Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is wickedly fun—if you can get past the server issues

When you start Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, your body is hurled out of a moving truck into with your character landing painfully on the ground below. It’s a perfect start to a game that’s trying to capitalize on the success of the battle royale genre with a satirical, physics-breaking twist.

When you start Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, your body is hurled out of a moving truck into with your character landing painfully on the ground below. It’s a perfect start to a game that’s trying to capitalize on the success of the battle royale genre with a satirical, physics-breaking twist.

And like the subjects of its satire, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, is a lot of fun to play— if you can actually get into a match.

The game, developed by Landfall Games, the studio behind the Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Clustertruck, is available for free until June 10. And the fact that it’s free might be contributing to its early problems.

WhenTotally Accurate Battlegrounds first released, some players spent at best an hour trying to find their first game. Since then, the servers have been even busier with a large amount of players picking up the title for free, causing further server problems and lag. Landfall has even added additional servers to help players find a match but server lag still persists, making every game nearly unplayable.

When we finally got into a game for the first time, we managed to last a few moments before the servers crashed. In the end we did, however, get a chance to play some complete games—and we had a blast. It was fun trying to keep control of our character as he flailed around like a ragdoll, pushed back and forth while firing a high caliber sniper rifle (he fell off a large boulder we’d been using for cover in the process).

Just like in all battle royale games, there are players to kill, an ever-shrinking circle to keep you moving, and weapon modifications to keep you entertained—albeit with an over-the-top physics engine that will have you cursing under your breath for every missed shot and every explosion knocking you back a few hundred feet.

The differences are in the small things. One random feature the developers added, for example, was the ability to tilt every weapon in the game to the side and enter “Gangsta” mode. Your character starts beat-boxing while you pop enemies like, well, a gangster.

All these options combine to create a unique experience that not only satirizes the battlegrounds genre, but offers a new unique take on the game mode that we haven’t seen before. Its a shame, therefore, that the game’s current matchmaking and server lag issues don’t allow players to enjoy the full experience.

While Totally Accurate Battleground might have been made as a joke at the battle royale formula’s expense, it could develop its own big community of fans—if the developers continue to add updates and fix those server issues.