Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a Borderlands series spin-off, kind of a sequel to the Borderlands 2 DLC, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep (which has been later released as a standalone game as well). Tiny Tina is again the bunker master for a game of Bunkers & Badasses, the Borderlands equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons. My impression is that Wonderlands was well received but its poor post-release support and monotone endgame soured its repute. The publisher 2K's recent EULA changes have also caused many to leave negative reviews on all of their games on Steam.

An okay spinoff experience

I'm not certain at which point in time in the Borderlands series this game is set at. Tina is still tiny so it's definitely before Borderlands 3 but she's also the only familiar character at the table: there are no references to Borderlands 2, as far as I know. Torgue and Brick -- and Claptrap obviously, duh -- have their B&B characters in the story but that doesn't really help in placing the game on the timeline.

Lorelei from Borderlands 3 appears as Paladin Mike -- what an ear and eyesore. I was seriously considering muting dialogue volume in the first part of the game. The lack of old characters really hurts the experience in Wonderlands; Tina (Ashly Burch) does all the lifting here. Assault was more fun with Lilith, Mordecai, and Brick providing constant commentary. It made that DLC special. Writing is not as horrible in this one as in BL3 but it's not all that memorable either. The RPG trope jokes and intertextual references are generally amusing.

Borderlands with magic

Gameplay-wise Wonderlands has the same feel as BL3 -- which is good. Like in Assault, things are fantasy-themed while the base is still the same first person shooter experience. As a spinoff title, Wonderlands has a few more alterations. There is a dedicated melee weapon slot and the class system is less fixed: you pick one class (with one skill tree) to start and later get to choose another to go with it. The second class can be switch to a different one via respec. You can also customize your character's appearance more than usual -- as much as that matters in a first person game, anyway.

There is an overworld map separating the game's locations. While it's somewhat amusing to move your chibi character on it, the quests and random encounters (you can fortunately skip with a timely melee attack) are low effort content: repetitive fights in randomly picked encounter maps.

I somehow forgot that I like to play this series as a multiple-elements-using class (usually a Siren). I was lured by Stabbomancer's From the Shadows action skill but I really should've properly investigated first if any of the classes had a power similar to Maya's and Amara's Phasegrasp. As the second class I picked Spellshot, becoming Trapscallion, and settled on a build using Spellshot's Ambi-Hextrous skill that replaces action skill with a second spell slot. I had two bouncing Trickster's Ice Spike spells equipped for mobbing and two Triple Ice Spikes for bosses. Thus the playstyle was much like Aurelia in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel -- at least thematically.

Legendary items don't rain on you like in BL3; it took many levels before I even saw the first one. Loot drops are tied to your loot luck stat which goes up as you do stuff, and eventually the legendaries will start dropping too. Unlike in BL3, I had to use the golden (skeleton) keys to keep my gear up to date. Getting SMGs out of the thing was a challenge for a change.

Surprise grind

It takes about 50 hours to beat Wonderlands and then another 50 in the endgame to have enough gold to 100% the game. For some reason the storage deck upgrades in this game cost insane amounts of currency compared to your income. I believe the total cost is 290 million but one should be aware that the game has a rotating week-long event system: one of them reduces vendor prices by 50%, bringing the total cost of the SDUs down to 145 million. Before the event, it's better to only purchase the ones you absolutely need, like inventory and weapon-of-choice ammunition capacity SDU, and then save your gold for the event.

Other events one should take the most advantage of are: chaos crystal drop increase and moon orb drop increase/enchant reroll cost decrease. Gear enchant system works pretty much like in BL3 but the reroll cost goes up every time, capping at 4000 orbs. The maximum amount of moon orbs you can hold at once is only 16k and a typical Chaos Chamber run nets you enough orbs for mere one reroll once the item's cost has capped. That is brutal. You better hope you roll on the enchant you wanted early on or it will be easier to just find the particular item again.

No longevity

The Chaos Chamber, and it alone, is the endgame of Wonderlands. You fight through a set of random encounter maps, choosing buffs and difficulty modifiers along the way. Once beaten, you get to feed all your unspent chaos crystals to bunnies to get a bunch of loot. There are also few raid boss encounters you can unlock during each run. I just don't get why they made the process so convoluted. The raid bosses are kind of a pain to kill, too, so after few kills I stopped doing them. Maps have little find-a-skull puzzles to get extra crystals. At first, I thought they took way too long to find but eventually you learn where they are hidden. It does still take a bit to check if a given map has any of the puzzles present, however.

There are slight alterations to the type of a run you can do but the one you're likely to be doing is the chaos trial one because beating it increases your maximum available chaos level for increased enemy difficulty, reward amounts, and loot quality. Initially, each successful trial increases maximum chaos level by 5 but after 50 it becomes only 1 per run. I got to 75 before I had enough gold for the SDUs. You can skip the increments if your co-op partner has access to higher levels: doing a higher trial with them will get you straight to that level as well. After BL3's various activities, the Chaos Chamber is definitely an endgame lacking in variety.

Before you start on the chamber grind, you should do the Mirror of Mystery DLC content Wonderlands got because completing them adds more maps, bosses, and loot variation for the Chamber. The DLC were not well-received but I, like many, doubted if it could really be that bad? Yes, as it turned out.

Each of the 4 mirror mystery adventures have to be completed 4 times to fully unlock their content for the Chamber. And the adventures don't change in any way outside minor difficulty increase. It's incredibly boring do the same things like that repeatedly and extremely lazy for the developers to have made such a thing. You also might want to consider lowering your chaos level or disabling it altogether for the mirrors because dying fails the whole run. And having to repeat them more than necessary is torturous.

There's a separate currency in the mirror adventures that can be used on Wheel of Fate. You might want to consider saving it for later, to come back to roll the Wheel for better quality loot once you're at high chaos level.

A couple of hitches

Wonderlands had few technical issues for me. A fairly major one was how in every gameplay session, usually early on, the game would freeze once for several seconds. While it would run perfectly after that, the freeze usually cut the connection to the Shift server and it would never recover without a game reboot. It took awhile for me to troubleshoot it but I eventually located the problem on DirectX 12. Running the game on DX11 fixed the issue. First-time texture load-in was considerably slower on DX11, though, which is interesting.

A minor issue was how button prompts would get stuck on screen until pointing at another interactable object. An even weirder thing was how the last line of subtitles of a cinematic would be added to the end of all other dialogue subtitles from thereon. How does that even work?

I suppose there was how inventory seems like it's poorly optimized too. Item icons take a long time to load, sometimes never even doing so in your bank. And selling items one by one is laggy. Fortunately you can tag items as junk and then sell them all at once when pointing at a vending machine without even opening your inventory.

Borderlands 4 is currently set to release on Sep 12. If they manage to not have its writing be absolute garbage, I don't see why it wouldn't be a great game. Gearbox can clearly make good gameplay and the increased movement options, the fourth game has, promise an even better experience. The Siren character's abilities look cool, too.