Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands has been enjoying healthy player numbers since release, which goes to show how much the Dungeons & Dragons style for Borderlands games is appreciated even years after Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep for Borderlands 2. The classic tabletop RPG formula does wonders in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, particularly because of how well constructed the game’s humor is constructed, and how much of it can apply to actual real-world Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is as much Borderlands as any other game in the series, and it even manages to improve upon the well-established gameplay loop of the franchise through spells.
It isn’t hard for Borderlands fans to notice that many older elements make up a lot of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, including some animations and character models for recurring characters. In many ways, this new release is based on games like Borderlands 3, to the point that the UI across most of them remains the same. This poses a problem though, as the UI for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands shows how much it has grown past its predecessors, calling for a refresh in future Borderlands titles.
Why Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ UI Doesn’t Do the Game Justice
Oftentimes, equipping weapons and other items in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands can feel off because of the way clicking or pressing the main buttons works, and for the most part there’s a lot of menu clutter when viewing or comparing items in the inventory. Clicking on items to compare or equip them is usually a counterintuitive process that requires more clicks than necessary, and it can mess up the UI through small visual glitches.
Another problem is that the character’s inventory and the backpack are placed in a way that makes the space in between them too small to have two items showing up, which happens when comparing pieces of gear. Picking skills and stats in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands can be a pain because of all the clicking involved, and the fact that players have to press buttons on the same screen to show specific menus, such as for the character’s stat distribution.
The in-game screen clutter doesn’t help this case, with plenty of items on the ground at all times and no way to tell them apart as they stack on top of one another, which mostly happens at the end of a Chaos Chamber run or with boss loot. It’s not uncommon that opening a single chest turns into a loot explosion, and players then have to manually check every drop to see what’s worth picking up and what isn’t.
This also messes with the flow of the game, which can otherwise be quite hectic at all times, making it a missed opportunity to do better than in past Borderlands releases. A possible solution to the screen clutter in maps could be to introduce a loot filter, which could also help with another problem: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ reduced enemy density. A future Borderlands game should evolve past the current UI simply because it can be a detrimental value to the game’s final experience, underachieving what Gearbox does best: fun games filled with loot - and lots of humor.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is available for PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
