by MattW - June 16, 2004

The Vikings and Cimmerians, who once lived together peacefully, are now at war after the Cimmerian King�s brother turned evil and has started a war. Build up your city walls, train an army, and do your best to besiege the enemy before they get you in the latest offering from Primal Software and Dream Catcher. What this game does well, it does very well, but are its shortcomings worth the price of admission?

There's Vikings Afoot!

Besieger follows in the footsteps of so many other real-time strategy (RTS) games so that veterans of the genre will be able to jump right in, more or less. However, there are a few interesting twists on the formula. For example, there is no currency; your workers will collect wood, stone, and iron for buildings and units. Furthermore, for the basic worker units, there is no charge. 5 workers will automatically appear when a house is built, and the houses can be upgraded twice to support an additional 5 workers each time for a total of 14 workers and a female healer which appears on the 3rd upgrade. After building barracks� for offensive units, workers are recruited and trained to be Berserkers or Spearmen or Cavalry, etc, rather than those units just appearing after purchase. If any unit is killed, a worker will automatically regenerate at a house to replace it, free of charge. So, if you launch an attack on the enemy and lose a lot of units, there�s already a bunch of idle workers waiting to be trained when you return, and it�s actually quite nice.

The two races, Vikings and Cimmerians, have identical ways of gathering resources, producing units, and building defenses. The biggest differences between the two would have to be the Cimmerians use of horses for Cavalry and Archers on horseback, giving them a definite advantage in speed. Both sides have access to flying ships, some of which are the strongest units in the game. My particular favorite is the Cimmerians Balloon fighter, which has a flamethrower to torch ground units. Ha! Keep in mind, even flying and mechanical units (rams, siege towers, wagons) need workers to pilot them, as do attack towers. When attacking the enemy, don�t destroy their towers, just kill the men working them and put your own workers inside to use it against them! These kind of little touches can make for some of the most entertaining moments of the game and can really turn the tables during a battle. Also, you can select as many units as you like, which can be useful for moving an entire army across a map. There are several different formations you can select for your units, too, such as a phalanx, a column, triangles, etc.

One of the biggest elements in Besieger is that of building walls to protect your town. Walls can be upgraded to have ramps so that archers/spear throwers can stand on top to get the upper hand, and towers can be built along the walls for added defense. Gates are the biggest weakness to the walls, but are necessary unless you plan on just having an air force. Speaking of towers, I must say that Besieger is one of the 1st games of its genre that I�ve encountered to so adequately make use of elevation. The improvement in range of long-range units and towers increases significantly. Units running up-hill will move slower and units running down-hill will go much faster, adding some more depth to the game but not to the point that its bothersome.

What IS bothersome, however, is some of the AI. Tell a group of units to get to the other side of a structure, and often there will be a few stragglers caught on the other side, not knowing how to get around it. Even worse, I don�t know how many times I would tell a worker unit to either repair or man a tower and he would reply �No� or �I can�t do it!�, sometimes when standing directly next to it! Granted, these problems were more prominent for structures on hills, but that�s still no excuse. Units can get caught on each other and will just sit there trying to move through the other unit instead of going around, which has often cost me a battle or two.

To its credit, EVERY single unit gains experience. There are Heroes which can endlessly gain levels, and normal units can get up to 4 levels, increasing their attack power and HP each time. Veteran units can often make or break fights since a fully leveled army has twice as much health as its novice equivalent. In the single player campaigns, Heroes (which are absent from multiplayer) are undoubtedly the most powerful units. The centaur, Chaziim, can destroy small armies on his own once you get him leveled up high enough which is both admittedly fun and also removes some of the balance from the game.

Controls are a mixed bag. The terrain is completely 3d, and to accommodate it, there are 3 different camera modes: simple, advanced, and fixed. Holding down the mouse wheel will let you rotate the view to any perspective, and you can go from a straight down view of the heads of your units to a landscape which lets you look off into the horizon. However, the camera won�t let you go beyond a certain range of your units rather than just using something like the Fog of War from the Warcraft series, which can be frustrating when planning an attack. Also, the camera sometimes gets stuck and will drift for no reason, but using the keyboard�s arrows can solve some of it.

