Who would win in a fight out of Zeus and a mammoth? Minotaurs against halflings? Snake archers against potion sellers? They're the showdowns society yearns for but history denies... no longer! Now we have Totally Accurate Battle Simulator.

It's not accurate, of course - no one describes anything as "totally" with a straight face. And TABS, as everyone calls it, doesn't have a straight face. It has a googly-eyes and lollops like a drunken marionette. It is a raspberry in the face of serious army-commanding games and I love it for it.

TABS is so simple to play. You spend points to build an army, place it, then sit back and watch the fight - you don't control anything in real-time other than the camera. What's in your army depends on how many points you have to spend. You might spend 2230 points on a mammoth, for instance, or use the same amount to buy four flying Valkyrie - they're a bloody nuisance. Or you might spend 4000 points on two Zeus-es, or 4200 on three scarecrow, which are better than they sound.

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This week, a series of gifs enticed me to take a look at Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, a game that looks like what might happen if the cast of Morph decided to start doing medieval reenactments. Amusing as it looked with its googly eyes and shonky physics, I'll admit I came to it with a hefty dose of scepticism - the term simulator often being synonymous with 'a bit rubbish'.

I mean no disrespect to the Farming Simulators or hardcore flight sims of this world, of course - I'm talking about the stripe of games like Goat Simulator that rely on being just the right side of broken and hoping the one gag remains funny for longer than ten minutes (many of them struggle).

By contrast, there's just about enough of a game to Totally Accurate Battle Simulator's absurd campaign to lift it clear of the competition. While it's hardly going to replace Total War any time soon, there's something compelling about its mission structure; one which presents you with the enemy ranks and grants you a set number of points with which to purchase and field an opposing force. As with any strategy game, picking your units carefully is the key to success, only in this instance you find yourself asking how many mammoths you want to field, or whether a large unit of halflings is preferable to a smaller force of farmers.

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