Tiny Tina's Wonderlands Review (TheThunderPhant)
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands does some new unique things that are interesting and enjoyable, but also offers far less than any Borderlands games and is the laziest Gearbox has ever been with content. They play really hard into this D&D parody, which creates a cool class system with multiple class abilities, and the freedom to multi-class / spec points into two different classes at once. I thought this allowed for some pretty unique builds compared to other Borderlands games; my build heavily favored and amplified specific types of elemental damage including kill skills that would further benefit me. On the flip side, the D&D parody in many ways hurts the story of the game, as Tina is essentially serving as your DM. This gives the story a playful nature, but I honestly felt like creativity was lost because of this, the Borderlands world is already very unique and has a weird variety of locations and enemies. While the environment design/art teams undoubtedly cooked at times the enemy variety is the worst it has ever been.
A large amount of the game's content is really lazy. Between locations you navigate an overworld map where enemies can spawn and engage you in combat scenarios. These might as well be AI generated and are easily the worst part of the game. You spawn into a map and have to defeat a certain amount of enemies before it ends, gives you a few items, and boots you back to the overworld. These encounters are so repetitive and boring, and the enemies don't spawn all at once so you'll often need to find one that's hiding on the other side of the map, hunt it down, kill it, and then repeat with two more waves of enemies. While the overworld encounters are avoidable, about 25% of the game's side quests are just three of these encounters chained together, each DLC is about 5 or 6 of these chained together but a little more fleshed out, and other side objectives that buff your stats in meaningful ways also require grinding these encounters; it's incredibly lazy.
The main campaign is fine, but honestly not good enough for me to recommend. They don't make any meaningful improvements to the formula with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands and the content is the laziest it has ever been. You're so much better off replaying Borderlands 2, or any Borderlands game for that matter. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is fine, but it doesn't stand out in the genre, or meet the bar of quality that I can recommend in this day and age. If you're buying it heavily discounted and have co-op partners to play with then it might be worth considering if you're really into these games, but otherwise just pass on it.
Not Recommended / Only Purchase at Discount for Co-Op Play
If you found my review helpful, please consider following my Steam Curator page, where you can see more thoughts and recommendations