Extremely silly Battle Royale game Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is an unexpected Steam smash

Ridiculous new Battle Royale game Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is doing incredibly well for itself, considering it started life as an April Fool's joke.

TABG (as it shall be known from here on out), tasks players with roaming around a sprawling open-world map, hoovering up weapons and gunning down opponents until there's no one else left alive. So far so familiar - but TABG stands apart from its peers thanks to the low-poly silliness it's inherited from developer Landfall's Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, chiefly in the form of its preposterous, wibbly-wobbly physics.

In TABG, the very serious business of killing everyone in sight is made rather more ridiculous as limbs flail uncontrollably, bodies launch at improbable speeds, and weapons recoil enough to jolt you backward, usually in gape-mouthed surprise. It's supremely daft, and a lot of players seem to have taken to it for that very reason - TABG is currently riding high as the 18th most popular game on Steam, with over 27,000 concurrent players.

That's obviously not going to worry the likes of PUBG, sitting at the top of the Steam list with 608,000 concurrent players at the time of writing, but it's not bad for something that started life as an April Fool's joke. As Landfall explained in its TABG FAQ, the game is part of an April Fool's tradition celebrated every year since 2016, wherein the developer creates a silly new experience by combining one of its titles with another genre or game.

"The first year we made Supertruck, a mix between the game Superhot and Clustertruck," it explained, then "Last year we made TABZ which is a mix between TABS and DAY-Z. We spend an enormous amount of lunch breaks and nights playing battle royale games [and Totally Accurate Battlegrounds] is an homage to a genre we love."

If Totally Accurate Battlegrounds' daffiness appeals in any way, the game is free to download on Steam for the first 100 hours of its release. Once those hours are up (there's a handy countdown clock here), it'll cost $4.99 USD - which will go toward server costs, says Landfall.

Interestingly, when TABG originally launched, the developer said it wouldn't be providing further updates. However, it's now had a change of heart: "Right now we're working on getting the servers better", it explained, "but seeing the huge response from players we would love to update the game further."

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