Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands review: “An entertaining and silly mix of fantasy and

To fully get into the mindset of what it’s like to play Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands you’re going to have to understand that it’s the kind of game where you’ll be using a magical assault rifle to shoot numbers out of a shark with legs, while Will Arnett and Andy Samberg goof about. At one point the cast of Wonderlands, – which also includes Ashly ‘Aloy’ Burch as Tina and comedian Wanda Sykes as a robot called Frette – ‘kill the ocean’, explaining why the sharks are walking. I laughed out loud plenty, largely because it’s a great cast that effortlessly pulls off a completely absurd premise, which is that this is a game of Dungeons and Dragons being played inside Borderlands…

From the moment Tina starts you off in the ‘Glade of Helpful Tutorials’, this is a game that knows it’s a game, played inside a game that also knows it’s a game. One of the DnD characters even knows it’s a DnD character. You’ll occasionally leave the action to see it as a tabletop board Tina and her friends are playing around while discussing their “real lives”. When bosses appear, a figure piece is first slammed on the table to introduce them. It’s just a giant meta sandwich where meta is the bread and the filling. And somehow the lettuce is also meta. Metalettuce. 

The cast argue about rules, set-ups, and locations while you’re playing, causing the world to shift and change around you. At one point a disagreement about how dank the forest needs to be causes the trees to vanish and be replaced by giant mushrooms. These moments, when the cast are bickering in the sky above you about what you’re doing and everything changes to accommodate them, are a high point for the whole game. Even when it’s just basic commentary or chat picking apart the action, plot or characters it’s the funny, fast-paced dialogue that brings everything to life. Although there’s an oddly sad note mixed in, where it soon becomes clear Tiny Tina is basically lonely and running the game to get friends. A lot of the arguments stem from the fact that she’s desperate for the others to like the game enough to stay around so she won’t be alone. It’s an oddly bleak turn that arguably balances out the general buffoonery. 

I would almost have preferred a more linear game over the more open-world experience here simply because the structured comedy moments are so good. Like the parent series, Borderlands, this is a free-roaming looter shooter, albeit with a twist here: all the various areas are accessed through the Overworld, a sort of playable version of the tabletop setup, complete with push pins, bottle tops, soda cans, and other garbage. There’s a whole thing where Tina has to pretend a discarded Cheese Puff is actually a magical barrier, and not a forgotten snack. You wander this litter-strewn map as a big-headed version of your actual player character, finding and entering various regions to take on the main shooter gameplay. It means that, depending on how you tackle things and where you go,…