Yeah, there have been official Attack on Titan video games, but they’ve never really managed to fully capture the speed and scale of the show, so one indie developer figured he’d try and make his own and release it for free. Which he has done, and then some.
Swammy details the story of his little project in this video, explaining that what started as a fun little experiment in early 2021 blew-up after his girlfriend convinced him to post a short gameplay video on TikTok. An overwhelmingly positive response inspired Swammy to continue development on the demo, building on a foundation of swinging through the city by adding first some Titans to go up against, and then — after one disastrous mix-up — a co-op multiplayer mode.
By January 2022, the game was looking pretty good!
As you can see, the main appeal of this game vs the official releases is the swinging system, which in Swammy’s game is a lot faster and freer. If you’ve played the recent spider-man games, for example, you’ll be pretty much at home here, especially if you play this game in third-person (it’s playable from either first or third-person perspectives).
By the middle of 2022 Swammy’s project had racked up millions of views on social media and hundreds of thousands of downloads. And now it’s blowing up all over again because he’s announced that the whole thing is getting a revamp as he tries to port it over to Unreal Engine 5:
This guy built his own free to play game based off Attack On Titan in a little over a year… you can fight titans, train, sandbox and speedrun
It now has over 10 million downloads 💀 pic.twitter.com/YZ63VnC9tv
— Jake Lucky (@JakeSucky) August 9, 2022
If you want to play the game as it exists today, you most definitely can, with download links available here. Note that while there are versions available for both PC and Android, the PC edition is the one getting all the work, with the Android one now at its “final build”, after “constant harassment and threats” gave Swammy “zero reason to continue working on it, for my own mental health”.
It’s super easy to download and start playing — though there’s a video here if you need some help — and having been messing around with it this morning, I can understand a lot of the hype from fans. Sure, it’s pretty rough around the edges, and stuff like the interface is as barebones as it gets, but allowing for the fact this is a one-man job, and how fun the basic act of swinging around and stabbing things is, I think it’s really cool.