the devs to really stretch out the high fantasy (via tabletop role-playing) theme to greater lengths and heights, which includes giving the core Borderlands formula some much-needed shakeup.
As part of a preview event, we got to sample a portion of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands taking place solely in the optional region of Mount Craw. We also got to sample two of the six classes: Graveborn and Stabbomancer, starting at level 9 (the level cap at launch will be 40, so this is at an early-ish part of the game).
It’s the same region that you can see in this new 20-minute gameplay overview trailer:
This shouldn’t be a surprise: Wonderlands plays fundamentally the same as Borderlands. You still have four weapon slots to equip, randomly generated guns to loot with abilities defined by what manufacturer it is and what attachments it has, and two supporting skills on the shoulder bumpers (if you’re playing on a controller). One is the action skill, and the other replaces grenades: magic spells.
If you’ve played Borderlands before, Wonderlands will feel familiar right out of the bat. The controls, in particular on the controller, is as tight as you could get them to be. As you would expect from the series.
The gameplay loop is also similar. Expect to go from one open-ended area to another, each bringing in a wave of enemies needed clearing. They probably drop good loot so better get shooting.
And that’s fine. That bit is still greatly executed, and as fun as ever.
What’s New In Tiny Tina Wonderlands?
Melee Weapons and Magic Spells
But if you dig deeper into the details, then you notice the many little tweaks that have been made thanks to the new theming it has. There’s now a melee weapon slot (huzzah!) to equip maces, hammers, swords and “bonksticks”.
The melee action also feels a bit different. There’s a swinging animation so your hits don’t connect instantaneously, but also makes melee more satisfying when it lands and does big damage.
Magic spells come in quite a variety, including the way its cast, which requires getting used to. Some spells only need a button press and it will home to a target. Others work as an area-on-effect centring on your person (perfect to ward off pesky enemies that rush straight into you). Some even have extra charges, or let you hold down the button to channel it longer and make it more powerful.
Spells don’t use ammo but have cooldowns like action skills are. Action skills and magic spells have noticeably short cooldowns, so you can pop the two abilities a lot more often than you would in a normal Borderlands title.
New Classes
The classes are also an interesting new change. Wonderlands lets you create your own character, the Fatemaker, and assign one starting, permanent class and later pick a secondary class.
This change means you have six different classes to choose from (compared to the standard 4 of past Borderlands games). But each class in Wonderlands only have one skill tree instead of three in past games, so you only get six total skill trees (compared to 12 in past games).
I felt a bit worried at first, but then again, in past games you would usually divvy up points into two of the three available skill trees to invest in (and maybe get put one or two points on the third). So there is still potential for build variety, it feels like.
Each class can pick one of two action skills. The Stabbomancer for example can throw spinning daggers that do area-of-effect damage, or go full rogue with the ability to enter stealth mode for a period of time at the cost of lesser critical hit damage.
Stabbomancers can be built to be massive elemental status damage dealers (making use of spells and elemental weapons- the “mancer” bit of stabbomancer), or be super quick with enhanced movements, and a skill that collects stacks from gun damage that can be spent to deal stronger damage with melee (the “stabbo” bit).
Either way, if you go on Stabbomancer, you’ll be getting used to seeing the red “CRITICAL” texts a lot. If it’s not, then there’s something wrong going on.
Meanwhile, the Graveborn is a class for more advanced players that makes use of health points as an extra resource for damage dealing. The first action skill sacrifices HP for a burst of damage, in the form of Dark Magic, which means it’s also leech health. If you trigger it right in the middle of a good crowd the Graveborn walks out unscathed (and healed up) while everyone else lays dead.
The other action skill heals you to full health, but during the whole activation your HP will trickle down but all the damage you do leeches health. And if you ended up with 0 HP while it’s still active, you’ll go into a short period of invincibility.
So you can make Graveborns where their gameplan revolves around converting HP into firepower and hang back so you don’t get shot and lose them, or go gung-ho and up-close until near death where you can pop an ability to get them all back. Very different playstyles should you plan builds around your action skill.
Graveborns are one of three classes that can have a companion. The Graveborn’s Demi-Lich companion just hovers alongside you dealing some damage on its own. For now it’s hard to tell how effective companions are, at least you can interact with them. The Demi-Lich is quite the chatty little floating skeleton head.
