SiegeCaster Review

A Fusillade From The Past

HIGH Getting just the right runes to unlock fast-firing quad-ballistae.

LOW Being surrounded by enemies at all times.

WTF That is certainly a large slime.

Rampart, the 1990 arcade game by Atari, had a fairly simple loop — players used a trackball (one of the early technologies that competed with the mouse for how cursors would be controlled on computer screens) to fire cannons at boats that threatened a walled castle. At the end of the combat phase, the player had a limited amount of time to patch the castle walls up with oddly-shaped blocks, adding a light puzzle element to the experience, and if the player couldn’t fully encircle their castle by the end of their turn, it was game over.

Rampart did not spawn a sequel, but it did receive a terrible NES port before becoming largely forgotten, except as a footnote for people researching the early genesis of the ‘Tower Defense’ genre. As such, I was somewhat surprised to discover that, 35 years later, a developer has decided to bring Rampart back with a few new mechanics on board.

Siegecaster follows the Rampart formula almost to a T. The round starts with the player deciding which castle they’re going to be defending, and then receiving a free barricade wall and enough resources to buy a projectile-firing unit. Enemies then begin pouring onto the map in waves, and the player learns the the main difference between Siegecaster and Rampart is that Siegecaster is far more difficult – quite a feat, as Rampart was literally designed to steal money from children.

Siegecaster’s threats come in many forms — hordes of goblins that tear down walls, medieval tanks that fire cannons and carry troops, wizards that hurl fireballs across the map, and even an assortment of dragons that streak across the sky, almost too fast to hit.

Unlike its inspiration, Siegecaster isn’t broken up into discrete sections – players have to repair and extend their walls while fighting a continuous stream of enemies. There’s a ‘build mode’ that slows down time, but attacks keep coming, even while the player tries to figure out where to slot in yet another inconveniently L-shaped piece. Late in each stage it’s extremely common to have to helplessly watch as walls are flattened just moments after being erected.

If the player’s main castle walls are ever broken, they have a short time to rebuild before they fail the level. It’s not enough to focus on maintaining just the barricades – the exponentially-multiplying threat needs to be constantly beaten back, which means installing more archers, cannons, and ballistae, all of which require four blocks of free, fully-encircled ground before they can be placed. There’s also extra motivation to expand the castle grounds, as surrounding extra land means more money coming in for walls and troops, and wrapping walls around runes can empower the players’ weapons – a necessity given how quickly enemies’ health increases.

At its best, Siegecaster is compellingly hectic, asking the player to juggle half a dozen balls at once, always staying just a few moments ahead of complete disaster. More often than not, though, it feels too retro in design, as if the developers don’t fully grasp why Rampart never became a franchise, and how the tower defense genre improved on its early concepts.

By refusing to give the player a breather between waves, and because each new wall segment is more expensive than the last, every level plays out the same way – despite any attempt at getting an early foothold, the action quickly turns into a doomed battle as waves of enemies destroy the player’s progress.

There’s just no strategy possible in how walls and defenses are built – unlike in Rampart, where enemies come from the sea so the player can focus fire on one area, the enemies in Siegecaster come from all sides, all the time. Want to try building up against a lake or river to at least block one avenue of attack? Sorry, fully half of the enemies can either fly or shoot all the way across the map, so that won’t help in the least.

Likewise, the weapon system is awkward to use. Weapons start out extremely expensive – players only have enough funds to buy a single unit to start things out – and only get pricier with each one placed. Runes are difficult to acquire, and only by obtaining multiple runes for the same weapon can the player have a chance of increasing their power enough to stand a chance of survival. In practice, this means that even though there are three weapons, just two are viable. Only ballistae can hit dragons, so they’re an absolute necessity, and the cannons fire and reload so achingly slowly they’re not effective against most enemies.

Many of these problems could be overlooked if the developers had taken more notes from some of the titles that Rampart inspired. For example, there’s no reason to increase the cost of weapons and walls each time one is built. And why can’t the player buy permanent upgrades to increase the strength of their walls and their units’ various stats?

The only tool the player can use to improve their chances is to upgrade the runes, but even that isn’t much of a help, since which rune they’ll unlock is completely random. Spread runes, which effectively double each unit’s power by doubling or tripling the number of projectiles they fire, are necessary to survive more challenging levels, but the time spent unlocking and upgrading them provides no guarantee they’ll actually pop up in the level.

Siegecaster is an intentionally difficult game built by and for the hardest of the hardcore — and this feels like a bit of a tragedy to me. It’s rare that I’ll review a game without completing it, but after a dozen hours I decided to stop banging my head against the eighth level and call it quits. While I don’t doubt that this is the experience that the developers intended to craft, I can’t help but feel that a few quality-of-life changes could have made this an innovative tower defense classic, rather than what feels like a dispatch from an alternate timeline where arcade-style quarter-snatching difficulty levels remained the norm in videogame design…

Rating: 5.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Half Human Games and Boss Corridor and published by Boss Corridor It is currently available on PC. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was not completed. The game contains no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was not rated by the ESRB, but it’s basically a T and features an absolute ton of Blood and Fantasy Violence. There’s no shocking or offensive content in the game, just lots of tiny pixel-art monsters exploding into indistinct splotches.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

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