Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot Adventure
(
2021
)
I have a soft spot in my cold, black heart for the Borderlands series. A shaky, uncertain love that I cannot dismiss out of hand, but at the same time have to acknowledge is completely indefensible on any logical grounds. These games are exactly the kind of micro-transaction-ridden Skinner boxes that I loathe with an abiding passion. The Borderlands games are not meant to challenge the player with complex thoughts and emotions, nor are they meant to tell engrossing stories with compelling characters, nor are they designed simply to fill the player with a sense of joy and accomplishment; rather these are games that are designed to numb the player until all they care about is watching a set of arbitrary numbers go up; ideally to the point where they are willing to pay additional money to make those numbers go up faster. The Borderlands games have all the artistry of an Excel spreadsheet jazzed-up with a couple of magenta columns.
The humor is exactly the sort of insufferable Whedon-esque banter that has infested and ruined most Western entertainment over the last two decades. Joss Whedon, whatever his talents as a writer (and indeed, he is one of only a very few that has made this style of writing work with any degree of success), has unleashed a plague upon the world that seemingly won't rest until every moment of dramatic tension is deflated by a succession of painfully unfunny jokes. Though even when compared to modern Marvel movies, the Borderlands series was always a particularly loathsome example of this style, with each entry growing progressively more and more cringe-worthy.
Moreover, these boring and unfunny games are made by an insufferable asshole: Randy Pitchford. The kind of guy who downloads pornography on his work computer and stores explicit video files right next to sensitive company information, while loudly virtue signaling about how much he supports women. He's also the sort to use a police killing and a series of nationwide riots to promote one of his video games. So in addition to being indefensible on aesthetic grounds, they are also morally compromised as well.
Yet, despite all that, I can't hate Borderlands the way that I despise every other tedious looter-shooter. Part of this is no doubt just rose-tinted glasses, as when I was a poor student living abroad Borderlands 2 [2012] was the only game I had on my PC aside from SNES and Gameboy emulators. I would play it online with my then-girlfriend, now wife, who was still back home. Yet beyond simple nostalgia, I do think there is some merit to the Borderlands game, if only because, unlike their more brazenly mercenary peers, Borderlands at least seems to be trying to make something worthwhile. Trying and failing of course, but the effort is there. The cell-shaded art style gave the games a distinct look, even though I'm all but certain it was just an excuse to pay the texture artists in loose change and hallucinogens. There are huge maps, filled with a variety of enemies with unique appearances and attack patterns. Sure, at the end of the day, they are just HP blobs that need to be chipped away at with a series of slightly better guns, but Borderlands does a better job of disguising this fact than most games of its ilk.
The campaigns are all a healthy length, clocking in at 20-30 hours a piece. Moreover, they all try, and even occasionally succeed, to include a few emotionally poignant moments. Sure, most of the time these dramatic turns are ludicrous and cringe-worthy because the stories are all populated with garish clowns rather than real human beings, but that makes it all the more impressive when these moments manage to land. For instance, the scene where Roland is killed by Handsome Jack in Borderlands 2 [2012] had some real emotional impact. Sure, the scene is likely to give the audience tonal whiplash, as it snaps the player from the game's typical zany comedy to tragic melodrama in the span of a couple of seconds, but at least the moment taken in isolation can be meaningful. It's a nice touch that you spend the next quest not battling enemies or engaging with the game's odious humor, but rather simply talking with all the NPCs and hearing what Roland meant to them and how they were impacted by his death.
As a result, I'm willing to cut Borderlands a frankly absurd amount of slack, but even I have my limits and this game is what finally caused them to snap.
For starters, this is just a ten-year-old DLC for Borderlands 2 [2012], spun off into its own individual release with no discount or free offering for those that already own said DLC. Sure, some changes have been made (player characters now level up a bit quicker, and a couple of quests from the main game have been awkwardly grafted in) but we're not talking about any significant new content or graphical overhaul. Amusingly, the developers didn't even bother to rework the fast-travel map screen, so all the areas in this game are just tucked away in the corner of a map dominated by a huge continent you can never reach or explore. Even worse it's priced at $10, the same price as the original DLC and significantly more than Borderlands 2 [2012] with all the DLC when it goes on sale (something that seems to happen every couple of weeks). I would have never played it if it didn't get offered free on Steam a couple of weeks ago. I can't even say it's a cash grab, because a cash grab needs to have some possibility of making money and I have trouble imagining who the intended audience is for this game.
The story is effectively a game within a game, where the surviving characters from Borderlands [2009] play a tabletop RPG called Bunkers and Badasses (the Pandora variant of real-life Dungeons and Dragons). The dungeon master is the titular Tiny Tina, the adolescent demotions expert who might just be the most obnoxious and cringe-worthy character in the entire series (no small feat when you look at the competition she's up against). The world of Bunkers and Badasses is a generic swords and sorcery fantasy setting complete with Dragons, Orcs, and Undead enemies. There is disappointingly little here to distinguish it from a standard D&D adventure, with the only concession to uniqueness in the setting being the fact that the player character is packing a small arsenal of firearms. Indeed, it seems rather odd with every treasure chest being packed full of firearms that only a small number of the humanoid enemies seem to have ever thought about using them. The world of B&B is annoying just what people in our world think of as a fantasy adventure story when it would be much more interesting to see a unique spin on the genre as imagined by the insane, gun-toting population of Pandora. This of course was a flaw in the original DLC, but one that I was more willing to overlook when it had to fit into the larger game and storyline of Borderlands 2 [2012].
Likewise, in the original Borderlands 2 [2012] it made a certain degree of sense that you would continue to play as the same character you controlled for the rest of the game, even though you were now technically a fictional character in the world of Bunkers and Badasses. Nobody wanted to start a new character for the DLC or abandon the horde of guns they've amassed in the main game. However, since this game has been spun off into a stand-alone title this excuse no longer carries any weight. So, it's more than a little disappointing that all the character classes have been left unchanged. Having slightly reworked classes that fit in better with the fantasy aesthetic could have potentially given players who already beat the DLC a reason to try this game as a stand-alone. However that would have required a small amount of work and creativity, and it is clear that this product is just a quick cash grab. Honestly, I'm just surprised that they didn't try to charge extra for the Mechnomancer and the Psycho again.
As a capstone to Borderlands 2 [2012], Tiny' Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep actually managed genuine pathos, and in its climatic sequence could even be called moving if you were feeling generous. The emotional core of the game centers around Tina's unwillingness to admit that the characters who died in Borderlands 2 [2012] are really gone. In particular, she is in complete denial about the death of Roland. Not only does Tina include him as a character in her campaign (which would be a strange enough coping mechanism) she also seems to think that he will just walk through the door any moment. When the game reaches its climax, and the events of Roland's death begin to repeat while Tina is forced to admit what happened, the moment hits with a surprising amount of force.
This works in the original game because the events of the main campaign are still fresh in your mind. Here though they are robbed of some of their impact by the sheer distance from the events. The only build-up we have for the big emotional moments comes from a brief voice-over narration that plays at the start of the campaign and describes the events of Borderlands 2 [2012]. I can only imagine how confusing this sequence must be for a new player who just bought this game because it was the cheapest offering in the Borderlands series. You would be left wondering who all these people are and why you should care about any of them.
Yet beyond the obvious wrong-headedness of the concept, I found plenty of minor nitpicks to groan about while playing through the game that I hadn't noticed when I played the original DLC years ago. Whenever you take a small amount of elemental damage, be it acid, fire, or electricity, your character will start screeching and hollering, even if this damage doesn't even make it through your shield. This makes encounters with wizards who can spam elemental effects and spiders with poison bites, tedious in the extreme. Getting hit by enemy archers will cause your screen to buck wildly and make your character move slower. This makes little sense, as getting shot with a cannon has a less significant effect. These negative aspects of combat are compounded by the numerous arenas where enemies just continue to spawn in wave after tedious wave. Worst of all though the monotonous commutes that seem to accompany every side quest or main objective, where you painstakingly make your way across a huge, empty map. This gets especially bad when dealing with the numerous side-quests that are just variations on "go tothis place on the map then go to this place on the map then go to a third place on the map."
The game even manages to screw up its core mechanic, the act of looting wrong. Most chests are worthless, containing nothing more than ammo (which enemies drop when they are killed, despite not using guns themselves) and money (which is useless since merchants only sell inventory trash). Occasionally there will be a gun chest that will occasionally contain a usable weapon in-between all the inventory trash. The only reliable source of good loot is the dice chests, and those are so heavily RNG driven that they might wind up giving you worse loot than the normal chests! As I recall this was a problem in general with the loot in the original DLC, but it wasn't a huge issue since you had an entire game to loot from. Here without the other areas to fall back on you're stuck with the shit loot you can find from these sources plus whatever the bosses drop. When I'm not excited to open treasure chests in a looter-shooter then something has gone horribly wrong.
Then there are the politics. You have a tedious side-quest where Lilith the Siren from Borderlands [2009] shames the muscle-bound Mr. Torgue as a fake geek guy just pretending to be interested in fantasy/sci-fi/video games for social clout. The intention here is to castigate male geeks for being suspicious of all these “lifelong” female geeks that emerged from the woodwork the moment that geeky hobbies became trendy by reversing the genders and asking them how they would feel if judged for their appearance. Obviously, this doesn't make a lot of sense, as anyone (male or female) who has spent any degree of time with the hyper-nerd gatekeepers would probably have their bonafides challenged sooner or later. That is just how this particular subspecies of cringe-worthy nerd operates, something that these “lifelong geeks” would probably know if they were in fact, lifelong geeks.
I remember greeting this with a few sighs and eye rolls when I first played the game but now these moments fill me with much more ire. Part of it no doubt is my own tolerance for ham-fisted political messages in games has waned over the last decade. As I played more and more modern video games I began to see that there was only one accepted political view in mainstream Western gaming and that it was inserted everywhere whether it was warranted or not. In the case of Borderlands, I find it more tiresome than most video games though, as the attitude the game is trying to cultivate is lawless and irreverent, evoking the aesthetic of Punk Rock more than anything else. I can imagine nothing less Punk Rock than regurgitating talking points from Fortune 500 boardrooms, Ivy League lecture halls, and Hollywood production companies.
This game accomplished a rare trick, it took a game that I had at least a few fond memories of and turned it into a dull, repetitive, chore. All the fun and charm of the original seems to have been hacked out of the game when this DLC was ripped off the trunk of the main game. Amazingly all this is accomplished while not actually changing very much at all, indeed I doubt there is a remake that has managed to do more damage to the original game with less effort. It gives the Silent Hill HD remasters a run for their money! All the flaws have been amplified and all the moments of quality have been diminished by the passing of years and the careless presentation. Normally, writing a scathing review of a shitty video game is a cathartic experience, where I get to knock the snot out of a persistent object of my scorn. With Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep I find myself not elated, but rather slightly depressed.