What The STRUCK is Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands?

(My BRUTALLY honest Final Impressions of the game after playing for 80+ hours)

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Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands launched on March 25th, 2022 for PC (Epic [creator link], PlayStation, & XBOX). After several days of playing the game, completing my 1st playtrough & doing a fair bit of endgame farming I’m ready to share my Final Impressions and explain “What The STRUCK is Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands?“.

I’ll be brutally honest and some of the things I say may not be nice but my overall impression of the game is: 80% Blissful Joy + 20% Disappointing Frustration. It would either be in the upper highs or the lowest of lows how this game made me feel. Why? Hopefully, it will get clear after reading this post (or watching my video version).

Embark on an epic adventure full of whimsy, wonder, and high-powered weaponry! Roll your own multiclass hero then shoot, loot, slash, and cast on a quest to stop the Dragon Lord.
Quoted from the game’s Epic Store.

This post could end up getting expanded and updated eventually but, hopefully, for now it includes enough information to serve as a basic guide on top of a final impressions article.

Video Version:

The Story:

This is how the game is described by the devs:

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a fantastical first-person looter shooter in which magic, bullets, and broadswords collide. As the Fatemaker, you get to create a Multiclass hero and explore a chaotic fantasy world brought to life by the unpredictable Tiny Tina, while battling enemies that run the gamut from goblin gangs and sadistic shrooms to smack-talking skeletons and behemothic bosses.
Nothing you can’t handle, right? Fear not—as you level up and refine your skillset, you’ll get your mitts on a plethora of powerful gear by looting treasure chests, defeating baddies, and even finding magic golden dice. And hey, if the Dragon Lord or any of his minions give you too much trouble, you can always invite up to three other Fatemakers to join your party in co-op multiplayer, complete with crossplay!
Quoted from the Official Game Website

The story begins with us, a person inside the Borderlands universe, joining Tiny Tina and a colorful mix of Borderlands universe characters for a game of Bunker’s & Badasses (BL’s take on D&D). And this time the B&B game is Wonderlands (or set in that imaginary world at least) where an Evil Dragon Lord needs to be defeated and a magical queendom needs to be saved. We create our hero in a typical for D&D style by picking a class, allocating skill points in various attributes, selecting a background and even customizing our character’s appearance. Eventually, we’re thrown into a tutorial area of the Wonderlands to learn the basics.

Then the real adventure begins. Quest after Quest we get closer to defeating the evil Dragon Lord and more of the background surrounding him and his origin gets revealed. Along that journey we will encounter a cast cast of character that are fully voiced over each with their own quirks and a ton of side missions to complete.

There are plenty of mini bosses and big baddies along the way to the Dragon Lord that will also need to be defeated and make us break a sweat every now and then.

The Combat:

The combat system is pretty much what we are used to seeing from the Borderlands franchise. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a Borderlands game (even if not in name) and that is a good thing (for me at least). There’s plenty of shooting with all sorts of guns, there is the typical “shield” system which is now called “ward” and it still protects our HP. The grenades are replaced by spells and the action skill slot is still there (one of the classes can even use their action skill slot as a second spell slot).

The fast-paced shooting, sliding, jumping, blasting, and casting manages to retain that Borderlands feeling 100% so if you loved the Borderlands franchise’ combat you most likely will love the combat here as well.

The enemies will use various ways to hurt us (or try to) and they will also have various types of “HP Bars”:

Flesh is Red and Fire is effective against it
Ward is Blue and Lightning is effective against it
Armor is Yellow and Poison is effective against it
Bone is Grey/White and Frost is effective against it

And there’s also Dark Magic that siphons your enemies’ vitality, sending it straight to your health bar. These lifestealing properties can keep you going during prolonged battles, provided your Dark Magic is hitting its mark.

Character Creation:

This is one of the best changes compared to what we had in Borderlands 3. You can now create your character the way you want them to: main class, appearance, voice, personality, starting attributes. Customize as much as you want (within what the game allows you of course). There is even an option to override the limits of the sliders to create some weird looking characters. If you want to change something latter, you can do so at one of the customization stations (there’s 1 in Brighthoof and 1 in the Chaos Chamber + more in other spots).

The Overworld & Map Zones:

The explorable world consists of 14 maps/zones + an Overworld area. The Overworld in a unique kind of place where you control your character via a top-down/isometric point of view and can explore various dungeons & points of interest. There are plenty of NPCs that can give you quests as well as certain Shrines that can grant you buff once you collect all 4 of that shrine’s pieces (scattered across dungeons and the map). The Overworld also connects the standard 14 maps/areas mentioned above. One of those areas is a town that becomes our base of operations white the others are all different biomes with unique inhabitants and all except one are part of the main quest line.

