Virtual 100 – Game 48
I hate this game. I really hate this game.
It’s been tricky to write about this one, because my first instinct is go off on how incessantly annoying the game is, how pointless the “shooter-looter” system is, and how broken and underwhelming the combat can be. And to be honest, I’ll probably end up doing that anyway. But I’m going to hold off on that long enough to say how disappointed I was in this game overall because man, they had a good thing here. But what started out as a side quest in Borderlands 3 then evolved into a stand-alone chapter with Tiny Tina’s Assult on Dragon Keep, then finally became a full-fledged “AAA” adventure with Wonderland. They took what worked really, really well in a bite-sized portion and turned it into an all-you-can-eat buffet.
We see it a lot, right? Usually with small businesses, or internet-fame, where someone gets super-popular for a 30-second video, or whatever, and they try to push it so much that it ultimately fails. It also brings to mind whenever television shows would release a full-length feature film back in the day. I loved the Simpsons, and South Park, and Beavis and Butt-head. These are all shows that work well, and are entertaining for the 20-ish minutes that their shows last. But do I really want to watch it for an hour and a half? I realized, time and time again, throughout my teenage years, that no, I do not.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderland took an idea that worked really well for thirty minutes, and dragged it out for a thirty hours. And that’s without doing any side quests.
The game is absolutely gorgeous. With TTW being the successor of sorts to Borderlands 3, it really does refine that semi-cel-shaded look and turn it into something smooth and organic. I can’t fault the graphics at all. Where the original Borderlands and Borderlands 2 had that rough Sharpie look to them, where everything had a hard black outline, and even details on the characters themselves looked like they had been drawn on, TTW tones it down quite a bit, where everything now has a more painterly look. There were hardly any instances where I thought it lacked interest. The zones themselves are varied and interesting, and while some of them drag on a little too long, I can’t say I ever got bored with any of the environments I was in.
Not everything works, and while the overworld has details to make it apparent that it’s a make-believe game board that is being played on, it never goes all-in on it. There are sections of the map where a piece of the landscape has broken off, and the compressed styrofoam is showing, or there are bridges made out of bottlecaps, or there is a cheesie-poof blocking the way, but everything else is normal. Trees, rocks, structures don’t have that “toy” look to them, so it kinda ruins the illusion. On top of that, I think the bobble-head appearance is just dumb. I get it, they’re supposed to be tabletop miniatures, but I almost would have rather had a fixed toy piece that just hopped along the overworld than my character being my character except with a gigantic head. It just looked ridiculous, and not in a good way.
At the beginning, Tiny Tina narrates while the player goes through the game world. She changes her mind on a few occasions, and the game world reacts to her updating the situation. It works really well and I liked that dynamic, but it’s mainly all for show and the spectacle of the beginning. After a while that stops and it’s just like you’re playing Borderlands. I really wish they would have kept that element of surprise— like anything could change at any moment. And to be fair, there’s a little bit of interaction later in the game, but not to the degree that we see at the beginning.
To me, the graphics and the environments were the high-point of the entire game, and I can’t help but wonder what this development team could do if they weren’t shoe-horned into this IP. I think if they took the visuals and the formula and completely removed it from the Borderlands universe, they could come up with something really special (especially if they got rid of the shitty RNG guns and actually gave us something fun to shoot).
Okay, I’ll give a fair bit of warning, because what I wrote above is about as positive as it’s gonna get. Because like I said, I really came to hate this game.
“Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands” should have been titled “Tiny Tina’s Wonder If They’ll Ever Shut The Fuck Up.”
I had this game for a while, and I’ve attempted to get it started several times in the past, but there’s always been one big reason I’ve fallen off of it relatively quickly: The talking in this game is non-stop. Now I kinda knew this going in; I remember the reviews when the game came out. But they always mentioned Tiny Tina, and I was like, “Well okay, that’s kind of her character. Plus she’s the game master so she has to talk and narrate.”
What I didn’t realize is that it’s not just Tina. None of the characters in this game are likeable, and none of them are capable of shutting the fuck up. For a game that focuses on a solo “hero” the game is constantly throwing chatter at you, whether it’s Tiny Tina, or one of the other characters participating in the game (who I guess are supposed to be the other co-op players, though I couldn’t tell you who the hell they are or where they came from.) If you’re playing the game solo, they’re nothing more than voices that offer opinions and commentary.