Also, like a tabletop RPG, you can also invest in “hero points”, attribute points that bring passive improvements. Points in Strength gives you critical hit damage bonuses, while points in Intellect makes your Elemental Status damage stronger. So you can build your character in that way as well, with one hero point dolled out alongside one skill point when you level up.
How potent the class synergy is from multi-classing remains to be seen. But at least in the early game you do get to make different builds centring around your preferred action skill, despite only having access to one skill tree.
New Guns
There are also new guns. They exist in the same six gun types (pistol, SMG, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, launcher), but new parts have been added to the RNG pool to create more guns (some of which are fantasy flavoured) available to be looted in Wonderlands.
All the gun manufacturers from Borderlands 3 return, albeit in a different, more high-fantasy name (unless it’s Torgue) and all their manufacturer quirks are carried over as is. Blackpowder (the Jakobs equivalent) still fires as fast as you can pull the trigger and crits can ricochet, for example. There are however new manufacturers for the new gear type like melee weapons and rings.
I found pistols and assault rifles that can shoot crossbow bolts instead of bullets. Consecutive bolts struck on the same enemy will deal more damage- incentivising you to close down one target at a time and go for the kill. Expect new modifiers like this in the new guns you can find in Wonderlands. Also, gun part variety has also been expanded. I found a Stoker (Vladof) sniper rifle that can have a shotgun attachment, instead of a launcher attachment as seen in Borderlands 3, for example.
Tabletop-RPG High-Fantasy Themeing
The region we got to explore is pretty meaty for an optional location. It took me two hours to complete the four quests available. Two of which revolve around helping the goblins to rise up against being oppressed, as part of the Goblins Tired of Forced Oppression. The goblins want to GTFO. Yep, the typical Borderlands humour is still in place in Wonderlands.
The game makes use of its high fantasy (via tabletop role-playing) to good use. The whole UI is a bit more pointy-er and bold thanks to the change of theme. Second Wind has been renamed Death Save to be more on-brand with the many tabletop RPG references.
Borderlands’ cel-shaded look just blends well with the high fantasy themeing, it comes off natural. Though I fear that in going for high fantasy, the game might be too faithful and ended up looking like boring, generic high fantasy.
Mount Claw plays the theme straight- there were no weirdly out-of-place cans spewing a river of spilt soda or other random wacky-ness being injected here. I hope other locations don’t play it too safe like this. The charm of the Borderlands universe is that it can be gruesome, serious and goofy all at the same time.
New characters Valentine and Frette are playing Bunkers & Badasses with Tiny Tina (still tiny, so this is pre-Borderlands 3) as the Dungeon Master, and they will bicker and give some meta-commentary about the game from time to time.
One quest, in particular, leans into the usual tabletop RPG nature of allowing players multiple ways to solve a problem but you probably want to use the “seduce” option when available. Just to see the trio’s reactions.
Your Fatemaker also talk. The female Graveborn and male Stabbomancer we played have slightly different lines, similar to how Borderlands 3 did it. As revealed before, you can choose your Fatemaker’s personality, which I assume has to govern what lines they’ll say in conversations. (We didn’t get to take a look at the character creator.)
Closing Thoughts
Overall, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is really what you would expect from the title: a fantasy-flavoured Borderlands. It gets to shake up the series’ core formula, and it definitely is making bigger and bolder changes compared to what Borderlands 3 brought to the table last time.
But fundamentally, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is still a Borderlands title. The gameplay loop of watching numbers popping off as you whittle away enemies’ health, numbers grow bigger and bigger as you acquire more powerful gear, and the frantic chaos of the gunplay that’s so good in the hands, all of that remains intact here.
Should you enjoy the Borderlands series, it’s not a roll of dice to see if you would like Wonderlands. It’s Borderlands with a (sort-of) new flavour. As long as the story doesn’t suck as much, I reckon Wonderlands is shaping up to be a good time for those looking for some looting and shooting.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands will be out on March 25 for the PS4, PS5, PC (Epic Games Store), Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
Preview based on PC version. Preview build provided by the publisher