Totally Accurate Battle Simulator Hands-on Preview - Crazed Battles

Who would win in a fight: Zeus, or a wooly mammoth? Or how almost between a Viking Longship and a wheelbarrow? What about a brave knight and a haunted scarecrow? These are the questions that have plagued mankind for centuries, but we finally have a tool to answer these questions. Totally Authentic Battle Simulator is the latest game from Swedish developer Landfall and lets players build incredibly silly armies to fight it out for our amusement.

To phone call Totally Accurate Boxing Simulator a strategy game would exist a disservice to both TABS and the genre. While at that place is a campaign where players have to build an army to defeat a specific enemy army, the results are always more comical than truly strategic. The player will be shown exactly who they take to defeat and where they are on the battleground, so recruit a counter army using a simple but effective points arrangement. Zeus costs thousands of points, while a simple farmer simply costs sixty or so. Once you've used all your points or are happy plenty with your regiment, the battle will unfold.

Unlike other army games though, your soldiers, even the expert ones, will march awkwardly, flail wildly and appear hilariously unthreatening. There is something extremely enjoyable nigh the animation in the game, and how the soldiers crash-land into and off of each other as they haphazardly jab with their weapons. This rarely ununiformed ground forces also takes strategy completely out of the window, as the result tin can change drastically and by sheer chance. Players have no control over the battle once it begins and so will have to just sit back and spotter to see the outcome.

To be perfectly clear, though, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is a game that does non take itself seriously at all. This isn't some terrible attempt at breaking into the strategy genre but a loving and cheeky homage to it. Each unit has a unique trait and advent, and while the game never tells you how anything will behave, information technology is safe to say it will do something funny. The wheelbarrow I mentioned earlier is the closest affair to cavalry the game has, as it speeds headlong into enemy groups and destroys their defences, just by and large, falling off the nearest cliff. The Viking longship is non a naval unit, but a ship being carried across the land by two sailors who will throw it at the enemies at the slightest provocation.

Although the campaign is fun plenty and gives you the excuse to larn about the traits of each unit of measurement, the existent fun in the game comes from the sandbox. Here yous can freely experiment with the troops, creating near limitless armies on both sides and watching the ensuing chaos. I say limitless because the game doesn't end you adding troops, but the software and your computer itself will strain if yous get a fiddling too ambitious here. A lot of the excitement for this game seemed to come up from the Twitter as Landfall game designer and CEO Wilhelm Nylund has been posting short videos of the game for most of last yr. These brusque videos express what is so much fun in TABS, and that is simply watching foreign warriors do all kinds of bizarre things. Building a small-scale forcefulness and unleashing it confronting another squad is exciting, as the outcome is never predictable, and funny. Watching a medieval king take a catapulted stone to the face before marching on is simply bonkers, and if that doesn't sound fun as a set upwards I don't know how to help you.

My favourite experience with TABS, all the same, was playing information technology with friends. What started every bit me showing them this silly piddling distracting game turned into a nighttime of debauchery as we quickly turned the whole thing into a drinking game. Two players would create opposing armies, and everyone would bet a drink or two on the upshot. The bets and the armies got more outrageous equally the evening went on before we finally ran out of vodka.

And when you're not blind drunk because the Minotaur you bet on got frozen past water ice arrows, the game can even exist quite cinematic. The art style is beautiful. The bright colours highlight the lovely soft shapes and agreeable animations, and the cartoonish way makes sure you never really wince at whatsoever deaths. Equally the totally accurate battles rage, still, the role player in control can pull the camera in and out of the activity. Catching decisive moments and hilarious ones, too. I wouldn't exist surprised if someone was currently trying to recreate the famous battles from the likes of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones in this title.

If you are looking for something that you can mess around with, and something that volition keep you surprised, this is the right game. There'southward no real pressure to fight against or challenges to overcome, only the run a risk to watch something funny happen and know that yous were a part of it. And with new features being teased already, the game looks to go on you occupied longer than yous might think.

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator launched on Steam Early Access concluding week. We'll revisit the game for a full review once it's out of Steam Early Access (according to Landfall, in about a yr from now).