Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access. This week, he returns to the simulated killing fields of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator.
Developer: Landfall
Publisher: Landfall
Release: Out now
On: Windows, Mac, Xbox
From: Steam
For: 11.39, $15, 12.49
When I was seven years old, my dad broke our Atari ST. We had been playing about with some primitive CAD software, plotting out simple shapes to render low polygon urns when he fell eerily silent. His face slackened, transfixed. His eyes became locked to the screen. Clicking over and over, the man began adding vertices anywhere they would fit, hundreds of them, tracing the outline of some impossible, non-Euclidean solid. With each fresh click the Atari took longer to respond, until at last the monitor was a nonsense web of overlapping edges and clipped geometry. Dad, I pleaded, the maddening nest of garbled lines reflected in his glasses. Dad, don t.