REVIEW : Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (PS5)
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a tabletop role playing game in which the dungeon master is Tiny Tina, and the action takes place entirely in the players’ imaginations. This should be an opportunity to be more inventive and drive the franchise into new ground, but it simply comes down to Borderlands with some dice jokes thrown in for good measure. Prey is the primary character in this cooperative shooter. It’s pointless to argue about this since Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands are so identical to their prototype that they don’t deserve to be called anything else. This essentially implies two things: if you enjoy Borderlands, then you’re in luck, because you’ll find nearly everything linked to them right here.The titular (for the uninitiated) Tiny Tina is a psychotic youngster in the Borderlands world who speaks in exaggerated teen slang and enjoys blowing stuff up; a one-note joke that ran out of steam during her brief appearance in Borderlands 2 and has only become more boring with time. She’s a living, talking, screeching metaphor for the series as a whole, and her elevation from an intern to a full-fledged officer is a perfect example of that. The characters are always (constantly) yapping, everybody is in some fashion, everything is a joke or a pop-cultural legacy, and the force with which the swan is pushed into your throat is inevitably variable. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy the comedy in games in general. The trouble is that the Wonderlands don’t know peace, and they won’t hesitate to yank you out of the game and delay you for reasons of questionable quality, which isn’t ideal.
The merits of a vexing secondary character to a vexing main character are questionable. This show adamantly desires to make you laugh. It has to be. It has an unquenchable desire that it cannot satisfy. Wonderlands avoids gags with predefined and catch phrases in favour of having characters merely yell strange things as the game smiles uproariously at you to let you know you’re meant to be giggling, presumably in the hopes that you’ll succumb out of sheer humiliation if nothing else.
Following a brief explanation and tutorial, you will be sent to the Overworld map, where you will roam with your squirrel as if on a playing field, collecting side missions, opening treasures, and occasionally encountering random encounters, among other things. In this mode, the game mimics a tabletop RPG, with corks from drinks or snacks littering the terrain, preventing further progress, and Wonderlands employing every possible fantasy / RPG clichés.
While we were sitting like Will Smith at a Chris Rock show when Tiny Tina triumphantly proclaims the Queen of the game is a magical horse dubbed “Butt Stallion,” we’re sure there’s someone out there who thinks the Arse Horse is hilarious.
The amount of fun you have with Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is partially determined by whether you grimace or laugh at the humour.
For what it’s worth, we enjoy the fundamental gameplay here, and discovering a terrific new spell or weapon gives us that tiny dopamine high that makes it all worthwhile. Boss fights, in particular, are thrilling and appropriately opulent. What isn’t entertaining is the mission design, which is riddled with repetition and fluff, and if we were being cynical, we’d speculate that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands began as a much smaller game .Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, but the end consequence is the same. The fantastic writing and outstanding voice acting talents blend seamlessly with the twisted and wild FPS mayhem to produce something really unforgettable.
Unlike previous Borderlands games, which took place in a series of massive open world interconnected locations, Wonderlands is divided into smaller sections that are accessed via a completely unnecessary overworld. You just go from one task sign to the next in a top-down view, occasionally completing trite puzzles, and usually discovering that you’re too low level for your next plot objective and must grind in a neighbouring dungeon. This keeps happening over and over.
With Ashly Burch reprising her role as Tiny Tina, Will Arnett as the primary bad guy, Andy Samberg as the too eager stupid party member, and Wanda Sykes as the rules-obsessed player, the outstanding, laugh-out-loud writing is complemented by one of the best comedic ensembles of any game. The voice acting and comedic writing are better than they’ve ever been in this series, and the adventure would be worth it even if it weren’t for the action-packed looting and shooting. Even though the antics are constantly hilarious, the primary tale ends up being one of the lesser aspects of the package.
Unfortunately, even in this fictitious universe, the devs couldn’t leave weaponry out, so expect pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, and snipers, all with a touch of mediaeval aesthetics. Instead of grenades, you acquire magical skills, and instead of shields, you have a protective spell, but everything else works the very same way, with vending machines for purchasing and selling supplies and resupply stations. This is by far the most common criticism and the Wonderlands’ weakest aspect. Gearbox had access to a seemingly limitless reservoir of innovation, but he didn’t drink from it either. Yes, some side tasks are amusing, but be prepared for highly monotonous shooting of waves of monsters.
Once inside these dungeons, you must fire a wave of opponents in a tiny arena, then repeat the process. If you’re at the appropriate level for your next story assignment, you can proceed; if not, you can simply grind some more. We’d have an easier time recommending Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands if they’d simplified the whole thing and just presented the story objectives in order, but this is six or seven hours’ worth of stuff drawn out for fifteen hours or so, and it shows. There’s a task in which you must figure out how to break through a character’s impenetrable “plot armour,” and another in which the players become too suspicious of a minor character. The antics never stop, and lovers of tabletop gaming will find plenty of inside jokes and references that will make seasoned dice-rollers salivate. Shoot a blazing crossbow in the face of tens of thousands of goblins, launch massive meteors against anthropomorphic fungi, and hang out with a queen mare made entirely of jewels. In a nutshell, that’s Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. Thousands of versions of randomly generated weapons with stupid and absurd bonuses, such as an automatic crossbow that feels like an ancient machine gun or a shotgun that turns into a fireball you may toss at an adversary when it runs out of ammo, are available as usual.
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