The Battle Royale genre is still in the midst of hitting its apex in terms of clones and various game studios attempting their shot at the game type. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite are on top, with Fortnite currently leading the way. For a while, PUBG was leading the genre after a rapid climb in active user base that reached over 3 million players this past January, but the numbers seem to have plateaued since then. The rise of the free-to-play Fortnite‘s popularity could be the main contributing factor, but some believe the consistently buggy nature of PUBG is what stopped its growth. Seeing the struggles that Bluehole Studio Inc. and the PUBG Corporation have suffered in trying to create realistic 100-man fight to the death should understandably discourage smaller development teams from attempting to tackle such a task. To that contrary, indie game studio Landfall Games have decidedly embraced the buggy nature of games like PUBG with today’s release of Totally Accurate Battlegrounds.
Known for their fun and well-executed mechanics in games such as Clustertruck and Square Brawl, the folks at Landfall Games have recently been flipping the script on how they design game mechanics with TABG and their currently-in-development title Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. As the developers mention on their Steam store page FAQ,
TABG is an April Fools’ joke, we’ve done one every year since 2016. We’ve previously combined one of our games with another genre or game. The first year we made Supertruck, a mix between the game Superhot and Clustertruck. Last year we made TABZ which is a mix of TABS and DAY-Z. We spend an enormous amount of lunch breaks and nights playing PUBG, this is an homage to a game we love.
Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is available for PC on Steam right now. The game is free for the first 100 hours of release. After that, the game will cost $4.99. As of writing, the game is suffering problems with player connecting to their servers. Fortunately, this won’t prevent players from adding the game to their Steam library during the free period.