The premise for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is rather simple: take the looter shooter blueprint of the Borderlands series and reframe it with a fantasy edge as in-game characters play a knockoff of Dungeons and Dragons called Bunkers and Badasses.

This is the same idea as the standalone DLC for Borderlands 2, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, but this time its expanded into a full game.

Does this clash of FPS and fantasy work? Yes, very much so, but it’s utterly kneecapped by the worst and stingiest loot we have ever seen. More on that later.

Let’s start with how things look right as you boot up the game. Those who played Borderlands 3 will be instantly familiar here with that classic Borderlands style for the current year.

What’s different is that things are more fantasy leaning, as you may imagine. As you can see in the trailers on this page there are a lot of fantasy tropes like skeletons, dragons, snake people and more.

Before we go on we have to declare our love for the skeleton enemies in this game. Basically, all of them speak like Skeletor and whoever came up with that idea at Gearbox or 2K should be given a raise. As you’re fighting them they’ll spout out lines that made us genuinely smile and every time some of them showed up for a fight we were happy to see them.

Our favourite line from the skeletons is “we’ll defeat you with the power of friendship… evil friendship!”.

Really the worst part about the presentation here is how fantasy clashes with, well, guns. Borderlands is a series based on guns and there’s been very little work to adapt them to fit into the faux Dungeons and Dragons setting. Some assault rifles now shoot crossbow bolts and shotguns are reloaded by sprinkling them with magical crystals, but they’re all still guns.

More work could have been done to fully turn the guns into more medieval weapons, but it’s not too difficult to get over.

Gameplay is likely the best that Borderlands has ever been. In our review of Borderlands 3 we commented on the smooth and satisfying gunplay and movement, and that’s been carried over.

Even better is the changes made for this game, like the fact that grenades have been replaced with spells. These spells are much more varied than even the weird and wacky grenades in past Borderlands games and it’s a lot of fun to discover them and mould it into your gameplay.

Our favourite of the bunch was continuous use spells which would activate as long as you held down the button. We found a spell of lightning that would chain as long as we fired, and this was combined with an SMG with a huge magazine so we could fire both of these at the same time for a while until everything was dead.

There’s also a slightly reworked melee system where various swords, polearms and axes can be picked up along with the assortment of guns. There’s no actual melee system aside from pressing a button and your character swinging the weapon, but now that these can be modified with all the stats of a gun, you can be much more effective in close range.

The setting and the gameplay perfectly meshed and we loved pursuing side quests to kill more enemies in unique and interesting ways.

Unfortunately we now need to talk about the worst part of this game that sours everything you do. The loot in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is outright awful and actively discourages people from continuing to play the game. It almost ruins the entire experience and it’s ridiculous that it ever made it out of testing.

We’d say around 90 percent of the time playing this game you will be picking up common and uncommon loot that is so useless and so disheartening to see that it’s sometimes not even worth picking up to sell.

At the end of grand adventures and difficult fights it’s a hilarious slap in the face to be rewarded with loot that you probably won’t even use and garner no excitement from receiving.

This genre of game is made with a tight loop in mind where gameplay leads to loot which encourages you to keep playing, acquiring more loot and so on, but the loop is completely broken when the rewards for your efforts are this bad.

It’s worth mentioning now that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands has a new mechanic where, around every section of the game, there are D20 dice hidden and hidden well.

Finding these dice not only rewards you with some loot, but apparently it increases some numbers in the back end of the game to improve your loot rewards accordingly.

We went out of our way to find these dice and we got between 60 and 100 percent in each area, and still the rewards were bad.

Either this system is working as intended and the system still sucks after finding the dice, or its broken and the dice do nothing.

It’s difficult to convey how much poor loot hurts this experience but imagine playing a Mario game where you can only jump half as high, a Pokémon game with two attacks instead of four or FIFA and all the players only kick with their non-dominant foot.

It’s a real shame as the rest of the game is so great, especially the story and voice acting. Borderlands 3 is infamous for having one of the worst stories not just in videogames, but in the history of humankind combined with Troy Calypso and Tyreen Calypso, known as the “Cringe Twins” by the community.

The story here isn’t ground-breaking but it’s enjoyable. The main story mostly takes a backseat to the side quests which contain a lot of memorable characters that lean more towards the fun side and less towards constant annoyance like in other Borderlands titles.

The voice acting is worth praising too. Ashly Burch returns as the titular Tiny Tina and she’s as good as ever. Joining her is Captain Valentine (Andy Samberg), Frette (Wanda Sykes) and antagonist Dragon Lord (Will Arnett).

Samberg and Arnett are our favourites here with the former bringing the dumb but fun energy of Jake Peralta into the mix while the latter reminds us of an evil Batman, fitting as Arnett played the character in the basically spoof film The LEGO Batman Movie.

With all that in mind Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a fantastic game completely failed by one of its core systems that is supposed to tie everything together. All we can hope for is future patches that tip the RNG in favour of the player and more interesting rewards.