Each one of the 14 maps/zones has got it’s own ‘completionist bait’ collectibles to discover and a selection of Side Quest that are optional which players can get from all sorts of colorful characters.

The Overworld also has randomly spawning enemies which trigger encounter fights if they reach you. You can punch them before they are close enough to avoid those. Those encounters will put you in a small arena area to fight off a wave of monsters and then get some loot & exp as a reward.

Quests & Side Quests:

As I mentioned above, there are main quests & side quests. The main quest is all about us completing our quest of defeating the Evil Dragon Lord, while the side quests are many and pretty different comparing one to the next one. There’s a side quest that makes you fight alongside a bunch of creatures calling themselves Murphs versus their evil blue brethren who have turned to the dark side. The blue ones you fight are pretty much a reference to the Smurfs as so is obviously the name “Murphs”. Not to spoil too much but that might be one of the most fun quest lines. There may be a few more boring quest lines such as one from Claptrap that makes you go around collecting ore and just do your typical “fetch quest” tasks.

Playable Classes:

The playable Classes in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands are 6 (with a 7th one to eventually come out with a DLC)

There are current 6 classes are:

Brr-Zerker – Brr-Zerkers are tenacious Frost-infused bruisers who complement their firepower with an onslaught of brutal, up-close-and-personal melee attacks.
Stabbomancer – Stabbomancers are sneaky, Critical-hit-focused assassins who summon magic whirling blades to the battlefield and disappear into the shadows at will.
Graveborn – Graveborn are Death-touched acolytes who sacrifice health to unleash devastating Dark Magic attacks and become the phantasmal Reaper of Bones, accompanied by their manic Demi-Lich companion.
Spellshot – Spellshots are gun-toting wizards who can unleash a constant barrage of spells and bullets and transform their enemies into harmless livestock with the snap of a finger.
Spore Warden – Spore Wardens are masters of nature who summon tornadoes and launch volleys of arcane arrows into enemy lines alongside their toxin-spewing Mushroom Companion.
Clawbringer – Clawbringers are faithful warriors who bring down thunder and flames upon their enemies with a spectral hammer alongside their fire-breathing Wyvern Companion.

Loot & Itemization:

The loot & itemization is very similar to Borderlands with some changes here and there to fit the Bunkers & Badasses setting (similar to how the BL 2 Tiny Tina DLC changed some things).

Players have 11 equipment slots:

4 Guns slots. The main DPS source for most builds
1 Melee Weapon slot. Melee as direct dmg will require a lot of min-maxing to be a main DPS source
a Ward slot. Works similar to Shields in BL. Takes damage instead of your HP until it breaks, eventually refills
an Armor slot. Similar to class mods in BL. Gives skills and boosts to certain class and subclass on top of the usual stat rolls
an Amulet slot. Bonuses to a certain type of elemental dmg + a certain class + standard stat rolls
2 Rings slots. Bonuses to guns,spells,companion,or melee dmg + standard stat rolls
a Spell slot. Replaces the Grenades from BL. Spellshots can pick an action skill that opens up a second slot.

There are a ton of items with various legendary affixes to farm for if one want to synergize their build to the limits. On top of that you’ll also need to grind like a lifeless zombie if you want each of your best-in-slot items for a specific build to also have the best possible rolls. The only thing you’ll be able to re-roll is the enchantments (which are the equivalent to anointment from BL 30.

There are also chaotic version of every item that can only drop while playing on chaos levels 1 trough 20. More about chaos mode and chaos level near the end of this post.

Myth Ranks:

The Myth Ranks system replaces the Badass Ranks of Borderlands 3 with a nice idea that is, unfortunately, badly executed. There no longer is a freedom to spend the points in the trees you want but instead you have to put them 1 by 1 in each tree in a clockwise order. You can not put 100 consecutive point into Archmage (for example) and you are forced to split those 100 into 25 for each tree. Another bad thing about it is the lack of milestones for investing X points into a certain tree which was small but fun part of the builds in Borderlands 3. I hope this system gets a rework and a big overhaul.

Build Diversity:

The diversity in terms of Builds comes from multiple places:

Our Equipped Gear
Attribute Points Allocation
Skill Trees of Main + Sub Classes
Myth Ranks (those eventually you ‘max out’ to a semi-cap at lvl 400+ and from there on there’s no choices to be made)

Considering the vast loot diversity and the number of slots we get + the multiclass system that lets us mix-n-match between 6 total classes, we get a lot of build diversity as a result. Now, obviously not all builds will be top tier and i hope the game is balanced enough that you don’t need a top 1% OP tier build to complete the hardest content. Good Build diversity in many games did not mean plenty of “viable’ builds. As time goes on we’ll see how good the weaker average builds are when facing the hidden bosses on Chaos 20.

