As I mentioned on the PC Gamer Show this week (video above, and full show here on YouTube) I have completely fallen for the King in Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. It's a game about goofy, physics-based combat between two armies made up of various units. In the campaign levels you have a restricted budget to spend on units to overcome a (typically) stronger army.

But in sandbox mode you can build whatever armies you want and pit them against one another. With all that freedom and all those units at my disposal, I've only been doing one thing: placing a single medieval King on the field and making him fight everything all by himself.

Why do I love the King? Why do I restrict myself to using him and only him? Here is why, in a single goddamn clip that you need to turn the sound on for.

He's a tall, goofy fellow with a huge sword and he strides around making regal gibberish proclamations. He's also a damn tank. See him get hit with multiple boulders? Notice how they basically break his arms so they're stuck behind him. See how he still stabs the catapult to death with both arms bent behind his back?

That's why I love the King. That's why he is the King.

Hail to the King, baby.

Here he is taking on a couple dozen hobbits. Granted, hobbits (halflings) are the very definition of fodder. They're useful in the game for slowing down other units because they stick to them, as you'll see below. The King doesn't quit, though, even after he loses his royal footing and all but disappears in the mob of Brandybucks, Boffins, Bolgers, and Bracegirdles.

Grand and mighty as the King is, he's not invulnerable. He can shrug off a few catapulted boulders, but a ballista (giant-ass crossbow) will immediately put him out for the count. Sharp projectiles, in general, spell demise for the King, but in the case of arrows and spears he can take a number of them to the royal torso and keep on fighting.

Just not forever. Missing a few swings of the sword didn't help, either, but that can happen when you've got a spear lodged in your elbow.

But that's a King for you, simply too proud to carry a shield. And hearty enough to take on Zeus. Yeah, Zeus is in Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, because this is a game about total accuracy.

I do like Zeus a lot too, he's got a swagger I enjoy and he's ruthless against mobs, chaining lightning strikes together than can take down entire lines of infantry. But this is no squire or knight he's fighting. It's the King.

Perhaps my favorite example of how tough my King is can be seen below when he takes on two Viking longboats. Granted, the longboats aren't in their element, being on land and everything, but the Vikings aren't shy about riding them while they're carried and thrown by their mates.

The King has two boats thrown on top of him and lies there, crushed beneath the weight of both. And he still keeps slashing away with Excalibur, wiping one poor dude off the map with just one swing while lying on his back under a buncha damn boats! When he finally works his way free his arms are all jacked up (again—I think inbreeding in the royal family make have resulted in weakened joints) but he keeps fighting. 

There are ways to make the King even more powerful—priest units will follow him around using divine magic to protect him, which would probably give him the edge he needs to take on spear-hurlers and archers and ballistas.

But I like making the King go out there by himself. Leading by example. Being a one-man army. Hail to the King.

If, like me, you've been following Landfall Games CEO Wilhelm Nylund on Twitter, you've been subjected to perhaps hundreds of amusing gifs from Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. But when is it coming out, you may have cried, desperate to make your own gifs of wacky (yet totally accurate) physics-based battles.

Well, today's the day. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is now on Steam Early Access. I played it a bit this weekend and yes, I made some gifs of my own. Like, a hundred of them.

While the game isn't complete, there are currently 50 levels of a campaign mode available, which takes you from stone age battles (guys with clubs, axe-wielding chieftains, woolly mammoths) to farmland clashes (farmers with pitchforks, hobbits, and potion-hurling alchemists) to medieval times (knights, squires, kings, and catapults) to Greek mythology (Minotaurs, hoplites, and a lightning-bolt hurling Zeus) to the Vikings (berserkers, longboats, and winged Valkyries).

You might not guess from the silliness on display, but there is some actual strategy in the campaign, as you're always an era behind the AI-controlled enemy army. So when they start breaking out the archers and ballistas and you're still running around with pitchforks and wheelbarrows, you're going to have to get creative to win. Some levels are pretty tricky to beat, but this is a game where failure is as much fun as success.

You can also mess around in sandbox mode and simulate battles between any armies and units you want. Send mammoths to fight minotaurs or put cavemen up against catapults. Want to make a single Arthurian king fight a hundred unarmed but very persistent hobbits? You can do that. I did that.

Once a battle has begun you can fly around the map watching from any angle you choose, and there's slow-motion and super-slow-mo so you can simulate a dramatic, 300-style battle as I did with the king below. 

I use the king in a lot of my battles. I sort of love him.

There are more armies to come—in the menu, one unavailable tab shows what looks like a ninja's star, and another shows a pistol crossed with a sword, so we've got plenty more totally accurate battle options to look forward to while TABS continues to be developed while in Early Access. There's also a grayed-out option for a 'unit creator' in the main menu, so it looks like we'll be able to design our own warriors. Someday.

You'll find Totally Accurate Battle Simulator on Steam for $15.

Okay, last gif. For now.