Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator is taking YouTube and Steam by storm, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a bare bones sim, still in early access, where you can creates massive armies, arrange them on a map, and the watch the chaos unfold. Wanna see what it’s like when 1,000 chickens overtake a Roman Phalanx? I got you covered.
At first blush, this might seem overly simplistic. So you can have a World War II battalion fight orcs—so what? But the level of customization here is intoxicating. Even if there aren’t many in game models or pre-fab units so far, you can customize every unit’s attack power and move speed. You can throw ten tortoises on a map, but give them a superhuman attack power. You can assign different armies to teams, pitting Spartans and knights against zombies with archer back up. When I first realized the potential, I felt a bit giddy. The options aren’t quite unlimited, but they’re expensive enough to allow for the recreation of iconic battle scenes from movies, or just for endless fucking around with parameters until I find answers to some incredibly stupid questions.
To that end, YouTubers are picking up the slack for me. More than one have created the Battle for Helm’s Deep from the Lord of the Rings.
And many others still have pitted 300 Spartans against 10,000 Persians.
But the funnest videos to watch are the silliest. How does every unit in the game fare against one extremely strong turtle?
Wanna watch Chuck Norris punch some chickens to death?
Chuck Norris punching things to death is, unsurprisingly, a common theme with Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator videos. Here he is, individually punching 12,000 zombies until they die.
But watching any single unit utterly demolish an army is always amusing. Here’s a chicken killing hundreds of human beings.
If you’re a teenager about to embark on the seemingly endless stretch of free time known as summer vacation, you’re welcome. Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator is perfect, stupid fun. It’s not deep, but it’s a good way to waste time. At the very least, you can pit a horde of zombies against 10 penguins with maximum attack and movement speed, and that’ll be enough to keep anyone amused for an hour or two.