The Citadel

The Under Siege single player campaign starts off in the suitably wintery landscape of ‘The North’, and follows a small group of rebel soldiers in their battle against the oppressive regime of The Citadel. Starting with only two types of units under your control, soldiers and archers, the five chapters of the game take you across a variety of environments, including swampy lowlands and ancient temples. As you progress, you get to level up your units, using cash or in-game experience, and you can add to your unit types, as you free comrades and adopt allies along your journey.

During the first few minutes of gameplay, Under Siege slowly introduces you to its action orientated take on RTS, but before the end of the first mission, you realise that this game will not be a walk in the park. With no requirement to build or collect resources, the game boils down to finding solid strategies which you can use to take out the wide variety of enemy unit types that are thrown your way, often having to change things around on the fly. Whilst the enemies encountered are not overly blessed with intelligence, what they lack in cunning is usually made up for in terms of sheer numbers. During one Chapter 2 mission, I had to kill a total of 277 enemy units with my little 10 man team (admittedly not all at once).

Mission types are varied, and range from escorting VIPs to protecting villages and taking down large enemy bosses. Fog of war is used in some maps, but I preferred the levels without it, as the fog would often leave me surrounded by enemies on four sides, with no prior warning, and a limited field of vision. On this note, I did find the camera a little frustrating, as I would have liked to be able to zoom out further, in order to get a wider view of the battlefield. The default ‘zoomed out’ view is still too close to the action, in my opinion, and the ‘zoomed in’ view, whilst looking pretty, is not terribly functional.

Progress in Under Siege can be slow at times, with the high difficulty level resulting in the replay of many sections of the game, either through outright failure, or by losing too many units during battle. With the levelling up process requiring you to keep at least one member of a unit alive, and limited resources with which to upgrade between rounds, cumulative narrow victories may seriously hamper your chances to progress through the game. The flip side to this high difficulty level is the strong sense of achievement that you get when you finally nail a particularly tough section.

>Controlling the action

The controls in Under Siege have understandably been kept simple, and are generally pretty intuitive. Squads can be assigned to the D-Pad and sent into battle with the click of a button. Each unit type also has two special abilities that can be activated with the triangle and circle buttons when needed, such as healing, taunts, flaming arrows, slowing darts and protection spells. The game offers support for the Playstation Move controller, which works pretty well, but I actually found the Dualshock method just as responsive, and more comfortable to use during longer sessions.

Visually, Under Siege makes a very good impression, with a nice range of environments and units types and some neat visual effects. The cut scenes that punctuate the action feature Manga style representations of the main characters, and fit well with the rest of the game. I have to confess that I didn’t read a lot of the story as it was told, but the visual style did appeal to me, along with the overall steam punk feel to the game.

Multiplayer

Under Siege offers a multiplayer mode alongside the single player campaign, which matches two players into a lobby in order to battle on a series of stand alone maps. A ticker tape display on the main menu updates the number of players online, and unfortunately player numbers do seem quite low at the moment. Thankfully there is also support for local multiplayer, and there are a small selection of maps which can be tackled in co-op, either locally or online.

Map Designer

A very interesting addition to the game is the map designer, which is actually the full design engine that was used to produce the levels of the main game. Landscapes can be terraformed with relative ease, and there are a huge range of environmental and man-made features that can be added. Checkpoints, mission goals and enemy types are all definable, and it is even possible to build cut scenes to fit in with the action.

Whilst the designer is initially quite intimidating, it does get easier as you spend some time tinkering, and it provides Under Siege with a great USP. Unfortunately, as it stands, the levels that you create cannot be shared with other players. According to the official Under Siege forums, map sharing will be added in Patch  1.03, but this has not yet received an official release date. It is a real shame that this feature was not available at launch, but its arrival could certainly breathe new life into the game, and may eventually help build a strong sense of community.

In Summary

Under Siege is an accessible take on the RTS genre, that fits the format of a downloadable game well. It is visually appealing, and the controls are a good fit for the PS3, using either the Dualshock or Move control methods. Whilst the game is fun to play, there are some niggling aspects which slightly spoil the party, and the difficulty level is definitely set a notch or two higher than I would have liked. Hopefully some of these niggles will be addressed in upcoming patches, and it will be particularly interesting to see the impact that the introduction of map sharing has on the Under Siege community. If this feature is a success it could seriously extend the lifespan of the game, as the playing community continues to drive it forward.

It’s a nice change of pace, actually. For the most part, I associate the RTS genre with frustrating missions that start out slow and build up into complex nightmares through long drawn-out tactics.

Under Siege dispenses with all that resource defending, base building and troop management. You start out each mission with a bunch of units and some money. Spend the money to upgrade existing units or buy new ones. Pick the units you want for the next mission and bang, you’re ready to go.

Throughout the missions your units will gain experience and skills that are carried through the campaign, so it pays to preserve your Rather than farming resources to replace cannon-fodder, Seed Studios have taken the approach that you control more elite units facing almost overwhelming odds. I like it. Far from dumbing down the strategic elements, Portugal-based Seed Studios have placed the emphasis squarely on battle tactics. Difficulty ramps up quickly and by the third mission, you’re already beyond the point of just blindly charging around the map killing everything that moves. You HAVE to think about where your units will be on every encounter, whether you use your archers to draw mobs in or keep them at the back where they can shoot and heal. Given that 80% of the levels are between 5 and 15 minutes long, that’s a pretty steep tactical curve.

