Tiny Tina's Wonderlands Feels Like More Borderlands 3

Developer Gearbox is taking a bit of a detour from the exploits of Borderlands' vault hunters with its next game, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. Inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons-influenced Tiny Tina's Assault On Dragon Keep, Wonderlands is aimed at bringing a more tabletop RPG-like experience to Borderlands' loot shooter formula.

Wonderlands sees you dive into Tiny Tina's latest Bunkers & Badasses campaign. Instead of playing as one of four premade characters--a hallmark of the Borderlands series--you can pick from one of six classes and then customize your race, physical appearance, voice, and personality. Tina then narrates your adventure as you explore her fantasy world, making adjustments to the story and your quest on the fly, much like a dungeon master in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

I've now had a chance to play Wonderlands, jumping into a preview build of the game that saw me able to try out the Stabbomancer and Graveborn classes. I went for the latter first, for no reason other than that the name sounds cooler, before replaying the first 15 minutes or so of the preview with the former. Between the two, I ultimately ended up enjoying the critical-hit-focused Stabbomancer (which plays a lot like a D&D Rogue) more than the powerful but risky Graveborn (which, much like D&D's Blood Hunter, can sacrifice health to pull off powerful attacks).

Both classes felt distinct in what they brought to combat, which leaves me wanting to see how the other four classes (Brr-Zerker, Clawbringer, Spellshot, and Spore Warden) might play differently. I also found plenty of loot, much of which felt like your typical collection of colorful firearms found in a fantasy-based shooter, but there were a few gems that offered playfully silly considerations to combat. My favorite was a shield that, when depleted, emitted a magical burst that flung all enemies around me helplessly into the air. But the more I played, the more I noticed that Wonderlands felt remarkably similar to Borderlands 3. A little too similar.

If Gearbox told me that Wonderlands started out as a post-launch expansion for Borderlands 3 before transforming into its own standalone game, I wouldn't be surprised--the two games feel as tonally and mechanically similar to each other as Dragon Keep did to Borderlands 2. It leaves Wonderlands feeling like a game I've already played before. Sure, the exact details of the story are different, but I'm going through the same motions I did back in 2019, including quests that feel like reused Borderlands 3 storylines.

It ultimately resulted in a boring hour-and-a-half preview, especially for me, someone who has already poured over 30 hours into Borderlands 3 and felt like I was just getting more of that.

The preview saw me mostly aiding Jar, a goblin seeking to unionize her fellow goblins in an effort to overthrow their greedy corporate overseer. Jar isn't much of a fighter, so she needs you to clear out any of the evil goblins in order to save the good goblins and unite them under her banner--a task that sees you exploring several tunnels and fighting through a handful of labor camps before ultimately going up against a traditional (read: bullet-sponge) Borderlands boss.

If the missions in the preview are any indication of how Wonderlands will play as a whole, they're not doing it any favors. The missions I played through feel like just another go at Borderlands 3's The Guns of Reliance (a series of missions in which you aid a rebel leader in freeing captives and starting a resistance), even concluding with a fight against an enemy that's only tough because he has a large health pool. In terms of what you're doing gameplay-wise, they feel indistinguishable.

The actual storyline of the quest isn't all that interesting either, as it mostly retreads narrative ground that Gearbox has done before (and better) and lacks the playful--occasionally, even intriguingly satirical--exploration of concepts and pop culture that define the best aspects of the Borderlands games.

An argument could be made that Jar is this aspect; an example of how goblins are everyday people and not to be generalized as the mindless, grotesque monsters that fantasy and most D&D campaigns make them out to be. But that feels like a stretch, especially given that Jar has very little characterization. And even without that stretch, characters in recent popular Dungeons & Dragons campaigns (like Critical Role: Campaign 2's Nott the Brave and Dimension 20: Fantasy High's Riz Gukgak) have already deconstructed goblin stereotypes by portraying them as individuals.

So, as cool as it is to be revisiting Tiny Tina's depraved and silly mind through the lens of a tabletop RPG, Wonderlands doesn't actually seem to do anything interesting with that lens.

Granted, the set dressing is there. The names of mechanics and features have changed to emulate D&D (killing an enemy to get back up and prevent your untimely demise is now a successful death saving throw, for example, and grenades have been replaced with magic spells). But if what I played is any indication, Borderlands' mechanics haven't evolved to match these new tabletop terms. Gearbox has successfully copied the lingo, but I saw no indication that the team knows what that jargon is supposed to invoke.

Looking back at the death throw mechanic as an example, it works exactly like Borderlands' second wind. In Wonderlands, when you lose all your health, your character falls to their knees. You then have a brief period of time before you fully bleed out and die--if you can manage to kill an enemy before that happens, you get back up with all your health.

It's simple to understand and fairly easy to succeed at, so it doesn't match the joyful exuberance tied to getting a successful death saving throw in D&D. In D&D, successful death saving throws means your character can be revived. Failing your throws means the character is fully dead and gone for good beyond a dungeon master pulling some shenanigans. Rolling saving throws is a harrowing experience that can change the course of a campaign forever, and Wonderlands lacks that same tension because your character's death is meaningless. Like Borderlands, Wonderlands allows you to be revived from a checkpoint a seemingly infinite number of times without consequence, aside from losing a small amount of money.

And I'm not saying that Wonderlands needed to be a roguelike or incorporate some semblance of permadeath into its structure--you don't need actual permanent character death in order to have a true D&D campaign. But this is one of several examples of how Wonderlands misses the mark and pretends to be something it's not. The game has included the words but without their meaning, resulting in an experience that feels hollow to its source material. So even if it looks different from Borderlands 3, in actuality, it doesn't feel any different.

You could argue that Dragon Keep is similar, in that it's built upon the mechanics and gameplay loop of Borderlands 2. But to Dragon Keep's credit, there is substance to its narrative. The expansion builds upon Borderlands 2's story, making space for Tina to grieve for Roland. And that is something that D&D is known for--plenty of folks have explored their emotions, found new friends, come to an understanding of their gender or sexuality, or simply grown as a person through playing the game. So Gearbox using a tabletop RPG to explore grief in Dragon Keep was incredible and clever. Like, of course, Tina, someone who struggles with expressing her emotions beyond over-the-top excitement and explosive outbursts, would only finally be able to explore something like the loss of her surrogate father through the act of roleplaying in a tabletop game.

I'm not getting anything like that from what I've played of Wonderlands, though. Gearbox has seemingly taken no strides in exploring how the mechanics and language of a tabletop RPG could transform a loot shooter (both in terms of how it plays and what kind of story it might be able to tell), and is instead seemingly just giving us another Borderlands-styled loot shooter.

I can't judge a (presumably) multi-hour game on a small snippet, nor do I want to. However, the piece of Wonderlands I got to play did not leave me impressed or eager to try more. In a timeline where Wonderlands is Borderlands 3 DLC, I might have been more excited--the prospect of a fantastical bite-sized snack is more appealing than gorging myself on a whole second course that matches the first.

And with all that said, in the game's defense, I didn't get a chance to experience most of the actual Dungeons & Dragons concepts that Gearbox has talked about introducing into the Borderlands' formula in Wonderlands--concepts like the tabletop-looking Overworld, character creation and multiclassing, and Tina adjusting situations on the fly in interesting or humorous ways as a dungeon master. None of that was available in the preview build I got to play.

But from what I was able to play, I got the sense that Wonderlands is just more Borderlands 3 in terms of its gameplay mechanics, narrative tone, and quest structure. Which I guess is fine if more Borderlands 3 is what you were hoping for, but I find that to be pretty disappointing.