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| The game looks pretty good, there's no question about that. |
An RTS set in a fantasy setting is a nice break from all the realistic wargames. |
Attempting to be different, the game is set in a fantasy setting, with one side playing the Vikings, whom are, believe it or not, the more peaceful people in the game. The other group in the game is the Cimmerians, and their King, Conan. King Conan is the happily leading the Cimerians, till one day, he goes on a quest, and his evil sister pops up and takes over, leaving Conan high and dry in the wilderness. Being a clever Cimmerian, he gets the Vikings to help, and starts to build an army to retake his empire. Despite the names and concepts from the famous Robert E Howard series, this game is nothing like the world he created for Conan, in which there would be Aesir instead of Vikings, but I digress.
The object of the game, in the usual RTS style, is to first build a town, gather some resources, and than go attack the other guy's town. You first must build a house, and the house will provide you five workers, and can be upgraded to make another five men. This is important, because, unlike most of these games, you can't just pump out workers, in this game they need a place to live. One problem you quickly realize is, space is usually limited, and you cannot overlap buildings, so the amount of men you will have is limited. Once you have your house and some workers, you will need a nice sawmill, and a worker to be assigned to it. You will send the remaining fellows off to gather wood, and make more buildings.
Of course, the object of the game is to build an army, so the worker-house dynamic now comes into play. After constructing a military barracks, you must send in a worker, who, after a short time, comes out a warrior. Since you are limited to only having as many men as houses, this cuts down greatly the number of soldiers you will be able to field. Another matter is, the stone mill, and the building that produce seige equipment also require a worker, and seige engines also take more men, and so on.
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| It's too bad the the game AI is atrocious, for your troops and the enemy's. |
Your units actually going where you want them to is a rare occurence. |
One of the game's selling points, according to the game itself, is the innovative camera angles. Besieger's game board is a beautiful three dimensional world, filled with valleys and mountains, lush forests and lonely islands. All of this is well and good, but unfortunately, the camera angles quickly start to confuse you, as they don't follow the terrain contour, but remain fixed. What this means is, if you are walking uphill, the ground gets closer, and closer...until you have to readjust the angles. In my copy of the game, sometimes the custom angles would not work, only the default setting would. This was extremely annoying, especially as at times, like when you are attacked, it was actually difficult to get a look at the enemy.
Another major problem also appears as you move about the game board. The AI seems to have problems moving units to the areas you order them to go to. Like many RTS games, you left click on a unit, and than click where you want him to go, or the group to go, and they do so. We have all seen the silly RTS games where one or two units will get confused and march into a wall, but Besieger tops them. NO UNIT seems to have any idea of where its supposed to go, if there is some obstacle between the unit and the target area, it simply doesn't understand what to do. The end result is, units don't understand how to march through gates and engage the enemy. This is extremely annoying, as the workers are no smarter, and suffer from the same problems. This indicates sloppy coding, and it really hurts game play.
The game includes missions and a campaign story line, and has some fun looking units. Infact, the units and terrain are quite lovely in this design, which is all the more disappointing because of the sloppy movement problems. The music score is decent, and suites the game, and the voice overs are what I have come to expect in games, hum drum. There is an option for multi player included with the design. and the games provides a good tutorial to learn and understand basic game concepts.
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| The game's camera angles can make it hard to do battle sometimes. |
The units would be pretty fun to use, if only they would listen to you. |
BESIEGER VERDICT
Overall, I found this game somewhat disappointing. The beautiful looks are spoiled by the sloppy movement problems, and since moving units is the heart of RTS, it kills the game. If they can correct the game with a patch, I would say to pick it up, as it is a little different from the standard RTS, otherwise, I would say its just another pretty face.
TOP GAME MOMENT
Raining fire on the enemies with your fire-breathing dragons, and making a quick getaway before the enemy can mount a counter-attack.
