Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands – One to watch for 2022

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands isn’t too far away and this is the next release from Gearbox, creators of Borderlands. Borderlands 3 wasn’t too long ago, and Tiny Tina’s has been in development for a little while, so it’s very exciting for this one to see the light of day. Today I’m going to bring you everything we know about Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.

In the story-focused trailer for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands we see returning characters, including Dragon Lord, an evil necromancer created by Tiny Tina and both Valentine and Frette. This may look like a Borderlands adventure, but it’s much more Tabletop and D&D-fantasy inspired. The world of Wonderlands includes underground caverns, forests and mountains too.

In true Borderlands style there’s plenty of weapons to get your hands on, plus there are skeletons and dragons to test out this wide array of loot on too. This one is more fantasy RPG, so we’ve got lots of classes too, and they include

Classes

Stabbomancers: This class is all about magic and knives, plus a litle bit of stealth thrown in for good measure. You can appear, stab then disappear again no worries.

Brr-Zerkers: Here it’s all out getting up close and personal, while offering that cooler touch. There’s plenty of opportunities to freeze enemies, which pounding them with your fists.

Clawbringer: These guys are all about hammers and AOE damage. Similar to Kratos, you can also throw a hammer with it coming back into your hands, plus you get a nice little dragon too.

Spellshot: This class is all about magic and spells. Described as ambi-hextrous, they can weild magic with both hands, plus you can turn enemies into all kinds of creatures using the polymorph skills.

Graveborn: This class is all about casting dark spells. They are fragile, but potent, trading their health for high damage spells, for example their Dire Sacrifice ability. They are similar in many repsects to the Clawbringer.

Sporewarden: Finally, we have our archer class. They can fire a bunch of arrows, plus they have a handy frost cyclone spell that homes in on their enemies.

Character Creation

For the first time in the Borderlands series, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is going to let you create your own character, rather than play as pre-defined characters set by Gearbox. Wonderlands promises a world of multi-classes heroes which allows you to use the skills and abilities of several classes. This will most likely manifest in a selection of skills, which you can pick and choose and customise to your playstyle.

Gameplay

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is very similar to Borderlands regarding gameplay. Fast combat, plenty of fun and games, damage numbers, and leveling up weapons, finding new weapons to keep you growing more powerful – that kind of gameplay loop. If Borderlands clicked with you, then it’s highly likely you’ll like Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands given it’s similar. If you found Borderlands a bit annoying, that may also be the case here too.

This is also very much a loot-based game. Find a weapon, use it for a little bit, then discard it when you have a better weapon. Where as Borderlands was a little more Sci-fi, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands definitely sits more in the fantasy side of things, which has the advntage of offering up more fantastical weapons and armour. These all can be collected, and will provide much of the incentive to come back time and time again. The big difference from Borderlands is here we have a lot of melee weapons.

Also, it’s worth noting there are no grenades in the game. Instead, players can cast a bunch of spells, and they have cooldowns in a similar fashion to grenades, but expect a strong magic game in Wonderlands. Instead of throwing explosives, you’ll be able to throw fireballs and mini-tornadoes to injure and perplex your opponents.

Locations

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is inspired by tabletop RPGs, so in regards to the map there’s dungeons, quests, random encounters and loads of environments to check out. We do have some info on the locations and they include:

Brighthoof: This is the capital and protected by The Diamond Guard, which has recently been under seige by enemies.

Butt Stallion’s Castle: This is the ruler of Wonderland’s Castle and also known as Castle Sparklewithers.

Sunfang Oasis: This is a picturesque area filled with lush green, lakes and ruins and this all located in the middle of a desert. It would be perfect, if it wasn’t filled with Coiled snakes.

Tangledrift: A massive beanstalk has grown and created another unique location, filled with people living safely (for now) out of reach of the monsters below.

There’s a nice tabletop style overworld, where you can move your chibi-like character around a board. Here you can encounter random things, which send you into new mini-maps. It’s a unique way of navigating and really leans into the tabletop RPG nature of things.

Story

We don’t know a whole lot about the story, but we do know it follows on from Borderlands 2 DLC Assault on Dragon Keep. In that expansion, Tiny Tina and other characters from the first Borderlands play a tabletop game called “Bunkers and Badasses”. They play as the characters from Borderlands 2 and go off on fantasy adventures wity Tiny Tina acting as DM.

Director Matt Cox has come out and said a little bit about the story with IGN saying “takes place shortly after Dragon Keep”, but that it’s “a brand new adventure in a brand new world in the mind of Tiny Tina.” Rather than being a fully-fledged sequel to that DLC, it looks like it’s going to be more of a standalone adventure.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands certainly sounds like fun, and it’s going to be interesting to see Gearbox’s take on a fantasy setting. They didn’t quite follow up the success of Borderlands 2 with the third installemnt, so we’ll have to see how this adventure goes with Tiny Tina.