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.The Wargamer

Minimum Req.: P3 1GHz, 256MB RAM, 32MB video card, DirectX 9 comp. sound card
Reviewed On: P4 2.5 GHz, 512 Meg RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

When trying to come up with an adequate way to begin my review of Besieger, I was constantly reminded of a short story out of one of the Hellraiser comics. In the short, a poker player in the 1800s won a bet with a stranger, with the infamous box as the wager. The player won, and the stranger grabbed the box and headed out; whenever the player made the comment that he had won, the stranger acknowledged the statement and left with the box. I think that is how I would treat Besieger. While not necessarily as bad as a tool that opens up a gate to a netherworld of pain and suffering, it would be pretty painful to the unsuspecting winner.

Besieger is a real-time strategy title that focuses on siege combat - or so the box would have you believe. The player assumes the role of Barmalaya and Konin, both heroes from different nations that are finding themselves in some rather unfortunate circumstances. While Konin went on a mission to attain the Sword of Krom, to assure peace and safety for his kingdom, Cimmeria, his sister took the opportunity to work her dark magic and usurp the throne. Hearing news of this, the Vikings gathered a large army at their capital and the council of elders sends Barmalaya on a quest to get Thor's Hammer to stay the inevitable attack. En route, his airship is blown off course and Mara attacks the Viking army, destroying it, the council, and the capital. The player starts off as Barmalaya, gathering support for the Viking cause, and eventually assumes the role of Konin, during and after his trials in search of the sword.

The distortion of the intro music should have tipped me off that something wasn't going to be quite right here. Shortly after beginning the game I encountered the game's most dangerous creatures of pain: the AI, pathfinding, and camera - the unholy trinity of pain.

Aside from crawling through dungeons and laying siege to castles, the player will also recruit lesser heroes to fight alongside their army of battering rams, spearmen, berserkers, cavalry, archers, and soldiers of

allied races. The Cimmerians and Vikings have different units, with the Cimmerians seeming to have a significant advantage with mounted archers and spearmen. Siege weapons include battering rams, siege towers, artillery airships, and giant crossbows. It's a shame that there is little fun in using all of these handy wall-crushing weapons.

Due to horrible pathfinding and unresponsive units, elaborate siege plans will be for naught as troops get stuck behind roots, trees, hills, or refuse to move (always count on healers not moving if they are a part of a squad that is told to attack). I once sat and clicked on a battering ram to attack a wall, a section that was a few feet in front of it, over fifteen times, and not once did it bother going to the target; instead, it went in a different direction and attacked a random object, also getting it destroyed in the process. The problems are made even worse during the boring dungeon-crawling missions - and some do move at the pace of a crawl, with few units given to go through large caves and ruins - which did nothing but waste time. The camera will also play hell with every aspect of the game: air units are never adequately shown with ground units; zooming out from an air unit causes the camera to drop to ground level; it's sluggish; and it wasn't uncommon for the view to actually move on its own.

Technical problems aren't the only thing wrong. Due to a population limit, the player will spend most of the time divvying citizens up between manning mechanized weapons, gathering resources (iron, wood, and stone), training as troops, and working at structures to increase productivity. Since sieges are big productions, it's unfortunate that big armies rarely form due to the player needing to constantly supply the army with goods. The whole process of training and assigning workers is very slow, which isn't a good thing considering how long is needed to fight off armies and destroy towns - I had the game at 150% speed and it was still sluggish due to just not being intuitive. Formations are also useless from a tactical standpoint: there are none; they are only somewhat useful in navigation because they rein in troops, necessary to prepare for engagements and move through tight spots. Further negating the usefulness of formations is the fact that unit class also makes no difference in a formation: healers and archers will be in the front lines with the soldiers, and killed within seconds.

After suffering through the single player campaigns, there are always the multiplayer and skirmish modes to try out. For multiplayer: good luck on finding someone else with the game - or who would want to subject themselves to more of it. Skirmish mode is brought down by the same problems as the campaign. Sure, it looks cool seeing a castle built into the side of a mountain and an army ready to rush it. However, instead of the epic battle that seems sure to occur, the player's army gets slaughtered by catapults and the trickiness of the castle's drawbridge; advancing troops will get confused as to how to go down the bridge, so they will just stand still or jerk around, with the handfuls that do make it down met by the waiting enemy. Of course, that is when the player's and enemy's troops aren't running in circles. Yes, the troops will actually run in circles. I watched a detachment of enemy troops on my drawbridge, a handful were standing still and 3 or 4 men were running circles around them. Apparently the mark of a true soldier isn't the ability to hold their ground against a determined foe, it's the ability to make himself dizzy and not vomit.

When the game does work, and it randomly will (I would experience some sessions where only the camera would and a unit or two would mess up and others when the game just didn't want to respond at all) it meanders around in the area of average. The idea of laying siege to a castle is awesome, and in Castles and Stronghold it is, but not here. Every time I would think that my past experiences were some sort of hallucination, the game would immediately fall apart (units not moving and getting in the air and jerking back and forth, etc.) to remind me.

For all that is wrong with the game, the graphics are actually pretty good. The quality of the character models looks good, as do the structures, and units are animated well. Watching the wobbly wheels of a battering ram kick up dirt as it steamed downhill with charging soldiers was always a nice sight, as were some picturesque views of airships flying over mountaintops. The sound didn't fair nearly as well. The spoken dialogue is poor, the voices don't match the characters, and some responses sounded like their were recorded in a bathroom with a $10 mic. Selecting troops will cause one of each type to respond, so there will be multiple responses for one command. Peons will also constantly complain about resources being too far away, despite the fact that they are still mining them, and will whine nonstop about their situation, with their complaints often overlapping each other.

Overall: 2.5/10
Without all of the problems Besieger would be about average. The few moments when I actually thought I had discovered the diamond in the rough, I would then be reminded of why I wanted to break something as a hero would ignore my sixth command to back away and get killed because he couldn't navigate around a tree stump. No matter how decent it looks in the screenshots or during the first few minutes of play, the experience quickly degenerates into a needlessly frustrating episode that has the marks of an unfinished product rather than a few hang ups. It's just not a good game.

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