Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 Early Access — Is it worth it?

When the universally derided game Ninety-Nine Nights II was announced back in 2010, the game’s producer made a bold claim: you’d end up squaring off against armies of up to 1 million troops. This naturally became a meme, and the game absolutely didn’t even come close to this. Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2, on the other hand, does. Mostly. You ever wonder if five John Wicks would be enough to take down 100,000 zombies? Well, they’re more than enough. The game enters Early Access today with nothing but its sandbox components, so the question stands: is Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2, or UEBS2, worth it yet?

UEBS2 is going to get campaigns with stories and the like, along with the ability for players to craft their own. At launch, however, the game only offers a sandbox mode and a few maps, such as Mount Olympus and Troy. Of course, there isn’t much in the way of “gameplay” to speak of, but that’s not really the point. It really couldn’t be much easier to place your armies and jump right into the madness without wasting any time. There’s no need for a tutorial or anything of the sort. Everything’s purely self-explanatory.

You can add as many armies as you’d like and separate them into teams. You can then specify how many units you want on that team and place them wherever you desire on the map. There’s a pretty large selection of units to choose from, including obvious choices such as Roman and Greek armies, to zombies, WWII soldiers, hero characters (including John Wick, Chuck Norris, and… Nikola Tesla?). You can even add animals such as ducks and shrimp. Then you just boot into the map. At this point, you can position the armies via the overhead RTS mode, or take control of an individual unit. Then you press a button and the armies will start attacking each other. Or they’ll stand around if you set them to hold instead of attack.

One million troops

Okay, the one million troop thing also appears to be a bit untrue in Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 Early Access. But only by a little bit! Whenever I tried to set the unit count at a million, only about 996,000 or so would show up. Hopefully more development means we can reach the 1 million dream.

When you take control of a unit, you can only move, run, and use a single attack. Or have them make a “battle cry” sound. The single attacks for the melee characters are underwhelming and, unfortunately, not fun to use. If you wanted to slaughter a horde with melee attacks, it’d definitely take a while.

And then there’s the characters with guns. Guns are massively overpowered. Kicking off a fight between ranged armies will just see the battlefield descend into a light show where the better units melt their targets. It’s ridiculous. Those five John Wicks took out 100,000 zombies in no time at all, too. Such is the power of gun fu. I hope melee movesets are expanded on, as I’d absolutely love to wander into the middle of a horde and just tear through it.

Armies of the damned

Granted, you can make custom units and massively increase their health, damage, attack ranges, and other parameters. Much like everything else, it’s all super easy. UEBS2 doesn’t exactly run well, but it runs much better than it probably has any right to. If there are like a million characters duking it out and I’m still getting 40 fps, that’s not at all a deal-breaker, especially since this isn’t a “gameplay” kind of game. Not yet, at least.

If you’re looking to simply throw crazy armies at each other then Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 is worth it in Early Access. Everyone else might want to wait and see how the campaigns go, but that won’t take too long, as the game is only set to stay in EA for a few months. Let’s hope it ends up kind of feeling like what a good Dynasty Warriors game would be. You know, if those got made.