Early Access Review: Beseige

If destruction, fire, and the occasional crushed sheep is your thing, Besiege is the game for you. Currently released in early access on Steam, Besiege is a physics based building game that allows you to build powerful siege engines to lay waste to the massive fortresses, tiny hamlets, and yes, unsuspecting sheep.

Developed by Spiderling Games, Besiege is a tinkerer’s play box. It drops you on a map with a clear set of goals, and lets you create whatever your mind can come up with to meet those goals. Currently limited to a series of tutorial maps, these goals can range from simple destroy missions, where you must destroy a certain percentage of the environment or troops on the screen, to obstacle courses and resource collection courses.

Not unlike opening a box of your favourite Lego as a child, Besiege gives you a variety of tools and equipment to build your creations. You need to figure out the right combination of components and moving parts to get the job done, and there are always multiple possibilities for each encounter. One early level for instance tasks you with destroying a tower located on a mountain, you can do so by rigging together some springs and pulleys and ropes to create a catapult or trebuchet, or maybe create a legged monstrosity to climb the mountain side, or a flying bomber that can rain hell from above. Your choices are limited only by your imagination and ability to take advantage of the game’s sometimes finicky physics engine.

The game also currently includes a sand box mode, which acts as a test ground for various designs with a variety of obstacles and targets to test your machines on. The real fun however is in the mission play and trying to figure out new ways to destroy your targets.

The visuals for the game, are cartoonish, and comedic, with massive explosions throwing debris across the map, or throwing soldiers up past the camera. Sheep splatter into satisfying pools of blood as your siege engines crush tme with spikes, bombs, and fiery balls of death.

With a quickly growing community of siege designers, a variety of both monstrous, and incredibly well thought out creations are also available to be shared and used in your own game, and each design can still be altered or improved for your own tastes. Individual components can also be redesigned and their effects changed to serve varying purposes, like increasing the tension on a spring, or the rotation speed of a wheel.

Though the structured mission play is currently limited to only one zone, with all of the bits and pieces available in the steadily increasing inventory, it’s not hard to find new and more inventive ways to cause havoc on each map. Besiege has shown a good start to a very creative game that you can spend minutes on, or hours trying to create that perfect weapon of destruction, or a perfectly balance flying contraption.

Overall 6.5/10

Check Out 7 Minutes of The Witcher 3

Another great, engrossing RPG to look forward to.

The Order: 1886… Let’s just say they got your order wrong.

The Caffeine Crew

This update comes with The Order: 1886.  And it’s true.  The game just isn’t what it should’ve been.  Overcoming some issues with my recorder, I sit down with The Order: 1886 for the first time and play through this movie of a third person shooter.

Here’s The Order 1886, At a Glance.

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The Voiceover

So, Leonard Nimoy passed away the other day.  And while most people will recognise and remember him for his most famous role as Spock on Star Trek, some of my more fond memories of the man happen to be tied to games.

Though with the influx of movie and tv tie ins these days, where actors often reprise their roles, in the mid to late 90’s it wasn’t nearly as common for a well known actor not known as simply a voice over actor would lend his voice to a video game.

We could also find it strange that one of the earliest games Nimoy would lend his voice to would not be a Star Trek game, but however a  whimsical, and downright weird game such as Seaman.

An interesting, if not perplexing early attempt at an interactive pet sim, one of the only games released on the Sega Dreamcast to use the microphone attachment, Seaman used Nimoy’s baritone voice as the instructional narrator for the game. As the game loads up, Nimoy’s voice tells us about the odd, “legendary” Seaman creature, which are then tasked with helping grow and develop by voice commands and tapping on the “glass” of it’s aquarium. It’s hard to argue that Nimoy’s voice over wasn’t one of the best parts of that game.

Seaman, Opening Narration

And who can forget hours upon hours, of “one more turn” as we listened to Leonard Nimoy’s voice describe major events, and new technologies as we dove head first into Civilization IV and all of it’s life sucking replayability.

Personally I spent a great deal more time with Leonard Nimoy gaming away till way too late into the night then I can say I did watching replays of Star Trek. Though we will miss him for his many screen roles, and his poetry and music, we will also miss him for his influence over modern gaming, and the uprise of quality voice overs in the many games we play today.

“In the beginning, the Earth was without life, and void….”

Thoughts on the evolution of gaming communities.

I had a brief conversation the other day with fellow blogger @TheNeoNerdBlog whom I recently began following, that got me thinking about how much gaming communities have changed, though also in many ways stayed the same over the years. I myself have been gaming now for over a quarter of a century, a crazy number in itself, and the many changes I have seen have been incredible.

