Last month Blowfish Studios launched real-time strategy (RTS) video game, Siegecraft Commander on HTC Vive. The title features a unique wall connecting mechanic when building defences that can both aid and hinder a players tactics. The studio has included 12 Steam Achievements to unlock, all of which VRFocus has listed below.
Featuring a single-player campaign and multiplayer, VRFocus reviewed Siegecraft Commander giving it a respectable 4 stars, describing it as a “highly engaging, strategy videogame.”
Full Achievement List:
Spiteful Last Words
As a tower is being destroyed, fire a projectile and destroy an enemy tower
Too Many Eggs In This Basket
Get 5 tower kills by destroying the tower it is linked to
Booster Shot
Killed a tower with a full power trebuchet shot
Full Speed Ahead
Crashed air units into each other
Deconstruction
Destroyed a tower with a building projectile
SAM Site
Shot down an air unit with a keg
Got Milk?
Caught a cow with a dragon
Cows Go Moo When They Boom
Changed a cow into a mad cow
Blitzkrieg
Hit 8 friendly units with the haste spell
Winter War
Hit 10 enemy units with the freeze spell
2017 hasn’t had the best of starts in terms of new virtual reality (VR) content, but a lot of gamers are still likely getting through their sale purchases from December. For those that are looking ofr something new and are fans of real-time strategy (RTS) videogames, Siegecraft Commander has now arrived on HTC Vive.
First announced by Blowfish Studios in May 2016, Siegecraft Commander features a single-player campaign, while providing both turn-based and RTS options for online multiplayer matches. The titletakes a slightly different tact to normal tower defence gameplay by connecting all the towers players build with walls. This form’s an interweaving web of defences, but the problem for players is if a structure is demolished, the towers it helped build also crumble, leading to potential domino-like effects where entire forts are destroyed with one well-placed attack.
While Siegecraft Commander launched on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, as well as HTC Vive, it was also due to support Oculus Rift at the same time. Currently the videogame doesn’t appear on the Oculus Store and the Rift isn’t listed under supported headsets on Steam.
Blowfish Studios is currently running a limited time discount for Steam users with a 30 percent discount available until 23rd January. This drops the price down from £14.99 GBP to £10.49. If you want to get a better idea of what the title is like, checkout VRFocus‘ review which gave Siegecraft Commander a respectable 4 stars.
For all the latest releases on Steam, keep reading VRFocus.
Trebuchet, or not to trebuchet? There really is no question when it comes to Siegecraft Commander, a tabletop strategy game that combines traditional real-time strategy (RTS) elements with a unique base-building mechanic that’s designed to significantly change the way you create structures and attack enemies. By making you physically fling—as in, put in a slingshot and shoot out—everything from explosive barrels to defensive buildings like outposts and armories, Siegecraft successfullygameifies the most banal part of traditional RTSs and summarily smothers what might otherwise be a dynamic and interesting game.
Developer: Blowfish Studios Available On:SteamVR (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift) Reviewed on: HTC Vive, Oculus Touch Release Date: January 17, 2017
Gameplay
In Siegecraft, your base is composed of essentially two main types of buildings that help create a sort of fractal defensive web:
Primary Structures
From the heart of your base, called ‘the keep’, you launch outposts, which are essentially self-replicating nodes that allow you to grow your base larger and closer to the enemy. Primary structures are useful for manually destroying the enemy’s keep or any pesky foot soldiers that slip by—accomplished by launching explosive barrels. But more on that later.
Primary structures let you create secondary structures like armories and garrisons, and also some limited defensive structures like land-to-air ballistas. If the enemy knocks out an important node in your primary structure chain though, it destroys everything linked to it from that node forward, effectively undoing a lot of your work.
Selecting secondary structures in ‘Siegecraft Commander’
Secondary Structures
After placing a primary structure, you can then have to option to select a number of secondary structures. Placing an armory for example opens up a new branch of the tree, letting you create infantry barracks, and gads of defense structures—all of which are basically dead ends when it comes to growing your base though. Because secondary structures can’t build primary structures, you need to think tactically about how to get past tight terrain, and advance through the map without filling a crucial bottle neck with a library or a mortar when you actually need an outpost to help push forward.
After a successful match, it almost feels like Siegecraft has me creating a sort of primitive intelligence, like a brainless slime mold that eventually takes over a Petri dish bit by bit. And while I really want to like Siegecraft solely based on this self-imagined premise, the activity of physical launching structures is consistently unnerving and just comes too close to ‘unnecessary gimmick’ territory for comfort.
Sure, launching an explosive barrel at an enemy outpost should rightfully require a keen eye and a good understanding of how the launch mechanic works, but hampering forward progress in the heat of a match because you launched an outpost too close to a rock, or too close to a river, or too close to your own building, or the wall that trails behind it is too close to anything—you begin to ask the most important question of all: Am I having fun yet? Because I’m honestly not sure. I should be worrying about the enemy marching at my gates, and not aiming, pulling back and whiffing my second outpost on a row.
