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My final opinion of Besieger is that it tries to do too much, and ends up accomplishing almost little. Although it is impressive in some areas, the game as a whole just isn't up to snuff. Let's back up a little.

AI is one of the major downfalls of the game. Controlling your units is an onerous task, and micromanagement is next to impossible. Spear throwers, for example, cannot attack when the enemy is inside a certain range. If the enemy gets closer to them, they attempt to keep backing away, and end up running trying to gain range indefinitely. If you order a unit to move away from a battle, as soon as it gets to the spot you ordered it to move to, it will charge back into the fray. Units seem to have minds of their own, and attack anything regardless of whether they have low health or not. You can order a unit to fight defensively, which does help a bit, but controlling them and telling them when to back out is still a nightmare.

Graphics, on the other hand, impressed me. The units have some very nice texture, and even if you zoom way in on them they keep their image quality. Whether you are looking at them from 300 feet away or 2 feet away, they look very nice. Although the units could have used a bit more creativity in design (horsemen, spearmen, and berserkers all look pretty plain), the actual models and texture are great to look at. Camera controls are very good, and offer a variety of options for a variety of players. From Follow mode to Advanced, the controls will allow you to manipulate the camera angle as you see fit.

The gameplay and dynamics of the game need some serious work. It seems that certain units counter certain other units, but there is no indication of why or how this happens. My spearmen can easily beat mounted horsemen, but nowhere is there an armor or attack type specified that tells why they are so potent against the mounted attackers. Each unit has a damage rating that explains how much damage it deals, but that is the only indication of power that the player gets. As a result, gameplay is slightly one-sided - there is very little strategy involved and in the end it all comes down to how fast you can make units. As mentioned above, it is extremely hard to control units and get them to do what you want, so the only option is to mass up and hit 'em hard. Base building takes so long, however, that the majority of your time will be spent harvesting resources.

The many heroes in the game follow a unique style that I enjoyed. Instead of the traditional "resurrect your hero when it dies" method, once a hero is dead, it is dead. It makes sense, too. As a result, keeping the heroes alive becomes a major focus of the game. Too bad it's so hard to do because of their poor AI. Once a hero starts taking damage, you have to tell him to get out of the fray, and hope he obeys you. This happens approximately 50% of the time.

Heroes are gained through the storyline. Usually you rescue some noble centaur attacked by his allies, or save a besieged town to have the main healer join your group. As mentioned above, if one of your acquired heroes dies, it is dead. End of story. This can turn out to be tragic, because heroes are one of the main attacking powers in your army. They dish out massive damage, and have very high hit points. Conspicuously absent from the hero lineups, however, were abilities. Heroes can attack, but there are no special abilities or spells that distinguish them from normal units.

Besieger follows the traditional plot line. Noble king goes away for a while and his evil sister takes over the kingdom and starts blowing stuff up. Boom boom! Bang bang! You can guess where the story heads from there - the hero is sent out to stop her. The dialogue between characters is OK, but they all seem a bit stiff and unnatural - no real personalities in the mix. For Vikings, they sure do have good grammar! Lines like "They have destroyed our city! We must attack them and avenge our fallen comrades!" are common in many cut scenes.

In addition, something seems to be seriously wrong with the multiplayer and skirmish modes. I haven't been able to play against a human, because nobody I know has the game, but whenever I play against a computer it seems that the game is very imbalanced. The computer starts out with about 500 of every resource, and I start out with about what feels like zero. As a result, by the time my workers are all done building, the computer is besieging me in my base with arbalests, spear throwers, and axemen. This is on the normal difficulty setting. Fun as it is to see my workers brutally slaughtered and my buildings burned to ash, it gets old pretty fast. Honestly…. How am I supposed to win this?

One thing worthy of note is the realism in the game. Instead of the traditional "build a building, train a unit from it" scenario, Besieger makes the unit making and training process much more enjoyable and realistic. Once a barracks is built, a worker must actually enter the barracks and it will be transformed into a fighter. No more fighters popping out of nowhere! We can now see how peasants are trained and turned into spearmen, horsemen, and berserkers. Cool! Also, catapults, watch-towers, and arbalests all need workers to man them. Tired of seeing towers shoot by themselves in other RTS's? Workers must now enter a tower in order for it to have an attack, and you can see them on the top operating its machinery. This was a very nice change, and added a lot of depth to Besieger.

I must also mention the Game Speed slider. If the game is ever too slow for your tastes, you can adjust the speed to suit your needs. Helpful!

Music and sounds are well done, but they can get repetitive after a while. Hearing the same few tracks over and over again gets pretty boring. Still, they are well done track. Unit sounds and voiceovers are good, and suit their units. Nothing fancy, and they don't get boring.

Besieger was a dream: A dream of a new style of RTS that would revolutionize the genre. I'm afraid to say that it didn't quite catch that dream. The new elements that Besieger offers are good, but the horribly executed AI and pathing system, overly long base-building procedure, and lack of strategic depth in the game are its ultimate downfall. There is definitely promise in Besieger - if tweaked with AI fixes and heavily modded it would be a great game. Graphics are very nice, and the camera angle system offers good functionality. At the moment, however, Besieger's bad spots far outweigh the good.