When I first started gaming, at the beginning of the age of the console, most gaming communities consisted of you, your couch, and whatever assortment of local friends were over that afternoon. Games we played were often single player, but we all sat and watched intrigued while our friend finally beat that boss we always had trouble with, which seems to go along with some modern equivalent I am sure we are all aware of.

Everyone had a knapsack on the floor in the basement, next to the tv, primed and prepped to disconnect our system and get it ready to ship with a select few favourite games to our buddies’ houses down the street. They never left our sides. That chance for both brothers to beat up whoever might come out of that 2D door next, or partnering up two plumbers to fight off mushrooms in a vast play world were first and foremost.

Things change quickly though, and it was also around this time that our father’s got used to picking up the phone only to hear a squealing series of beeps, and we heard our mother’s call downstairs to get off the phone line, and our first 33.3k’s pushed bits of information across the World Wide Web, or 1200 baud in my case. My first experience online, fighting amongst friends in giant battle robots in MPBT 3025:Solaris. People who’s faces or voices I would never see or hear, people who today I may know only by their call signs though we may have been friends for years. Suddenly our communities reached well past our homes, and our schools, and sometimes even our countries. We started looking up time zones so we could figure out the best time to be online to meet with our friends. We became technical geniuses trying to figure out how to get back online after dropping mid way through a match. Hoping desperately that we could get back into whatever gaming lobby we were in before we let down our team mates.

These communities quickly grew and expanded, finding homes online in massive game lobbies like the Gaming Zone, where we might wait for hours for that familiar ting from your Zone messenger as a friend invited you to join a match. For me this was the golden age of my gaming career. Friendships were made that have lasted longer than some of the ones I have made in the normal run of my life. Hours spent before dawn, trying to get one last match before bed. Bringing friends along on the ride was the most important part.

Now as I’ve grown older, had a family, a career, and seen my time for gaming slowly dwindle away each year, and as I log into my youtube account to watch people play through games I no longer have time, or budget to pursue I am reminiscent of those first early years of gaming, sitting on the couch watching a friend play through a game.

Now in truth, my couch might be a slightly squeaky office chair, and that office chair might be shared with millions of other viewers from around the world, but the essence of those first communities, of sharing the experience of a great game, parallels in such an intriguing way with those first early days on the couch in the basement gaming away with your friends. Watching your friend beat a challenging level, jumping in to help out when they are lost, challenging each other to break the other’s record. Though the scale is nowhere in the same scope, the emphasis on sharing the experience will never leave gaming communities.

Stranded Deep, Early Access Review

I am a few hours into the gameplay of Stranded Deep and I can tell you this is a very solid game for an early access on Steam. Graphically the game looks beautiful. The water, and lighting effects are amazing and add a lot of realism to the game, especially any dives you might decide to take at night. The animal models are solid and move fluidly. The only lack so far being the absence of any player model, or any shadow effect, which leads to some odd situations where whipping a potato out of your sack resorts to an odd instant shadow materializing from nowhere. The game maintains a solid frame rate throughout most of the game, unless you have piled up a large amount of supplies on your beach, as the physics engine seems to struggle to maintain frame rate with more than a dozen or so sticks floating around.

 

The gameplay included with the early access model is solid, but to some degree underwhelming. Everything works well, and is fairly easy to accomplish, but with no story, or end game to shoot for you are limited to building a massive beach cabin on all the various islands around you. On these islands there is a lack of uniqueness as each island is a carbon copy of the next, and holds roughly similar amounts of resources for you to use. The real gameplay begins once you start to explore the depths around your tiny island for shipwrecks hidden deep below the ocean. With limited air, and sight lines, and never knowing when the weather may change and your visibility under water will be reduced to zero, these dives are fun and exhilarating. The fauna is filled with small fish and the occasional shark, though I have yet to truly feel threatened by the massive tiger sharks, and great white’s swimming around as their AI is not very aggressive and you can easily swim past them, which leads to the only major downfall of this game, survivability.

I found it entirely too easy to create a beach paradise with dozens of sources of food available on each island in the form of crabs, small fish, and dozens upon dozens of coconuts which serve as both food and hydration. The overall game balance feels off as I never really feel like I am in danger of not surviving the day, or the night.

Overall this is a very solid start, and with some balancing done and an overal story, or end-game in place this game offers a unique take on the survival/craft genre, with its beautiful surroundings, and the exploration of a vast, endless ocean.

I look forward to spending more time lost in an endless ocean.

Overall rating, 7.5/10