Even NPC’s in the game, that may give you a side quest, continue to talk long after you’re ready leave. They are incapable of just laying out the mission and getting on with it, they all have to have their “moment” to let their personality show. I walked away from most of these conversations mid-sentence, and the game doesn’t even register that you’ve left. You’ll just continue to hear the NPC’s ramble off in the background as you walk away. They’ll stand there yapping to no one cuz you left 30 seconds ago. And those are the ones you CAN walk away from. There are times when the game pairs you up with an NPC companion that follows you along, and they just refuse to ever shut up. And you can’t shoot them, because I tried.
Now, the Borderlands games have always had this problem. There have always been characters like Claptrap that were just so incessantly annoying because of their constant yammering. But there were also long periods of time in Borderlands where you could just wander the land on your own, slaughtering anything you came across to get money and loot. And it was fine. There was a balance.
But TT’s Wonderlands never lets you off the leash. You’re always tethered, even if just metaphorically, to someone. And you can’t escape. After the first few hours, just as before, I JUST WANTED IT TO STOP. Sure, I could have just turned the V/O off in the settings, but I wanted at least some of that. Battle banter was fine. Hearing the skeletons taunt me occasionally gave me a chuckle. Besides, an utterly silent game would have been weird.
But the constant yacking isn’t even my biggest complaint with the game (and it’s a pretty big one). My biggest gripe with Borderlands is also its main draw. The “Shooter Looter” as it’s been deemed, is so chock full of piles and piles and piles of loot, that you spend the vast majority of your time comparing weapons instead of enjoying the game. This wouldn’t be as big of a deal if you weren’t so hungrily searching for something better than what you have. Compounding this problem is the fact that, for whatever reason, the developers chose to lock away the other two gun slots for higher levels. The third gun slot doesn’t unlock until around level 16 or 17. And it takes a while to level up, too. I think I played for a good ten to fifteen hours before I got there. That’s a long time to be juggling shitty weapons between two gun slots.
I get that Borderlands games have always locked them at first, but I feel like it just took way longer to get there this time around. And when most guns have some form of elemental damage, you’ll want to carry at least a few. But you can’t. It takes that Borderlands gun loop and stretches it out.
There are huge stretches of time where you’ll be stuck with a shitty arrangement of weaponry and you’re searching for something— anything— with decent enough firepower to trade it for. Out of the mountains and mountains of loot, rarely did I find a gun I actually liked.
That’s every Borderlands in a nutshell. The novelty of randomly generated weapons was a cool idea at first, but anyone playing will quickly see how wonky and awkward a randomly generated gun can actually be. And sometimes the drought between finding fun, effective guns can be pretty long. I would be totally on board with a gunsmith that could make exactly the kind of gun that you want, when you want it. Which, admittedly, would kill the entire hook of Borderlands in the first place. Still, I’d be okay with that.
The game starts off in a pretty restricting manner, but it ultimately does become more playable. Not because the characters became likeable or more endearing, but because all of the early-level roadblocks slowly began falling away. I unlocked the ring accessory slot. Then the necklace accessory slot. Then a sub-class. Then (finally) another gun slot. Once I wasn’t being restricted quite so much, it actually started getting, “better.” But holy fuck it took its time getting there.
The melee weapons were a cool addition, and I really dug it initially. Firing off a few rounds at an approaching skeleton, then giving it a good, hard whack with my sword or ax was fun— at first. But I quickly realized that I was whacking more often than I cared to because literally everything bum-rushes you in this game. In Borderlands, you had an enemy or two that would rush you. A skag, or a flying creature, or maybe a bandit would charge at you, but for the most part, everything shot at you from a distance. Not so in TTW. They gave you a sword, and they want you to use it. The unfortunate result is that there’s always something in your face.
The further I got into the game, the more shit it threw at me. The more shit it threw at me, the more shit I had in my face. It got really, really, really annoying. On top of that where the projectiles, spells, arrows, gunfire, and so on that were also hitting you at the same time. Where are they coming from? Who the fuck knows, you have your gun taking up like, 25% of the screen, and there are two skeletons in your face, and you can’t see a goddamn thing. It only gets worse as the game goes on.
