Totally Accurate Battlegrounds Review

Originally developed as an April Fools’ joke by Landfall Games in 2018, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds delivers the laughs in a parody of the battle royale genre.

Totally Accurate Battlegrounds sets the theme from the moment you land in the lobby. You’re presented with a humanoid figure — not a good-looking human specimen by any means. It’s more of a rounded human body with the head of one of the characters from Worms.

Just below your worm-human hybrid is the option to randomize his or her (it’s very unclear) outfit. You can’t choose awesome skins you’ve unlocked. You can’t create a style combo that will leave your enemies in awe of your fashion sense. All you can do is randomize your outfit. And the combos are terribly coordinated. It’s wonderful.

You get a pirate hat with a suit. A king’s crown with a dressing gown and caveman-like belt. A shower cap with any of the options is hilarious. There’s a chicken head and jester hat, which pair terribly with everything — again, wonderful — and so many more beyond those.

Before you start the game, you’ll spend a good amount of time seeing what combos the randomizer throws at you. You’ll inevitably be left regretting that one good option from a few clicks back and can’t seem to get again.

Get out there, soldier

Once you’re satisfied with your outfit choice, you’re ready to jump into a game. Or be dumped into a game.

You’ll be transported to the hover trucks, which cruise across the polygonal landscape. You’ll spot a place you think looks good to land.

And when you drop, you’ll be dropped hard. Your character gets shot out of the truck like a clown in a cannon at the circus. And your landing on the ground below is about as graceful as a two-year-old on ice skates.

As you pull yourself together and scramble to find a weapon, you’ll notice your character doesn’t seem to understand how its legs work, so it bounces up-and-down a lot as it moves. All these things just add to the wonderfully light-hearted theme of Totally Accurate Battlegrounds and make sure there’s always a smile on your face.

Combat

The combat isn’t what you’d call tactical or precise. But it’s fun, in the way most battle royale games provide entertainment as you try to outwit and eliminate enemies with the constraints the game places on you.

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Shooting guns doesn’t actually feel that bad — it’s not totally accurate (get it?) but neither are Fortnite and plenty of other shooter games. They’re not trying to be realistic, so it doesn’t matter that their combat doesn’t feel that way.

What the game needs, however, are stronger visual cues that your shots are landing. There’s no blood splatter, just a dull audio thud that lets you know you’ve landed a hit. And even that isn’t obviously clear.

The enemy squealing or crying out would have been more in theme with the rest of the game — and would have made landing shots more rewarding, and hilarious.

It’s the little things

Totally Accurate Battlegrounds does have some wonderful little touches that are fun to toy around with in game — for a short time. You can enter gangsta mode, where you press a button (‘G’ by default, obviously) and your character will start beatboxing and tilt his gun to the side.

This definitely gives away your position, but the tradeoff is you look like a total badass as people come to kill you.

There’s an Easter egg, too, if you enter gangsta mode while wearing the Adidas tracksuit. Instead of beatboxing, your worm-human hybrid will start playing Tri Poloski — a famous Russian dance track which translates to three stripes. Pretty funny.

You can also chat via text in-game — speech bubbles will appear above your head — which is a fun way to taunt your enemies or attempt to negotiate your way out of a bad situation.

Final Verdict

Totally Accurate Battlegrounds makes a mockery of the battle royale genre – excellently. But like all jokes, once you’ve experienced it once, it just isn’t as funny after that. And it only gets less entertaining each time you experience it again.

The game is cheap, so if you have some friends who enjoy battle royales, then you could probably get a few hours of fun out this game. But as with all April Fools’ jokes, it’s going to be forgotten pretty soon.