Enchanting System:

Here is one of the places where i won’t have many good things to say. I appreciate that they finally realized players want to re-roll their gear’s stats BUT they aren’t letting us re-roll all of them… just the Enchantments. This means players will still need to loot every single piece of equipment many, MANY times before one with the rolls they want shows up. Sometimes not even getting 200 of the same item will be enough for the RNG gods to grant you the stats you wish on that item base. This is extremely disappointing & off-putting in a looter game in 2022 when you can see the re-rolling QoL done better even in single dev indie games like Chronicon (one example out of many) done better than a multi-million dollar budget dame like Wonderlands made by a team of over 200 people (not sure of the exact number).

On top of that this enchanting system has a terrible user interface that is anything BUT user friendly. Here’s how it works:

Players collect “Moon Orbs” a currency that is used strictly for enchanting (for now at least)
Players visit an enchanting station (In Brighthoof or the Chaos Chamber)
Then Select the item you want to enchant & pay a price to enchant it
Players are given an option to choose between the new version of the item with the new random enchantment or the old one (which could have been with or without an enchantment on it)
selecting the new option will add 1 to the count of enchants on that item, which will increase the price of the next enchantment. Selecting the old one will not add 1 and you’ll still be able to enchant for the same price (that was THANKFULLY patched recently as before even selecting the old version used to add 1 to the number of enchant times)
can NOT enchant amulets, rings and armor

Here’s what’s wrong with the system (apart from only re-rolling enchantments):

The Moon Orbs cap is 4000 and should have been more like 40k or 400k as 4000 is a joke considering the rate of increasing those enchantment costs
There is no system that lets you continue enchanting. Example of how it could be done on PC: pressing X confirms the new choice but HOLDING X could confirm the new enchantment + re-roll again. Q discards and keeps the old item version but HOLDING Q could discard + re-roll again. The interface could also show the price cost of the next enchant for each version
Currently, not only does the interface NOT keep the item we’ve just enchanted (or discarded) selected BUT it also scrolls back up to the top of the list of gear while the equipped gear (which is usually what people will be enchanting) is at the very bottom. This can be very frustrating as each time players need to scroll back to the bottom to re-select that same item if they want to re-enchant it

Hopefully the devs add plenty of QoL to this system in its current state as well as either add a new system that uses gold, moon orbs or both… or even a new currency that lets us re-roll the actual affixes on gear such as gun dmg, spell dmg, ward capacity, max hp, etc. I think the best way to handle such systems is a extract/salvage system that lets players convert gear they don’t need into materials and then use those materials for re-rolls. Every salvaged legendary giving you 1 (maybe 1.5 for chaotic gear) re-roll chance will be amazing. Having a system to re-roll affixes and another to re-roll the values of the current affixes will be amazing. Added bonus could be an option to lock/unlock which affixes you want to re-roll and which one you want to keep as they are.

Endgame: Chaos Chamber:

This is the place where we’ll spend most of our time after beating the story and completing everything else we wanted to in terms of side missions, collectibles, etc. There is an NPC (won’t say who to keep at least the text version spoiler free) that we interact with. From there players can select what type of chaos chamber run they want to do. There are few types of runs:

Featured Run – a fixed pre-made run that will change every week (or maybe it was every day). No crystal bonuses
Normal Run – A Standard run with all of it’s randomness left to the RNG gods. Rewards +20% crystals
Extended Run – An Extended version of the Standard run with all of it’s randomness left to the RNG gods. Rewards +20% crystals
Chaos Trial – A test run that you need to pass in order to unlock the next Chaos Level (more about that below). Rewards +20% crystals

Chaos Chamber runs are pretty much a series of encounters (like the ones in the overworld dungeons) that you have to complete. Each encounter will let you choose the Main Reward of the next one. There will be a mid boss fight after X encounters and in the end you’ll face a big boss. The rewards one can choose will be a loot cache, a crystals cache, a temporary buff/lvl increase to a random skill, or a choice of two random map affixes. The temporary buff and the map affixes last until the run ends.

There is also a currency called chaos crystals (crystals for short) that players can use to buff themselves from various buff stations across the encounter maps (each buff station has 3 tiers) or use it for “targeted” loot rewards at the end of a SUCCESSFUL run. Buff stations will increase their cost for each one players pick so picking the only the ones you or your teammates really need is crucial. It’s up to players to choose if they want to buff themselves more or save up more crystals to use in the ‘loot room’ at the end of a run.

