Tech: Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

My friend and I got a lot of mileage out of Borderlands 3, so when Gearbox released a fantasy-themed spinoff, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, we grabbed it on launch day and plowed through the campaign. We knew going in that it would be little more than a re-skin of the mainline Borderlands games.  We were okay with that, though - the looter-shooter formula is more than a decade old at this point, and we're well past the point of carping about the Skinner box.

In Wonderlands, you play through Tiny Tina's homebrew session of "Bunkers and Badasses," a thinly veiled D&D parody that just happens to contain more guns than a National Guard armory. The game-within-a-game conceit is charming and occasionally clever (there's an RPG-like overworld made to look like someone's gaming table, complete with cheese puffs and soda cans), but it also sometimes serves as just a meta-excuse for lazy writing.

On the plus side, the shooting and looting is as polished as ever, and Wonderlands gives you new toys to play with, like melee weapons and magic spells (in place of the usual Borderlands grenade slot). With the right combo of stat points, skill points, and equipment, you can create characters that lay waste to enemies. The game isn't terribly difficult, but there's nothing wrong with a little power fantasy once in awhile.

Rating: 80/100