Besiege is a physics-based game in development by Spiderling Studios in the United Kingdom for Windows, OS X and Linux. The game was released in early access on Steam on 28 January 2015, and after a long beta period, gained its full release on 18 February 2020.
The game allows players to build outlandish medieval siege engines to pit against castles or armies. Players select from a collection of mechanical parts that can be connected together to build a machine. Each level has a goal, such as "destroy the windmill" or "kill 100 soldiers". Although the goals are relatively simple, the wide variety of possible approaches allows for experimentation.
This game gives examples of:
- All Deserts Have Cacti: Krolmar has cacti that will break parts off of your machine if you touch them, despite Krolmar having Arabic cultural influences.
- Annoying Arrows: The archers can't do much damage individually and are unlikely to destroy blocks unless in large groups or given copious amounts of time. Their main purpose is to prevent you from building suicide-bombers loaded down with explosives that just drive into targets, since even a single arrow can detonate a bomb no problem.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Unlike everything else which reacts rather realistically with surrounding components and will put stress on touching parts or break if overlapped, braces completely ignore these properties. A brace can be placed under, inside, and intersecting whatever you like without problem, and they can even pass through other objects while your machine is in motion during game play. Braces also happen to be completely unbreakable and while they can break off of a part (or break other parts if they put too much stress on them) they themselves will never snap. As braces are the go-to method of strengthening your contraption, and often the only feasible way to make it work without falling apart, this allows the player to be much more freely creative while still allowing the game to be very heavily physics-based.
- Arrows on Fire: Firing a crossbow through a flamethrower's flame will ignite the arrow, causing it to set fire to whatever it hits.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- Incredibly large or incredibly compact vehicles can easily become this, particularly the former. Building these is basically the entire point of the game.
- Making tank treads out of a chain of hinges and wrapping them around wheels. They slow your vehicle down, rob it of traction, are less able to transverse obstacles, make your machine bigger and heavier than it needs to be, are time-consuming to make, are difficult to keep from sliding off the wheels, and literally do nothing better than if you simply left the wheels bare. Damn do they look cool though, and the soldiers of Ipsilon will stop thinking they're gangster real quick when you roll up in a tank and start running them down.
- Gears. There is nothing an array of gears can accomplish that just using a single powered wheel or spinning block can do better, and you'll struggle to find any legitimate uses for the things. But they make your contraption look all Clock Punk and such, and that is just frigging cool. In fact, pretty much their only genuine legitimate use is being used as buffers to keep tank treads from slipping off — yes, their only use that isn't awesome but impractical is as a component to something else that is awesome but impractical!
- Design-It-Yourself Equipment: You build your siege engine from basic parts.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Flying machines on the whole. They can go anywhere on the map, avoid obstacles, attack enemies from their blind spot above or well out of their reach, and avoid damage from running over uneven ground or into enemies. Of course they are very difficult to control as weight, balance, and ballast are constantly in conflict and even the slightest bump can send them careening out of control and into an unavoidable crash. An array of anglometers tied to propellers can create an autostabilization system and would be an utter
Game-Breaker, but the size and weight of this alone will take up a lot of room and make the thing needlessly huge and cumbersome which leaves little to no room for weapons and gear. - Faceless Goons: The most you'll ever see of any NPC's face is a nose poking out from under a hood.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Krolmar takes design cues from Arabic culture, despite also featuring cacti.
- Fire-Breathing Weapon: The flamethrower spews out flame, and is useful for burning enemy soldiers and wooden structures.
- Glass Cannon: Most of your machines aren't very durable. Even basic Ipsilon soldiers can rip it apart in pretty short order, halberdiers will be smashing parts of your machine off in seconds if you allow it, it takes only one good shot from an enemy cannon or bomb to utterly demolish your vehicle, and fire will burn the entire thing to cinders in no time. Your best bet is to go in fast, hard, and mercilessly, and it doesn't hurt to rig your vehicle with bombs and a remote grenade which you can use in a last ditch effort to take out your foe with the blast and burning debris.
- Grim Up North: Valfross is a freezing land where the player will be fending off grizzled vikings just as much as they'll be fighting the environment, such as in the Frozen Path and Relict Frost.
