Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Reviews

When Gearbox decided in 2013 to combine its great sci-fi shooter with a Dungeons & Dragons-style classic heroic fantasy genre, it sounded like a very distant vision. But “Tiny Tina’s Assault on the Dragon Fortress” turned out to be a surprisingly successful feat, which had fresh ideas, a charge of specific but fan-favorite humor, and even some seriousness.

It may seem strange to ask if a full DLC spin-off has surpassed, but Assault on Dragon Keep has definitely set the bar high enough to ask a similar question.

• Published in: Xbox One / One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC (Epic) – Verified
• Publication date: March 25, 2022
• Genre: FPS, marauder shooter
• Czech location: Not
• Multiplayer: yes, 4 players
• Data to download: about 75 GB
• Game time: 10-15 hours
• Availability: 16+
• Sales version: box and digital
• Price: CZK 1,699 (Xzone)

Crossbows, chopsticks and hammers

Borderlands is a looting shooter genre, so it’s a good idea to start with this important part of the game. Unlike Assault on Dragon Keep, where firearms remained firearms with only fantasy titles, Wonderlands saw much more significant changes. You will still come across modern-looking “toys”, but there are many variations of various crossbows, crossbows and similar alternatives that are more suitable for landing.

No need to worry about these changes, they are playfully identical to Boderlands and there is even a classic modern division into categories such as pistols, submachine guns, automatic rifles or rocket launchers. Grenades have undergone more significant changes. Instead, you now have a variety of spells, often with very unexpected properties and uses. Grenades in Borderlands have never been boring, but Wonderlands directly encourages frequent changes and testing of everything you find.

After all, you will have to find a lot, as is customary in Borderlands, and now in Wonderlands. There’s a chest on every corner (and watch your facial expressions!), enemies will regularly drop a whole spray of new equipment, and if you don’t like something on the ground, you can buy some in the store again. slot machine for game currency more interesting chips.

Wonderlands directly encourages frequent changes and testing of everything you find.

Sometimes it occurred to me that the number generator, especially for weapons, could be a little pathetic. There is no shortage of interesting spells, but it happened to me several times that an unsuitable weapon fell out of the boss, which froze a little. I would like to change my outfit like socks and try weirder and weirder combinations. Instead, even after an hour, I find nothing that makes my theoretically quite ordinary submachine gun fire bursts of ice shells.

Far and near

Compared to Borderlands, Wonderlands offers a much wider selection of different classes and is clearly based on the Dungeons & Dragons archetypes. So there is the equivalent of mage, border guard, barbarian, necromancer and others, although, of course, aptly renamed.

A pleasant surprise will be the development of close combat. No more regular punching, but you can choose from a variety of swords, hammers, axes, daggers, maces and other precision tools to crack open enemy skulls. It’s not Mortal Kombat, but with Borderlands it’s a significant shift, especially for characters that have their own melee-related special abilities. Playing as the Clawbearer, you can, for example, jump into the thick of enemies and hit the ground with a hammer, thereby not only damaging enemies with your own attack, but also setting them on fire.

But if you have one rich set of skills that need to be unlocked a bit, within a few hours of starting the game, you will unlock the ability to add a second class. You can create meaninglessly burnt combinations, but that’s all. It adds chaos to the whole game which makes it more fun. You do not have to deal with the situation on the screen, the main thing is that you will laugh at the absurd violence that takes place on it, even if at the moment it consists of a stream of numbers, statuses and colors. .

You can create up to mindlessly burnt combinations.

Of course, the presence of your friends will increase the fun. Just like in Borderlands, in Wonderlands you can play the entire campaign in cooperation with up to three other players. The only downside is the somewhat unbalanced difficulty. Even in two players, the bosses are just a longer stoppage than an epic duel, and you overwhelmingly defeat them on the first try.

shooter from wonderland

Borderlands rolled around in their stylization, but mostly specific humor, since number one, it’s no different here. The humor is often puberty and sometimes infantile, which is not meant to be pejorative but is a simple fact. If you get the ridiculous look of a bald-headed rancher with fairy wings and a tutu, you’ll love it here. However, unlike the previous installments, you can find a surprisingly supportive script. For example, in one of the side missions where you have to help a revolutionary goblin free the working class from oppression. In general, side missions are quite common in Wonderland, as many of them are not at all clear that they are really side and optional. The developers just put so much work into them that they seemed as important and good as the main storyline.

