Entertainment

Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is a battle royale video game by Landfall Games

The best Battle Royale game

Colin Looysen, Writer | 11/08/2021

Hear me out, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds stands out as the best game in an arguably over-saturated genre, and although it has the same mechanics as some of the more popular battle royale games, the developers incorporated just the right amount of random to eliminate the issues of other games, and the insane amount of items and mechanics make every round fun.

TABG is developed by Swedish indie game studio, Landfall Games, who are known for their 2016 game Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, a sandbox and puzzle battle simulator known for the ragdoll physics-based characters. For April fools in 2018, Landfall released TABG, combining their iconic character designs with the popular battle royale Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, and after getting great reception and a consistent player base, they decided to continue to support and update the game until on April fools in 2021, they made the game free to play.

Fortnite. Warzone. PUBG. If these words don’t mean anything, then let me spell it out for you.

Boiled down to its most basic form, a battle royale game consists of a large number of players who compete or fight each other until only one is left standing and is declared the winner.

The most common form of a battle royale game is a shooter, where the players start with nothing and must find weapons, healing items, and grenades to eliminate other players and stay within the ever-shrinking safe zone. TABG has all of these things and even borrows weapon attachments from PUBG and the second chance mechanic from Call of Duty Warzone, but nothing is as it seems.

On top of the normal guns and items, the developers included rare weapons like taser shotguns, rare grenades like orbital strikes that damage everything in a massive spherical radius, and an attachment that makes your bullets heal players instead of hurting them.

The zone in most games is just a colorful circle that only slightly damages you when you are outside of it. In TABG, the zone consists of massive rectangular prisms that ominously converge to form a wall that kills you if you are stuck outside.

The first level of the respawn minigame that players call the “Gulag”

When you die in-game, you are transported to a white empty plane with nothing but a jump pad which launches you into a 3 level minigame where you dodge pillars for a chance to respawn. If you beat the first level, you respawn with a curse. If you beat the second level, you respawn normally. If you beat the third level, you respawn with a blessing.

Blessings are an original game mechanic that can be found on the ground along with normal loot, or bestowed after beating the levels of the respawn minigame. Blessings range from normal mechanics: increasing health, speed, magazine size, and decreasing recoil and shot dispersion, to unique things, like passive health regeneration, bullet modifiers that poison or slow down enemies, literal personal bubble shields, wallhacks, the ability to do 5 jumps, and one that makes it so you throw three grenades instead of one.

Curses can only be gotten through the respawn minigame and are the opposite of blessings. They can make it so you can only look right, remove your ability to jump, make it so you jump randomly, shoot randomly, shoot less often, adds a fog that stops you from seeing anything that isn’t right in front of you, or worst of all, the curse of rubberbanding that mimics a bad wifi connection and randomly teleports you back to where you were two seconds ago.

The sheer amount of stuff in the game may seem daunting at first, but in-game, it makes every round interesting. Yes, there are guns and blessings that you will find every round and should be picked up if you want to win, but TABG encourages players to experiment by including absurd items. How can you not pick up a minigun or katana and try to destroy other players?

The game also has a shooting range where you can try out a ton of the wacky weapons in the game

The crazy items and intentional jankiness of the character models and map design make the game infinitely replayable and surprisingly balanced.

There is no building mechanics so you won’t be out-built by a 9-year-old like is so common in Fortnite.

The map is great. There are named locations like Pyramid, Wild West, and Area 64 that always have good loot, and even smaller buildings placed around that also usually have worthwhile loot. It is large enough where you don’t need to have insane reflexes just to survive like in Warzone and small enough where you won’t get bored running for 5 minutes straight without seeing anybody like in PUBG. There are also vehicles that help get you where you need to go.

The TABG map looks huge but is really the perfect size and has a multitude of great locations