- Hair-Trigger Explosive: The provided bombs are extremely sensitive, to the point that they're often more dangerous to the player's vehicle than the enemy. Just slightly jostling them may cause them to explode, though Murphy's Law means they often fail to explode when you want them to.
- Military Mashup Machine: Given that you create siege engines from various parts, some of the machines will inevitably become this.
- Made of Explodium: Bombs, of course. Usual practice is to build a catapult to fling them at the enemy, or just put them at the front of your vehicle and drive into them for a Suicide Attack. Some maps also feature bombs buried in the ground as mines, which have to be carefully navigated around.
- Not the Intended Use: Shrapnel cannons don't actually fire a projectile, but effectively are just a "force" cannon with enough umph to punch holes in walls or hit enemy soldiers with fatal concussive blasts. This programming quirk means they'll send bombs flying without detonating them. Place a shrapnel cannon and a grabber holding a bomb in front of it, keybind both to the same button, and pressing that button will fire the bomb like a cannonball. To explain how much of a Game-Breaker this is, the game devs have "exploding cannonballs" as a cheat code that prevents you from progressing if you use it.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Civilian buildings will collapse from a single hit from just about anything, in contrast to castle walls which are much more durable.
- Recoil Boost:
- The cannon has rather strong recoil, which can be exploited as a form of thrust.
- Mount a grabber on a vehicle. Plop a block on the grabber. Put two reverse-aimed shrapnel cannons set to full strength aimed away from what you're aiming at on either side of of the block. Plop another grabber on the end of the block. Plop a bomb on that. You've created a BFG that'll topple any building in one shot from across the map.
- Schizo Tech: The machine parts you can work with look like medieval/renaissance technology, but the self-moving and flying parts actually make them modern, remote-controlled robots.
- Shout-Out: One mission in Tolbrynd is titled "Farmer Gascoigne" and pits you against unique scythe-wielding enemies.
- Siege Engines: The point of the game is to get creative building these. Designs can range from the mundane (wheeled carts with cannons on them) to the fantastical (zeppelins that drop bombs on the enemy) to the bizarre (Humongous Mecha with sawblades for hands).
- Simple, yet Awesome:
- Literally putting a simple bomb on wheels will get you through a lot of missions.
- Almost any mission where you just need to wholesale destroy structures, an army, or animals, can be taken down by the simple and effective war crime that is a a massive box of bombs. Build a tray as big as you can, fill it with bombs, copy it, and stack it three-times high. Put a single remote grenade in it to detonate it, put some basic wheels on either side, and wrap it in some wood paneling to hold off arrows. Then just drive it straight into the fray and hit the detonate button. If the blast doesn't wipe out everything, the raining flaming bits of wood landing all over the map will finish the job for you. It takes about 5 minutes to build.
- The cannon that fires itself is a very simple and effective design, consisting of an unattached cannon on a ramp aimed away from the target that is hurled at the target by the momentum of its cannonball. You'd be downright amazed what this thing will take out.
- Spikes of Doom: One of the provided blocks. Not much good against structures, but they work great against squishy human enemies.
- Steam Vent Obstacle: Having a water cannon with a torch or other source of fire heating it will make it fire steam instead, which in effect becomes an unlimited ammo flamethrower that can't ignite stuff. It packs enough punch to send enemy soldiers flying and can even generate thrust for flight.
- This Is a Drill: One of the available blocks is a rotating drill head.
- This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The water cannon has few uses in standard gameplay, other than pushing enemies around and being paired with a fire source to produce a steam cannon. However, it's the only thing that can extinguish the titular Sacred Flame of Zone 30.
- Those Magnificent Flying Machines: The flight-oriented parts give this impression, being mostly wood and canvas and based on Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine sketches.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: The player is given carte blanche to build all kinds of devilish contraptions designed to inflict pain on enemy soldiers (or enemy sheep). Sawblades, flamethrowers, bombs, spikes, cannons, and drills are among the tools on your arsenal. Flamethrowers in particular lead to this, as enemies who are set on fire will run around screaming for a few seconds before dying. Which leads to . . .
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If one of those burning enemies happens to blindly run into your construction, it may catch fire.
- Video Game Perversity Potential : It's entirely possible to build perverted vehicles that look like people having sex. This video
demonstrates this well.
