Totally Accurate Battle Simulator makes a sneak attack on Early Access

If, like me, you've been following Landfall Games CEO Wilhelm Nylund on Twitter, you've been subjected to perhaps hundreds of amusing gifs from Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. But when is it coming out, you may have cried, desperate to make your own gifs of wacky (yet totally accurate) physics-based battles.

Well, today's the day. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is now on Steam Early Access. I played it a bit this weekend and yes, I made some gifs of my own. Like, a hundred of them.

While the game isn't complete, there are currently 50 levels of a campaign mode available, which takes you from stone age battles (guys with clubs, axe-wielding chieftains, woolly mammoths) to farmland clashes (farmers with pitchforks, hobbits, and potion-hurling alchemists) to medieval times (knights, squires, kings, and catapults) to Greek mythology (Minotaurs, hoplites, and a lightning-bolt hurling Zeus) to the Vikings (berserkers, longboats, and winged Valkyries).

You might not guess from the silliness on display, but there is some actual strategy in the campaign, as you're always an era behind the AI-controlled enemy army. So when they start breaking out the archers and ballistas and you're still running around with pitchforks and wheelbarrows, you're going to have to get creative to win. Some levels are pretty tricky to beat, but this is a game where failure is as much fun as success.

You can also mess around in sandbox mode and simulate battles between any armies and units you want. Send mammoths to fight minotaurs or put cavemen up against catapults. Want to make a single Arthurian king fight a hundred unarmed but very persistent hobbits? You can do that. I did that.

Once a battle has begun you can fly around the map watching from any angle you choose, and there's slow-motion and super-slow-mo so you can simulate a dramatic, 300-style battle as I did with the king below.

I use the king in a lot of my battles. I sort of love him.

There are more armies to come—in the menu, one unavailable tab shows what looks like a ninja's star, and another shows a pistol crossed with a sword, so we've got plenty more totally accurate battle options to look forward to while TABS continues to be developed while in Early Access. There's also a grayed-out option for a 'unit creator' in the main menu, so it looks like we'll be able to design our own warriors. Someday.

You'll find Totally Accurate Battle Simulator on Steam for $15.

Okay, last gif. For now.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.