totally accurate battle simulator pc review

Want to see who’d win in a fight between Zeus and fifty guys armed with harpoons? Well now you can. There are now pirate queens and pumpkin catapults, skeleton warriors, lance-wielding jousters and medieval archers who fire snakes instead of arrows. The slapstick scrapping sim has been in early access for almost a year now, and since its launch the developers have been piling more and more ridiculous unit types into the game’s silly, wonky, physics-powered combat sandbox.

Last week, while stress-testing Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, I made so many ninjas fight one another that my PC juddered to a halt, overheated and blue screened, engendering more empathy and forgiveness for my father in two seconds than a decade of family therapy could ever hope to achieve. The Atari ST never worked again, precipitating a fraught relationship with my father that would take two decades to begin to repair. Dad stood up from his chair, said nothing, and walked out of the room. The 3.5” floppy disk drive let out a pained, mechanical shriek and the operating system bombed, the system’s guts irreparably confounded by my inscrutable father’s failed attempt to conjure a ten-dimensional, Lovecraftian artefact on something as powerful as a calculator. “Dad, don’t.”īut he was as unresponsive as the Atari itself, possessed by some unseen force, sliding the mouse to the render button and clicking a single, inevitable click. “Dad,” I pleaded, the maddening nest of garbled lines reflected in his glasses. With each fresh click the Atari took longer to respond, until at last the monitor was a nonsense web of overlapping edges and clipped geometry.

Clicking over and over, the man began adding vertices anywhere they would fit, hundreds of them, tracing the outline of some impossible, non-Euclidean solid. We had been playing about with some primitive CAD software, plotting out simple shapes to render low polygon urns when he fell eerily silent. When I was seven years old, my dad broke our Atari ST. This week, he returns to the simulated killing fields of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.

Totally accurate battle simulator pc review