Besiege Review (Nintendo Switch OLED)

by Jim Smale · Published September 26, 2024 · Updated September 25, 2024

Besiege Review, Besiege is a physics-based building game in which you construct medieval siege engines and lay waste to immense fortresses and peaceful hamlets. Build a machine that can crush windmills, wipe out battalions of brave soldiers, and transport valuable resources, defending your creation against cannons, archers, and whatever else the desperate enemies have. Create a trundling behemoth, take clumsily to the skies, and cause carnage in fully destructible environments. Ultimately, you must conquer every Kingdom by crippling their castles and annihilating their men and livestock, in as creative or clinical a manner as possible!

Besiege Review Pros:

Decent graphics.
999MB download size.
Own in-game achievements.
Graphics settings – performance or beauty mode, field of view slider, framerate, depth of field, and motion blur.
Full touchscreen controls support, both in-game and menus.
Control settings – Invert axis for the camera and zoom, sensitivity sliders for the camera axis, zoom sensitivity, and camera offset. Manual or automatic simulation camera.
Creative puzzler gameplay.
Tutorial pop-ups as you play along with a reference manual.
Cheat support – all unlocked and can be turned on and off in the pause menu and they are – explosive cannonballs, pick up objects with the cursor, no gravity, invincibility, infinite ammo, and ignore building bounds.
Uses physics for everything.
Sandbox mode has three types of sandboxes – Ancient grounds (enemies and structures) Barren expanses (flat empty world), and misty mountains (for flying machines).
The single-player has three locations – Ipsilon, Tolbrynd, and Valfross and each has its own unique biomes like ice, snow, forests, etc.
Each location has a cool little map diorama and you highlight the individual places to start a level.
Fast loading times.
Perfect fit for the handheld.
Each level has its own goal and you are tasked with making Contraptions to complete said goal.
The most in-depth yet accessible Contraption builder, you can choose which set of items is shown on the Hotbar for ease if use.
At any time you can test out your Contraption.
Unlimited retries per level.
The building lets you do whatever you want from simple designs to massive in-depth ones like building catapults, flying machines, add canons, etc.
A full 3D game world with 360-degree camera control including zoom in and out when building.
Each scenario is like a small diorama and comes to life when you press play.
Goals are varied from things like getting past this hazard, killing X amount of soldiers, or even storming castles. It really does a good job of mixing it all up.
Previously used builds carry over to the next goal.
You can save and load builds to save time.
To keep Contraption buildings somewhat regulated you only get a set cube to build within.
Day and night cycle with an optional handy time scale slider in the pause menu.
It’s such a fun game to play.
Retrying a goal or going back to building or gameplay is all instant.
You can have the game show you the center of mass on your Contraption.
Play how you want is fully encouraged.
Full workshop support so you can upload and download other players’ Creations.
The workshop builds are categorized – popular now, featured, most downloaded, cars, ballistic, all-terrain, armored, flying machines, walker and Mechs, mechanisms, automatons, and most recent.
You can search and refresh the workshop.
Handy undo and redo buttons.
The workshop has your profile showing how many likes and downloads you have as a creator.
You can make the game as simple or as hard as you like.

Besiege Review Cons:

Very daunting to start especially when you just have this one block and a goal.
Touchscreen is perfect in idea but in execution, it can make small piece building difficult and tricky.
The workshop is Switch only meaning you cannot get hold of any of the Steam creations.
It was weird to find the workshop hidden away in the menus.
The tutorial is not that in-depth.
You still get some performance hits but to be fair it is processing a lot.
You cannot remap the controls.
Playing with the controller is just OK, at times it feels like it has a bit of button lag.

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