Besiege (PC)

Developer/Publisher: Spiderling Studios

Release Date(s): Jan. 28, 2015 (Early Access)

Genre(s): Sandbox, Building Sim, Physics Sim

Platform(s): Windows, Mac, Linux

Language(s): English

Pricing: $6.99 / £4.99 / €6,99

Rating: None yet

Indie developer Spiderling Games officially describe their game Besiege as a “physics-based siege engine creator”. Besiege is currently available on Steam Early Access, and even watching the trailer for it is really exciting. Read on to learn more about this siege engine creator.

Storyline

Other than the level progression itself, there really is no storyline to speak of. It’s clear that the developers are more focused on gameplay here than having a good backstory. The world consists of various areas where conquering each level brings you closer to the last level of that area until the whole area is complete. You’ll find only a few areas available now in Early Access, but there are several more under construction.

Gameplay

Upon entering any level, you’ll be brought into build mode where all is calm and quiet. Any action that would normally affect you during play mode is prevented from happening. Your goal is to build a machine that will complete the task spelled out in big letters. Often this is destroying something, or destroying a certain percentage of structures and people, but it can also be something more complicated, like moving objects around. To this end, you have several categories of pieces available to you: Blocks, Mechanical, Weaponry, Flight, and Armor.

You’ll soon find that it takes patience to beat many of the levels. Often you will need to make several iterations of a design to fix its flaws and make it more effective for the current siege at hand. Occasionally you may find yourself scrapping a strategy completely in favor of a new design that tries to tackle the problem from a totally different angle (literally). Your machines can break from just their own weight (armor is heavy), from rough terrain, from enemy fire, or suicide sheep bombers! Work on your machine is confined to a boxed-in area to limit its size, which is fair enough, unless you go into sandbox mode or free build mode, but this will prevent a successful run from actually marking the level complete.

There is no tutorial to guide you in Besiege; however, the controls themselves are either self-explanatory or clearly displayed on the pieces you use to build your siege engines. For example, steering pieces are automatically mapped to the left and right arrows, and no matter where you put them on your machine, they will always perform the same function. Other pieces with special button functions include pistons, motor wheels, flamethrowers, cannons, contractible springs, and decouplers. Any of these function buttons can be remapped during build mode. With no tutorial, it might be unclear how to use certain pieces at first. One time when I got stuck, I rewatched the trailer (quite a while after I first saw it) and it gave me a lot of ideas and inspiration, and even showed how I could use many of the pieces.

Fortunately, you’re able to save any of your machines at any time and pull them back out for later use, which is handy if, say, you discover how to make a catapult and complete the level, but on the next level a catapult is completely useless. Rather than losing the whole thing, you can just save it for later. The levels do prompt you to build a wide variety of machines. There is really no way you would be able to play through the whole game through using the same machine. I would say, though, that one “disadvantage” of being able to save is that it can tempt you to try and be lazy and reuse or repurpose existing things. This can sometimes work, but other times it doesn’t work well when you don’t build from the ground up.

My Thoughts On Besiege

Despite the serious patience you need to play this game, it pays off pretty well. There won’t be any dramatic cut scenes or rewards, but it will pay off with a sense of accomplishment. Some constructive criticism I have of the game is the need for the editor to have some sort of grouping and moving tool. If you make a basic rolling machine, but then find out you needed to make it more stable by making the base longer, you can’t just remove the central pieces, the front or back wheels to extend it, and fill in the gaps in the middle. You would need to remove the entire back of the machine, rebuild out from the center, and then refinish the back by copying what you’ve already done. These features would allow for more focus on thoughtful machine design. Another thought I’d like to share is that it would be really fun if there was an area in the world where it felt more consistently themed. What I mean by that is that the shape of the structure to destroy, the type of enemies, and the setting can vary wildly from level to level within a single area. This can be good for “teaching” you different skills, but there’s less continuity than if you started with a small castle with a few defenders and advanced towards a huge castle with many defenders, which would allow you to start with one machine type and then beef it up as you go along. Hopefully something like this will come as the game advances towards its full release.

That being said, the editor does feature some niceties, such as custom key mapping, a visual for your machine’s center of mass which is very handy for building flying machines. Speaking of flying machines, I had a good bit of trouble getting a flying machine off the ground. I was able to make something which could briefly get off the ground with good control if there was wind going against it. And then I was able to make an airplane that really did well when starting in a level that begins with it already in the air, or was able to do an okay job when starting on the ground. I feel that some sample machines only available in sandbox mode could be helpful to players.

Now let’s talk about the good things in this game. It gets you thinking. It lets you be creative. It lets you tinker. It lets you destroy things. It lets you work with realistic physics. I always find physics-based games to be pretty compelling. The “physics-based” part of this game is that you need to either work with or overcome some basic physical principles. For example, armor protects against arrows and is heat resistant, but it’s also heavy and could put strain on your wood blocks or slow down your maneuvering. When trying to achieve flight, you need to overcome gravity while at the same time maintaining steering control and the ability to move forward. When building a catapult you need to figure out how to fling such a heavy object so far without causing the stored tension to break your own structure apart.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in this game tend to make things look pretty good from far away and a little more bland up close. The blocks turn out to be some pretty repetitive textures when you’re using them to build up close, but I’m okay with this because once you view your creation as a whole it can look quite good, and I think that the “whole” is the main focus and the “up close” is just functional. I will say that the graphics for the explosions, fires, and destruction of stone structures got some attention from developers and were pretty satisfying, contributing to that rewarding feel. The sound was exactly what it should be: background music to help keep you focused on building, and effects for everything else. The sounds support the visuals of what happens when you cause damage, as they should. I am particularly fond of the sound that plays when switching from play mode back into build mode for some reason. Snappy.