Who thought combining Borderlands with Dungeon and Dragons would work so well? Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep is set in a fantasy world from the board game that the characters are playing, with Tiny Tina acting as the board master. The storytelling has no right to be this good, with fantastic, witty writing as the characters playing the board game narrate your adventure, with the hilarious Tiny Tina being at the centre of it all. How the narrative breaks the 4th wall is incredibly clever, as Tina dynamically changes the world and questline itself as she makes up the rules of the game on the go. However, there is a more serious undertone as the campaign shows how Tina is in grieving over the loss of one of her friends in Borderlands 2, and 2K does a surprisingly competent job of portraying Tina’s stages of grief without compromising the light-hearted tone of the campaign.

The campaign itself is really well paced, with a whole host of varied fantasy locations that take inspiration from some of the best media in the genre. This leads to some great environmental design and visual variety, with an impressive attention to detail as almost all assets in the game have been overhauled to fit in with the fantasy theme. Moreover, the soundtrack and audio design are fantastic. The campaign itself does a good job of mixing up the endless shooting galleries we’ve come to expect with Borderlands, with puzzles and traversal, but there are still a few areas where it just felt like the game was throwing wave after wave of enemies at you for the sake of padding out the length rather than to provide a challenge. The enemy variety does somewhat make up for this, but I still wish that these encounters were more engaging, with less bullet spongey enemies. Even though there are lots of enemy types, the majority of these are quite basic with simple attack patterns. I wish that 2k took more advantage of the fantasy theme by creating more wacky enemies like the necromancers and mimic monsters. Outside of the main quest there is a tonne of side quests to complete, these vary in quality but do at least provide the player with a reason to return to the world after the main questline is over.

I had a tonne of fun with Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, enjoying it even more than Borderlands 2 itself. Its by no means perfect, but the excellent storytelling, world building and main questline make it well worth your time.

Ranked DLC Recommendations

Playtime: 9 Hours
Score: 8/10

Finally finished this DLC only now in 2022, even though I have replayed Borderlands 2 a dozen times I never finished this DLC, as no matter what level I was going in, the enemies would always be overpowered and I could never beat it. Fast track to now that Tiny Tina Wonderland is releasing, they rereleased this DLC as its own standalone expansion game, which is how I finally played all the way through and beat it.

The standalone version starts you at level 1 and you get 2 skill points per level as opposed to 1, which makes the leveling process much quicker and makes you more equipped to deal with the later enemies, but you can obviously play this normally as part of DLC for the main Borderlands 2 game.

I can finally see why this DLC is the most beloved of the whole series as its really cool to have the Borderlands formula mixed with DnD like roleplaying. The music as well is amazing and evokes fantasy RPG vibes, especially the main town theme. The story for this DLC also serves as the best epilogue to Borderlands 2's main story, and how Tina deals with the consequences of Handsome Jack's actions. The story was overall well done and it was nice to experience as a Borderlands fan.

Only real compliant I have is Handsome Jack who is the villain for this one again, barely gets any great lines or scenes like he did in the base game, and is more an afterthought villain, like they couldn't think of a new one. Also while this is more geared towards the standalone version then the original add on one, the loot progression mostly sucks, as a lot of the guns I picked up weren't all that great and I only picked up 2 legendries in my playthrough, with one being useless and not for my playstyle. But overall, no matter which way you play this, its worth a playthrough!