Hey, It's Snowing

Besieger uses the engine from Primal Software�s other title, I of the Dragon. You can zoom out so that your units are rather tiny and hard to distinguish from each other, or you can zoom in so that they take up most of the screen. The units are rather detailed for their size, although you won�t notice too often since its impractical to be that close to them. Maps go through day/night cycles which make for some interesting effects (although it doesn�t seem as though fighting is impaired nor improved by night or day) and they also experience weather. Rather than just have a map covered in snow, it may start snowing on your settlement and the green grass will turn white, adding some needed variety to the otherwise bland textures.

Enemy Sighted!....Enemy Sighted!....Enemy......Nevermind

There isn�t much to say for the sound in this game � it gets the job done and that�s about it. The music seems the same in every level and is easily the most forgettable thing about this game (and sounds a lot like the Batman theme from the newer movies). All the other sounds are pretty standard RTS: units will respond when clicked or ordered, buildings have sound effects to accompany them, and a really funny voice informs you when upgrades are complete or when you�re being attacked. Towers will announce �Enemy sighted!� when something walks within their range, which can be a bit of a problem when there are NPC�s wandering the hills and stepping in and out of it and you hear �Enemy sighted!� every 30 seconds. I suppose it�s a necessary evil, though, since its much better than never being informed. The voice acting during the cut scenes varies between decent and painful, but they serve their purpose in advancing the story.

We Are Being Besieged!

Despite the complaints, I�ll admit I had fun with Besieger. The problem is, once you get done with the single player campaign, there isn�t much else to do. There�s a Skirmish mode which is essentially offline multiplayer against AI, and it shares the same maps and modes as the multiplayer. There are 4 modes of play: straight up deathmatch, siege mode where one player has a preexisting town which they must defend against their opponent, capture the artifact which is basically capture the flag, and tactical where you have a fixed number of units and can�t create more. All of this is well and good except for the fact that there are 8 (count �em, EIGHT) maps total available for both Skirmish and multiplayer! Granted, I�m sure since it�s a PC game that there could be more maps released for download, but the lack of a map editor/creator makes us dependant on official releases, of which there has been no mention. Since the majority of RTS fans that I know buy games specifically to play online and don�t care about the single player campaign, it seems inconceivable that these modes would be so lackluster. However, if you�re like me and enjoy the single player campaigns in these games just as much as online play, you�ll find that in the heat of a battle, the shortcomings can be overlooked.

What Else Is There?

I was very surprised to see just how much Skirmish mode resembles its multiplayer brother, essentially in the way that it won�t let you save during a game. While this makes you�re decisions and strategy that much more important, it�s odd that they would leave out the ability to save progress, forcing you to either finish games or just cancel them.

In contrast, the single player campaign can�t save often enough. The story flows very well, with multiple objectives and events unfolding across the same map and onto others. Rather than being broken into chapters like many other games, it goes from one event to another seamlessly with an auto-save function in case you get lazy.

The multiplayer menu is very disappointing, offering no in-game way to browse for online games unless you have the IP address of the game you�re looking for. Instead, Gamespy Arcade is needed to get games started and you�ll need a patch to use THAT (you can get it at www.dreamcatchergames.com). I�m not a fan of 3rd-party browsers for finding online games, but there isn�t much to do online here, anyway.

Conclusion

Overall, Besieger is a decent addition to the already crowded RTS genre. Some of the things that make it stand out can make it, at times, a joy to play, but the things that it gets wrong (and the inexcusably lacking multiplayer) can make you want to scream. However, at a retail price of $29.99, it could earn some appeal to those on a tight gaming budget. Perhaps if there are more patches, downloadable maps, or an expansion, this game could get a whole lot better, so let�s keep our fingers crossed.