Units are kept simple as well – archers obviously have ranged attacks and they also have a secondary heal for your infantry troops. Heavy artillery units have a rocket jump to quickly escape if they get surrounded by overwhelming odds. Infantry troops have a taunt to draw mobs away from your squishy archers but all secondary powers have a noticeable cooldown period. Use them wisely.

One of the things that most impressed me with the Under Siege design was the care they’ve taken on user experience. I played Battle for Middle Earth on both PC and Xbox 360 and I had major issues with selecting my battle groups on the console. Lack of a mouse was frustrating and IIRC, the game didn’t offer much to address this. In Under Siege, as well as providing key combos to select all troops on the map AND all of a single unit type, you can assign the four D-pad directions to your own custom battle groups. They’re marketing it as the first console RTS to feature the Move controller but it’s basically used as a mouse cursor. IMO, the detail Seed Studios have put into optimising the gamepad experience (it will release with the fifth iteration of the user interface) renders the need for a cursor pretty much obsolete.

[Edit: Okay, it's not JUST a mouse cursor. You can twist the controller to rotate the camera and do some other stuff. But IMO, not enough to justify the extra strain of pointing compared to, say, lying on the sofa with a DualShock.]

Beyond the Campaign

Not only will Under Siege ship with a 21-level single-player campaign, PvP and (unlockable) PvE multiplayer, it also comes with the full level editor. You can terraform your own custom maps, build missions, set up sophisticated logic for your mobs and write your very own static, text-driven cut-scenes. Seed Studios were very much influenced by the success of Little Big Planet’s community levels, so the in-game logic engine flexible enough to build your own dungeon crawler hack-and-slash, if that’s your sort of thing.

The entire game was actually built using dual shock controllers with this editor, so you’ll find the same care taken with this interface as with the in-game. Options are available to quickly copy core settings like lighting from one map to the next, making it very easy to preserve continuity. There’s also an in-game interface and rating system to publicise your levels and find other community levels. The game engine itself has an in-built profanity filter so ensure that community content is kept at a 12+ level and the studio will be moderating any levels that get flagged as offensive by the users.

As is becoming the fashion these days, you also have the ability to record battles as they happen. We tried this out on the system and recording makes very little different to the responsiveness of you controls. Upload straight to YouTube using the PS3′s built-in function or move them to your PC for later editing.

In practice

Well, I had fun. Didn’t really have a chance to try out any advanced tactics but I’d definitely recommend giving it a go if you like wartime strategy and and are looking for something casual. I did run into a few frustrating pathfinding bugs with mobs being unreachable by my ground troops. Since the levels are quite short, it’s not the sort of thing that could cost an hour’s worth of game investment – hopefully they will be sorted by the final build.

On a slightly different note, I was very happy to see that they’ve tried to make the game fairly gender-inclusive. One of the three heroes is female and in a refreshing break from form, she actually wraps up in a heavy fur-lined jacket that’s perfectly suited to the snow-bound setting. Not a chainmail bikini in sight. Your archer units are female as well – it’s a nice touch for us ladies.

Under Siege will be out on the PlayStation Network later this month for £11.99. Check back in a few days for my interview with Seed Studios producer, Felipe Pina.

What is it?

A stylized conflict-oriented real-time strategy game – no need to worry about gathering resources or defending your base

Is it fun?

Yes!

Is it worth the money? US$19.95 through Steam or £17.99 on CD-ROM

Yes, but the Steam version tends to crash if I play it for more than a couple of hours at a time. Haven’t tried the CD version but it’s quite pricey in comparison.

Why?

Well, at current exchange rates the downloaded version is only £11.40. Bargain! There are ony 10 levels but it feels just about right when you’re playing – no huge jumps in plot or learning curve and there’s a new tactic that you’re either up against or able to use in every level. Also, there are stick-men and it has fantastic ambient music! :)

You really need to plan what you’re doing so whenever you pull something off successfully first time you feel all clever :) Well, I do anyway. They’re quite good at sneaking in new enemy types, so a tactic that worked brilliantly in the last level can suddenly be completely shafted in the next – you need to stay quite sharp. There’s very little punishment in the game either – if you screw something up royally you can usually just regroup and start with a new tactic without worrying about running out of resources or letting the other guys build up their army. It’s very rare that you might have to reset the level due to poor planning.

I’ll admit, enemy AI is a bit simplistic – they have little concept of avoiding bombs and cannon-fire but in this case, the landscape appears to be specifically designed so that it’s difficult to place your cannons anywhere that would give you an overwhelming advantage. Likewise, wading in blindly with squads is possible but the worst of the enemy units are strategically positioned so that it can quite tricky to take them out with explosives and not blow yourself up.

Finally, pathfinding sucks! You really have to keep an eye on your squads if you’re walking them across a lot of terrain. It’s not so bad that it ruins the game though – you just need to be a little more careful than with other games. Compared to a traditional RTS like Earth 2150 it lacks some controls that you would expect, like keyboard shortcuts to zoom to a unit or control of multiple units at once, but small number of units you can actually have keeps it quite manageable – you’re simply not powerful enough to wage battle in more than one location at a time.

Summary: Fun and engrossing little strategy game. Keep an eye on your squads though, as they’re liable to get stuck if they need to walk anywhere near water or steep cliffs.

Also available on Linux and Mac. Check the official website for details.

Links:

• Official Darwinia website
• Free Darwinia demo
• Introversions’s store – Darwinia posters and soundtrack
• Purchase through Steam
• Trash80 – He did the music

Screenshots: