I’ve never been a big Borderlands fan. Most of my friends were way into Borderlands 2, but I wasn’t playing video games much back then—2010ish, I think. In fact, at that time, I played one game, exclusively: Team Fortress 2.

During the pandemic, I played Borderlands 3 with two friends—but only for a little while. The humor and the loot hamster wheel did not appeal to me. There were so many guns that none of the guns felt like they mattered. And the jokes were not funny to me.

The only Borderlands game I ever meaningfully played (and therefore completed) was Tales from the Borderlands, the Telltale game. I was really in to those narrative games, and that Borderlands version was one of the best. The humor there was just right, and the storytelling was top notch.

Despite that, coming into Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, I had low expectations. I had heard that it was a take on a D&D campaign set in the Borderlands universe, and, well, that seems to be exactly what it is.

It starts off with several characters, who I have to assume are all characters in Borderlands 2, sitting around a table set up with a table-top RPG. Tiny Tina serves as the game master, and her companions get cajoled into a game.

The dice are thrown, Tiny begins to spin the tale, and we move from the table into the game world.

I chose a class (mechromancer, based solely on the name), and I head out into the world. Tina narrates a story, and as she does, things in the world change. At one point, I run into something like a level-99 boss, right at the beginning, and the characters around Tina tell her that’s not the right way to tart a campaign, so she narrates a new boss, much more appropriately leveled, and the monstrous dragon I was ineffectually facing turns into a much more manageable skeleton with a ridiculous name.

I continue to work my way through the village, headed toward my goal, when a gatekeeper tells me he needs to accompany me into the forest. A companion complains he’s not in the game, and, poof, the gatekeeper transforms into this companion. This new NPC is “that guy” at the D&D table—creating insane challenges and tasks just to fuck with the players at the table and sort of ruin everyone’s fun. At one point, he directs me to destroy the ocean, and that’s when Tina takes over and gets the guy out of the game. Then, the quest resumes—I continue to look for the queen, the maguffin for this part of the story.

The gunplay is decent, the graphics looks like Borderlands, but the storytelling is hilarious and quite engaging. How Long to Beat tells me this game clocks in around 5 hours, and I played one for this Backlog Binge. I think I’ll come back to it—it was a ton of fun.

Verdict: Really glad I checked this one out, and I will come back to it and complete it.