Black Friday season is one of the best times for gamers to snag some underappreciated gems for significantly discounted prices, and one such game that should be on your radar right now is Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. Released early in 2022 while everyone and their mother (and me) was still marveling at Elden Ring, the D&D-themed Borderlands spinoff always seemed like a game that got overshadowed, despite how good it is. There’s nothing stopping you from playing it now, though, and since you can currently get it for as low as $13.05 on GMG (Steam), there’s never been a better time to give it a shot.
Notably, the physical Xbox Series X|S version is only $15 at Best Buy, as well, with the Xbox One version down to $10 at Amazon. The latter will work on Xbox Series X|S consoles, but you won’t get Series X|S-specific graphics and performance optimizations.
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The best Borderlands game since 2 — trust me
What if you took Borderlands 2’s beloved Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC and turned it into an entire game? That’s exactly what Gearbox did when it developed Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a spinoff of the mainline Borderlands looter shooters that’s themed around the in-universe D&D stand-in, Bunkers & Badasses. Sticking with that theme, you get the opportunity to create a fully customizable “Fatemaker” instead of control a named Vault Hunter, and then you can choose one of six classes for them and tweak your starting stats. Over time, you’ll get to upgrade those stats, unlock powerful bonuses from your class’ skill tree, and even gain access to multiclassing.
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Once you’ve made your Fatemaker, you’ll be thrust into Wonderlands’ 25-30 hour campaign, which sees you acting out the events of a of Bunkers & Badasses game run by the eccentric fan-favorite character Tiny Tina — also known as “the world’s most dangerous 13 year-old.” Overall, the writing is much better than the cringefest that was Borderlands 3, with the clever, yet over-the-top silliness that Borderlands fans love, but with a focus on tabletop-related humor. There are also quite a few touching moments in the story, as well, and they’ll probably hit pretty hard if you’re a longtime fan of the series.
With both gameplay and presentation, Gearbox went above and beyond with the D&D inspiration. Throughout the game, players will encounter everything from hordes of skeletons, devious goblins, and massive trolls to soaring wyverns, a cult of magically gifted snake-women, and even homicidal mushrooms. Instead of regular firearms and grenades, you’ll be fighting these baddies with bow and crossbow-shaped guns, a wide variety of magic spells, and melee weapons like swords and axes (a first for Borderlands). All the action happens across a number of the Wonderlands’ environments, including peasant towns, sieged castles, colossal sky high beanstalks, underwater temples, and more.
You can tell a ton of effort was put into making the game feel like a proper transition from Borderlands’ scrappy sci-fi style to imaginative fantasy, and this is especially true with Wonderlands’ endgame mode, the Chaos Chamber. In “runs” of this roguelike-style activity, you can challenge increasingly difficult waves of enemies and bosses across all of the game’s locations. Completing them will net you several randomized high-tier loot drops; when playing runs with higher Chaos Level difficulties, enemies will be harder to kill, but your rewards will be better.
All in all, there’s just a lot to love about Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, even if it’s not quite as expansive as a mainline Borderlands title. As we wrote in our Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands review, “the full journey is well worth playing” — and believe it or not, I’d argue it’s actually the best in the franchise since Borderlands 2. If it sounds like something you’ll enjoy, you should take advantage of these Black Friday deals while they’re available.
Something to keep in mind is that if you’re planning to get the discounted physical version of the game from Best Buy, you should make sure you at least sign up for the free tier of the retailer’s My Best Buy memberships. That way, you won’t have to pay for shipping.
