Besiege
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Spiderling Studios
Premise: Conquer the world, one zone at a time, by building siege engines relying on physics, skill, and a frankly ludicrous amount of explosives.
Initial Release Date: 28/01/2015 (Early Access)
I picked up Besiege about a year ago when it came out on Early Access, but didn't get very far because a) a lot of the elements that I ended up finding useful during my recent run through hadn't been added yet, and b) my computer at the time couldn't really run it without slowing down to a crawl whenever things started to get particularly explode-y. However, since then it's received a number of updates and I've managed to get a better school laptop as well as something vaguely resembling a gaming computer, so in the absence of anything else to play this week that I could both play and review in the time allotted, I picked it back up.
The best way I can think of describing Besiege's gameplay is "Kerbal Space Program, but with siege engines and a vaguely medieval-punk aesthetic". The only other main difference is that if your siege engine manages to get to the moon, something has gone horribly wrong instead of horribly right. The builder is easy enough to use, although it would've been nice to know about the 'rotate' control before I was three quarters of the way through the first kingdom. That being said, something being poorly explained is the kind of thing that's only a problem once. Each level gives you a vague objective, something like 'Destroy 90% of everything', or 'Steal and deliver this crystal' and doesn't particularly care how you get from Point A to Point B, and I like that it doesn't hold your hand, but it would've been nice if it gave you a couple of ideas on what to build because I'll admit that despite the variety, I ended up relying on the same handful of tools. Pro tip: helicopters are relatively easy to build, easy to mod for a variety of objectives, and unless there are archers or heavy winds in play the only real danger to you is yourself.
There's also a sandbox mode where you can test out new builds before attempting them in actual levels on a variety of objectives, as well as certain 'God' powers like the ability to enable zero gravity. I must say that the sandbox is definitely where the Steam Workshop support comes in handy; it's fascinating to see the kind of things that other people with better knowledge of engineering and more time on their hands can come up with. My personal favourite was a spaceship that worked with the zero-gravity and steered with water cannons. It's also interesting as a place to find out the logistics of making a siege engine to do any given objective.
My 'default' machine was a quad-copter that I called 'DaVinci's Nightmare', and essentially alternated between a version of that with a grabber arm for 'deliver the payload' objectives and one with a bunch of missiles and flamethrowers attached for 'Burn the world, burn it all' objectives, and when they didn't work I just rolled out a tank or a trebuchet that I'd downloaded from the Workshop.
In terms of objectives, I'm looking forward to the map editor because the objectives to tend to repeat themselves a bit. Well, they don't get repetitive per se, because each level definitely feels unique; it's more that what you're asked to do in each level that starts to go through the motions a bit. It tends to fall back on 'Get from Point A to Point B' and 'Kill XYZ% of everything' missions a bit much. I did quite enjoy the levels in the second kingdom where it got a bit more varied; My personal favourite was probably the level where you're told to destroy the four airships in a convoy, and I was able to get through by strapping three cannons to my helicopter to deal with the first three, and then some propellers to the bottom of the chopper so that I could body-slam the fourth into next week.
It still occasionally stutters a bit when things get too explode-y, but it's definitely been optimised a hell of a lot better since I last played it. Control-wise, it's fairly intuitive and even in the places it isn't, almost every control for your actual machine can be re-mapped as individual entities. For example, if you have multiple cannons on your machine, they will start off all bound to one button. However, if you want to have each cannon fire individually, you can map a cannon to '1', a cannon to '2' and so on, or whatever you want.
In summary, Besiege is currently selling on Steam for around $8. I mention this because at this point in time I'd say that it would absolutely be money well spent even if there weren't more levels and features coming. You should absolutely pick it up if and/or when you can. It's a nice overlap of something that is both vaguely unique and also well-implemented, and on top of that it's a game that lives by the philosophy of "If at first you don't succeed, blow it up again" and I hope there will one day be more puzzle games where that's a valid strategy. For now, though, there's this. And this is damn good.
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