A few months ago gifs of famous scientists, mathematicians and other great minds were turned into pixel characters with sweet fighting moves.

Here’s Charles Darwin chaining together punches that are depicted as man’s evolution, and Nikola Tesla firing an electric beam. Now you too can control these characters and more in a free online game called Science Kombat.

The game is currently hosted on Portuguese site “Super Interessante” (“Super Interesting” in English) and was made by developers Superinteressante Magazine with art by Diego Sanchez.

As far as gameplay goes, it’s a relatively simple 2D fighter in the vein of early Street Fighter games. You control your chosen brilliant mind with the arrow keys, and you have “W” for light attacks and “E” for heavy ones. There’s also combos like the ones mentioned in the opening paragraph.

Currently you can play the game online through a Unity webplayer (which you may need to download here) and there’s a campaign (in which you fight through the entire roster) and a single fight mode.

Now, there’s going to be some controversy here because of the final boss at the end of the campaign…

Science Kombat roster

Albert Einstein

Charles Darwin

Nikola Tesla

Isaac Newton

Stephen Hawking

Pythagoras of Samos

Marie Curie

Alan Turing

God

Yes once you’ve taken your preferred genius through the gauntlet you fight God – or The Divinity – in an arena made from clouds. The Divinity constantly shifts between gods from different religions such as Ganesha, Thor, Zeus, Anubis and more.

Beating the end boss fills the screen with a message that some players may find offensive:

“SCIENCE DEFEATS FEAR!! Congratulations! You won the fight against obscurantism and moved science forward.”

Regardless what you think of that, the game is ridiculously detailed with specialised arenas for each fighter, select quotes as flavour text and decent sound effects and music.

If you want to play the game, follow this link but remember to switch to English with the “Eng” button in the bottom left corner of the main menu.

The game currently has a watermark stating it’s a trial version, but we were able to play through all the content without being interrupted, so we assume this means that it will be expanded in the future. There’s also a mobile version which has been planned.