Instantly, the sky rains fire, pirate ships pop into being along the coastline, and enemies abruptly materialise, acclimatise and open fire. Approaching the town of Brighthoof, you’re told it’s under siege, but the scene looks oddly calm at least, it does until someone points out that it should look more foreboding. Tiny Tina, played brilliantly by long-standing actor Ashly Burch, is improvising the entire time, which means that sometimes the world completely changes in front of your eyes to accommodate her whims.
In the opening hours, my spore warden landed on a preposterously satisfying combo of freezing enemies in place with a frost-damage assault rifle, then shattering them with a two-handed sword, while my mushroom companion poisoned any enemies I hadn’t yet smashed into ice cubes. The usual sci-fi arsenal of hi-tech sniper rifles, grenades and character abilities like turrets or dual-wielding guns are replaced by … well, all of the same exact things, but now with a very tenuous Tolkien-esque bent. There’s more conceptual abstraction here than those expensive candles with names like “Afternoon Escape”.
You are the fictional fantasy hero created by Valentine, one of Tina’s party of players, putting you Inception-level deep into fictionalised video game worlds: you play an imaginary character, created by a video game character, in a world invented by another video game character. Likable teen psycho Tiny Tina acts as the dungeonmaster in a game of Bunkers and Badasses, the Borderlands universe’s own brand of D&D. And after copious Borderlands games, spinoffs and add-ons, there ought to be a sense of over-familiarity about turning up at an enemy camp, shooting everything that moves, then watching your foes explode like scowling pinatas, before you hoover up all the loot they drop. Every joke walks a tightrope between exuberant fourth-wall prodding and juvenile gags. The voice acting is exactly one decibel away from irritating at all times. E very step of the way through Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a D&D-infused spinoff of Gearbox’s cooperative shooter-RPG Borderlands, you think to yourself: this would be so easy to get wrong.
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