Admittedly, the game is available in two flavors, turn-based and real-time, so you can dial down the chaos if you so choose. While I played the real-time single-player campaign, online multiplayer is also available in both flavors, but I wouldn’t risk being matched with anyone using the PC or Xbox/PS4 simply because of the disadvantage of playing in VR. Moving your POV to get a good look at the game board, fiddling with unit selections and physically reaching back to fire every 20 seconds takes both time and patience in VR, something RTS players know is in short supply. Simply put, I found game’s VR mode too encumbered for the all-out chaos of real-time strategy play.
Immersion
The beauty of motion controls in virtual reality reveals itself almost immediately when you try it in a made-for-VR game. Picking up items and interacting with them as if they were actually there is something magical, something that we’ve never been able to do as a species before in the digital realm. Since Siegecraft is more of a VR-mode than a bespoke VR game, both general object interaction and haptics are an absolute afterthought, and there’s certainly no magic to be had using either Vive controller or Oculus Touch (which still renders as the Vive controller in-game).
While you do have a beautiful controller skin and a ever-present book glued to your hand so you can read some of the game’s useless story banter, I can’t help but feel that the game would benefit more from gamepad support—not a damning verdict by any means—and a complete removal of the book in favor of voice overs for campaign mode.
Immersion-wise, finding a comfortable angle to see the gameboard takes time to suss out, because too far away and you can’t accurately select units, and too close… well, you get this:
Instead of sacrificing some of the inherent coolness of a unified color pattern and architecture for the VR mode, the game insists on using labels so I don’t feel lost. The problem is, I feel more lost with the labels on the otherwise beautifully rendered gameboard, truly underlining this as a PC-first, VR-second game.
Comfort
Since Siegecraft Commander doesn’t require room-scale locomotion, and can be played entirely from the seated position if you so wish, users may suffer slightly from manipulating the gameboard too much, as you can grow in size and rotate the board to see better. This sort of world-shifting is known to cause nausea if exaggerated, but Siegecraft offers enough opportunity to rest in between so that little to no discomfort was felt personally.
You may also be tempted to look down at the board to get a good bird’s eye view most of the time, but keeping your neck pointed downwards with a VR headset can be a big pain in the neck after a while if you’re not careful.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
There’s no shortage of strategy style games for HTC Vive, the trick is to find the ones that not only provide a polished experience but also some originality. The latest to arrive for HTC’s head-mounted display (HMD) is Siegecraft Commander from indie team Blowfish Studios, which manages more of the latter than it does with the former.
Siegecraft Commander is essentially a real-time tower defense title that gives you an entire map to take over and control. Rather than going down the standard tower defense route of set positions for defences while attackers follow a set path, Blowfish Studios has mixed up the mechanic by allowing you to place towers pretty much anywhere, there’s just one small cravat, they’re all interconnected.
Matches start from a main castle (Keep), from here you launch the necessary buildings you want to expand with, but in doing so whichever building is used to launch the next an interconnecting wall appears. The premise sounds simple enough, but if you’re not careful and don’t properly plan ahead this can lead to all sorts of issues. Outposts are your main expansion building, from here Garrisons then Barracks can be built, or an Armory then defences such as mortars. But these can’t just be placed randomly. While buildings can be fired to cover different distances from any angle off the base structure, their interconnecting walls cannot overlap, so you may find certain environment bottle necks difficult to navigate if you’ve been haphazardly building.
Another critical factor in all of this interconnectivity is that of losing or destroying buildings in the chain. Should you or your opponent manage to breach deep enough in either’s defences, destroying a crucial building – ideally an outpost – then every single building built from it comes crumbling down. If this happens later on during a match this can be devastating for the opposing player, easily turning the outcome of a game.
As with most tower defence videogames, Siegecraft Commander tends to err on the side of management more than direct action. Barracks automatically produce knights up to the allotted build count, with mortars and ballistas firing automatically, when not on cool down. But for those that like to get into the heart of the action they can still do so. Trebuchet’s, Pyres (fire magic) and Airships for example all have to be manually fired, leading to some heated engagements when teams are at loggerheads.
Controls for the HTC Vive are easy enough to pick up, with the left hand controller adjusting zoom, twisting the map and moving it any which way you please. But its not completely rosy Siegecraft Commander. While these controls work just fine when not in the middle of a chaotic battle, trying to move around the map can be cumbersome, there’s no flight or teleportation movement, you need to drag the map. Also – and this does depend on how you’ve expanded – you may find selecting the appropriate buildings somewhat problematic. If they’ve all been nicely spaced apart then its all good, but more often you’ll have built a chain, bits have been destroyed so other sections are adapted and rebuilt frantically, meaning that nicely laid out plans have been turned on their head and everything is bunched together. This can then make it somewhat frustrating trying to highlight what you need quickly.
On the flip side, when chains are destroyed and plans need to be adapted on the fly Siegecraft Commander becomes a highly engaging, taught, strategy videogame. It is rough on certain edges, and there are niggling issues, but for a title that’s looking to enter a genre so heavily established, Siegecraft Commander does just enough to make it a worthy consideration for purchase.