The game still carries on the traditional Borderlands death mechanic where your character will be put into a “downed” state, where you have a bleed-out timer in which you can try to kill something to revive yourself. I get this mechanic in a co-op multiplayer situation, in a single player game, it’s downright irritation. Why is a second, or even third or fourth chance at life a bad thing?
Because the game has to make sure there’s always something to kill in order to revive. Meaning there’s nary a boss battle that is not spawning minions to be dealt with. They’re there for no other reason than to be fodder for your revival. And to just annoy you. So not only are you fucking around with the boss and whatever spells and shit they’re throwing at you, you’re constantly being smacked with arrows or have some low-level skeleton getting up in your shit. It is beyond annoying.
It might not be so bad if my character’s shield and health didn’t get utterly destroyed in one or two hits. I was constantly upgrading my shield whenever I found a better one. It wasn’t weak. But it never held up to enemy attacks for more than a second, and the health bar could be wiped out in one shot because defense was just a figment of my character’s imagination.
Why does the health and shield dissipate so fast?
Because all of the enemies in the game scale to your level. No, I’m not lying. In a game where you want to gain levels and get better loot in order to become stronger, it’s all for fucking nothing because the enemies are also constantly getting stronger. And I’m not just talking about wandering into a high-level area and getting hit with monsters that are out of your league. I’m talking about going anywhere on the map, even back to the beginning areas of the game, and still dealing mediocre damage because everything is within one or two levels of your character.
If you’re going into this game with dreams of becoming an all-powerful hero and annihilating everything you come across, keep dreaming. You’ll be middling around feeling about as average as when you started, no matter what.
I will never understand level-scaling in games like this. People hated it when Skyrim did it like, fifteen years ago, and they hate it now. Does it make earlier zones trivial and near-pointless to return to? Yes. Does it make going back and cleaning up incomplete side quests ultimately quicker and more enjoyable? Also yes. It has long been a staple of a good RPG that if you are having difficulty in a certain area, you move on and come back later when you’re stronger. There’s nothing better than the feeling of wiping the floor with the enemies that once seemed intimidating. THAT’S THE POINT.
And TTW completely misses it with this level-scaling bullshit. I don’t know what they’re reasoning for it was. Maybe it was for multiplayer co-op to be fun for everyone involved (which I’ve never agreed with— half the fun of teaming up with someone way stronger than you was for power-leveling).
The non-stop yacking from cringey and annoying characters, horrible loot system, armor and accessories with stats that barely seemed to make a difference, bum-rushing enemies that were always in my face, and level-scaling enemies really, really made this game seem much longer than it was.
And it could have been all to the detriment of my gaming experience that I was so annoyed by the NPC’s that I avoided side quests altogether. The first few I did was for Claptrap, who I’ve hated with a passion since the very first Borderlands, and a goblin-troll thing that tried to have a goblin uprising against another… I don’t know I stopped paying attention, they all talked so goddamn much. Every conversation had literal paragraphs of dialog on the screen that I just couldn’t be bothered to read or listen to.
Perhaps doing these quests would have rewarded my character with certain abilities and buffs to her stats. I never found all of the pieces of the Shrines. Each shrine gave a buff to a certain stat. But some of these pieces were behind obstacles that— I’m assuming— were tied to a side quest. One such quest got my character the ability to cross gaps on invisible bridges, for example. Then there were dice that were hidden in all the zones. Smashing a dice would give a tiny little incremental increase to the Luck stat. There were a shit-ton of them, and I smashed all the ones I came across, but it never really seemed to make any kind of tangible impact on my game.
Maybe all this would have been much more enjoyable had I been playing with a friend. The game is obviously designed for multiplayer and maybe by playing it solo, I missed out on the “magic” of the game.
But here’s the thing; I couldn’t find anyone that wanted to play. Because the game was annoying and un-fun, apparently I’m the only one that was masochistic enough to willingly subject myself to this shit.
But subject myself I did, and I am so, so happy to remove it from my backlog, mark it up as number 48 on the Virtual 100, and delete it the fuck off my hard drive.
I need a drink.
