Under Siege

With all the news still surfacing from E3 and now Comic-Con, and adding on the PSN outage of a few months past, it can be understood if you missed the release of Under Siege by Seed Studios.  If you did then make sure to hunt it out on the Playstation Store and give it a go, you won’t regret it.

Under Siege is a new entry into the creative gaming genre bringing real time strategy, and a fantastic editor to PS3 owners.  The game play has all the elements of a solid RTS console title made even more accessible through PS Move support.  Players control smaller groups of units (don’t expect epic sized RTS battles ala StarCraft here) making the player to unit relationship a bit more personal.  Units carry over from mission to mission allowing for some RPG elements of leveling up and upgrading abilities.  Other than these details each mission plays out as expected, with incoming AI units attacking in almost wave like patterns and players building strategies to progress through each task and map.  Of course there are finer details to look at in the gameplay elements, but our attention goes to the amazingly well done editor included with the game.

The video following does a good job of walking you through most of the features of the editor and gives you a taste of menus and controls, but there are some very interesting things that the video does not really show off. To start with the editor allows for much more that merely making a battlefield.  Seed Studios has given players the ability to craft an entire campaign to share with others.  Maps can be connected using still image story cut scenes allowing players to give their maps cohesion deliver an entirely new epic story of their own making.  The only other User Generated Content title out there that allows for a similar function is LittleBigPlanet 2, so this is a pretty impressive include for a PSN download title.

The map making itself is no less impressive with controls over every little detail in terrain, lighting, atmosphere, plants, rocks, structures, you name it.  Terrain options are very nicely mixed with desert, mountain, jungle, and snowy regions just to name a few.  Each area has specific structures to match as well as other nature brushes.  Map size itself can also be altered for close and deadly brawls to spread out enemy engagements.  On the subject of enemies - spawning and AI controls are also very easy to understand and allow for players to create co-op or versus with AI teammate scenarios.  Using the trigger system allows for scripted story events as well as programming specific victory conditions with no programming knowledge required, but maybe a little note taking.  The sheer list of controls and trigger options can be a bit confusing at first and not all of the names are out-of-the-box intuitive, but with a note book at your side and some invested time you’ll find yourself making adventures and challenges in no time.

As a first major offering from a small Portuguese studio, Under Siege is an extremely well done and impressive title. As a UGC title it offers more editor features than one would expect, or even dream of.  Once more, if you missed the release and are not already addicted to the game, then make sure to hunt it out on the Playstation Store, you won’t regret it.