Now there is a huge need of Quality of Life improvements here as well, especially considering Gearbox released the game with just one type of endgame that is also extremely repetitive. First of all, in the loot room, after a very rewarding run, we end up getting a ton of clutter of gear we don’t care about making it harder to target the gear we actually want to pick up. Loot Filters are needed SO MUCH here. The clutter of trash loot that we cannot auto-salvage-on-pickup is just one of the worst things about that room.

Next, we also could use a system/interface where we access the rabbit/bunny we want to pump full of crystals (or even better a single interface elsewhere that lets us select the bunny from there). That interface should let us pick how many crystals we want to invest into this type of loot (500, 1k, 1,5k, 3k, 5k, etc.) and then let us confirm to get the rewards we chose for the amount we’ve invested. Currently, it’s very sluggish that we need to hold (or pump) a button for one loot puke at a time. It’s even more annoying when more than one person wants to use the same bunny for the same type of rewards and a queue forms. If we had a place to select the bunny/reward we want and how many crystals to invest at a time this would be no issue.

One of the worst things about the Chaos Chamber is how it handles Failed runs. As we’ve established players earn crystals and then spend those crystals on buffs during the run or in the loot chamber. However, when a run fails (you loose all SHARED 3 lives your team has and then all people die) then everyone get teleported back to the chaos chamber to start a new run. This is EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING as is means the time you’ve spent up until you dies is not respect and valued at all. What they could do it to make it so that players get teleported to the loot chamber BUT the big loot chest in the middle is locked if a run has failed. However, to prevent people from never doing bosses, mayeb make it so that the final boss of a run drop a big chunk of the total crystals you an get during a run (like 30% or even 35%). That way players still get to feel like their chem spent was not a total waste and they do get some consolation prize for their efforts.

There are also 3 +1 hidden bosses in the Chaos Chamber. Unlocking and beating the 3 will unlock teh 4th and final hidden boss. I’ll make a separate article and video about those.

Chaos Mode:

This is the equivalent to the Mayhem Mode system from Borderlands 3. There are a total of 20 chaos Levels and each of them will add the following changes to your game:

Loot Luck – 4% per Chaos level (80% at Chaos 20)
XP – 4% per Chaos level (80% at Chaos 20)
Gold – 4% per Chaos level (80% at Chaos 20)
Moon Orbs – 4% per Chaos level (80% at Chaos 20)
Enemy Damage – 4% per Chaos level (80% at Chaos 20)
Enemy HP – this is stranger but it’s 25% at C1 and 541% at C20. Goes up like: 25/49/74/99/125/150/176/202/229/255/282/310/337/365/394/422/451/481/511/541

The Chaos level difficulty applies to all sorts of content. Overworld & World Maps (they scales to your level + the chaos level on top ofc.), Chaos Chamber runs, and possibly any other content that gets added.

Crossplay & Matchmaking:

Cross play is wonderful, especially when it bring together PC + XBOX + PlayStation players. However, the matchmaking and the SHiFT servers have been struggling and hopefully things get better as time passes.

I’ve also noticed a “Help needed” interface but there is no “Chaos Chamber” option from the list to select there just “Farming Loot” which does not necessarily mean Chaos Chamber runs. Not really a big need for such QoL but it will be a nice addition.

PROS & CONS:

PROS

Beautiful & Wacky World
a fun main quest line
Plenty of different Enemies
classic Borderlands style combat
Beautiful VFX, SFX, & OST
Plenty of GUNS & other LOOT
A Multiclass System
Myth Ranks are cool but badly executed
Vast Build Diversity
A ton of Side Quests: some very funny some uber boring
Fully voiced: quests, cinematics, even regular NPC dialogues
a ton of ‘completionist bait’ tasks
decent drop rates & some diversity to how we get loot
Chaos Chamber is decent but lacks QoL
Chaos Mode seems Bloated for no good reason
cross-play co-op & matchmaking
the Overworld is pretty cool but lacks some QoL

CONS

ONLY ONE type of endgame
could use A LOT of QoL in many places
a half-assed re-rolling system & also its terrible UI
terribly executed loot room
awfully handles ‘failed’ endgame runs
badly executed Myth Ranks
SHiFT matchmaking is struggling very often
too limited bank space (considering it’s not hosted online)
Not enough sorting options for bank/inventory
NO LOOT FILTERS
Chaos Mode seems Bloated for no good reason
some side quests are super boring
The Overworld really needs some QoL