It’s not that the good old find-and-fetch tasks don’t exist. You’ll meet them mostly in the Overworld interface, which is strikingly reminiscent of Pokemon games. It serves as a game plan, or some kind of glue between separate game areas, and in addition to the actual move, you can simply meet a number of NPCs with mostly easy tasks in it. However, it is up to you whether you will fulfill them. If you just want to play through a roughly twelve hour campaign, the game won’t throw a lot of sticks at your feet. The story starts to develop very well, especially in the second half, helped by a slightly generic but still fairly well-written negative Dragonlord. After the Calypso twins from the third Borderlands, who for most of the game stood on the wrong line between humor and embarrassment, I take Dragonlord for the whole ten.

If you just want to play through a roughly twelve hour campaign, the game won’t throw a lot of sticks at your feet.

The post-Borderlands 3 scenario in Wonderlands is a marvel. It seemed that the developers had recovered from the burnout syndrome and found the muses who helped them write in the past. It’s hard to say to what extent Ashly Burch (Tiny’s dubber), who is a huge Dungeons & Dragons fan herself, is involved in the game’s final form, but in Wonderland the humor has returned to a much more universal and smaller time. specific topics. Whether you encounter a Space Odyssey jingle parody reminiscent of the insults in The Mystery of Monkey Island, or echo a few catchy revolutionary slogans in the aforementioned GTFO Goblin Resistance, these jokes are far more thoughtful and functional than Gearbox’s. We’ve been lately..

All that glitters is not gold

Unfortunately, Wonderlands isn’t all about these great things, they also have some issues that we shouldn’t overlook. In 2012, Borderlands 2 was a very solid shooter. At the time, Gearbox managed to create a shooting experience that few games in its genre could match. But now, ten years later, I have a rather unpleasant feeling of déjà vu when I play Wonderland. It’s not that Wonderland played badly, but even the famous saying “if it’s not broken, don’t touch it” has its limits. After all, experimentation is risky, but games stagnating is definitely not a good thing. This hesitation is the reason why Wonderlands is a very good game, but not a very good one.

Even the famous saying “if it’s not broken, don’t touch it” has its limits.

After three big games and a lot of DLC, I would also call for a decent funeral for some of the characters. Once or twice their cameo was good, but at least some of the NPCs are already too repetitive jokes for veterans and at the same time an unknown reference for newcomers. Unfortunately, this is not the only and not the most serious claim to the game.

Wonderlands on PC is not exactly a well-tuned product. To be honest, I have not seen so many bugs in the game for a long time. From annoying, but quite innocent, like flickering descriptions of character statistics, to app crashes, quest log uploads, or merciless FPS dips by dozens, even below the limit of fluency. A teammate had similar problems, so I can rule out simple bad luck and coincidence.

According to information from colleagues in the editorial office, these bugs do not appear on consoles, which is good news, and we can hope that Gearbox will work on the PC version, but at the time of this writing, the situation was not entirely rosy, which is impossible not to notice.

The magic of the (old) new

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands threatened to become a hoax, a spin-off of a well-known brand. Luckily, that didn’t happen and I have to say that for me, Wonderlands overcame Borderlands 3 with ease, which was undoubtedly a lot more money and time spent on.

A few years ago, I had Borderlands 2 at the very top of the list of popular games, not Borderlands 3, but Wonderlands is, in my opinion, worthy of ideas and script. The Wonderlands concept is certainly noteworthy, especially in terms of gameplay and technical aspects, but it’s a good enough game to do away with the stick I almost broke about Gearbox.