I wanted to like Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands a lot more than I did. I love Borderlands, and I love Dungeons & Dragons, so this should have been a lock. Unfortunately, it🍨’s not really the mix of the two that was promised, but feels more like a half-baked Borderlands dressed up as a goblin for Halloween. A goblin with a typical Borderlands sense of humour, so he probably calls himself a mindgoblin, and whenever people ask what a mindgoblin is, he says “Mindgloblin deez nuts lmao gottem!” then dabs, downs a can of Rockstar, and dabs again. There is one major redeeming factor though - the Smurfs.
Part of the reason Tiny Tina’s Wonderland’s never felt like it was truly Dungeons & Dragons is the lack of player creativity. In D&D, you can approach situations however you want. There are rules, especially in head to head combat, but there are ways to make the game work for you. One of the characters in the party I play with can project thoughts, but only if he’s looking at you. Once, we set up an elaborate system of mirrors allowing him to see us as he hid out of sight, letting him continue to communicate. You can cast fireballs into a lake to create mist of steam to obscure yourself. If you can outthink the game, you can beat the game. This🍷 is harder to achieve in video games, but Tiny Tina doesn’t even try.
While there are occasionally some meta references to this, with pre-scripted characters changing quests right before your eyes through dialogue you have no control over, there is nothing you as a player can do. Just sit back and let the game play itself, and then kill things. That’s all you ever do - shoot enemies over and over again. This is a shooter game, and so that’s to be expected. I maintain that as a spin-off, there could have been more done to shake off the burdensome loot system of Borderlands to make it lighter and fresher, but hey, that didn’t happen. So we shoot stuff. The issue is we always shoot stuff. There is never any way to approach an en🌸counter with wor🌄ds, or thoughts, or anything other than a bullet in the face. That’s not D&D.
.png?q=50&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1.5)
All of the creativity comes through the game itself, which is sort of like playing with a Dungeon Master who writes incredible, complex narratives, then as s🌠oon as they’re finished speaking launches immediately into a combat encounter. ‘No, you can’t try to communicate with the leader, role for Initiative!’ The only saving grace of this style of DM is that their tight control means they often get to write quite inventive stories, and this is where we meet the Smurfs.
Or, as they're called in Wonderlands, the Murphs. We initially meet a group of small, greenish-grey gnomes who are under attack by a rebel sect - blue gnomes. Dear reader, I know I have mocked Borderlands for being stupid and puerile, but at this point I still did not get the joke. Not even when I was speaking to Father Murph and was told I needed to seek help from College Murph. In fact, not until I saw the blue Murphs (who, as you may have guessed, were Smurfs) did I realise the whole quest was a parody of the silly little Smurf adventures against Gargamel. It was still just about killing wave after wave of enemies, but at least this one was thinking outside the box.
There's nothing to this quest outside of the fact you have to kill Smurfs, but then there's very little to any of the quests besides killing things. At least with this one, it's clear Tiny Tina is trying to give you something other than just random fantasy characters where you have to kill them to find the stinkiest underpants (yes, that's real). It's killing Smurfs in order to help Smurfs, and that's oddly charming. Not as charming as the Smurfs' name in their native French (technically Belgian) though. Look it up and give it a go in your richest French accent.
