A Physics Sandbox That Always Belonged In VR

Crafting an invasion in VR has never felt this immersive.

Besiege VR is a sandbox for chaos and destruction. When the flatscreen game first released on Steam in early access in 2015, the simplicity and freedom in how you solve the myriad puzzles it placed in front of you captured the imagination of many. There wasn’t a story to distract you, more a framing device that you were an invader seeking to conquer the land (the puzzles) placed in front of you.

How do you seize victory? Complete the trial placed in front of you with whatever vehicle you can construct. You have blocks, braces, wheels, cannons, bombs, flamethrowers, you can fly (or levitate, the choice is yours). You can even bring in more complex builds, adding automations or mechanisms that both complicate and expand your possibilities. You can make catapults, indestructible fortresses, Frankenstein creations beyond the typical constraints of man. If it’s up to the challenge, no matter how smooth or scuffed the result, it’s valid. Crafting vehicles and surveying terrain from an all-powerful god-like place, soaring through these minimalist representations of multi-purpose terrain feels perfect for VR.

It starts simple. Destroy a tower, reach an insignia on the ground, defeat a few enemies, or dodge the bomb-infused sheep who’ll set your vehicle ablaze in seconds. Soon you’ll be forced to fly while facing high-speed winds to deal with suicidal soldiers and deliver floating cubes into holes amidst mazes. A simple car won’t do you much good at that point. After building a vehicle in the building world, you take control of it in the action sequence and aim to complete the mission with whatever you construct.

It’s been a hit with fans both through and beyond its early-access flatscreen release, as people experimented every which way to find a solution. Even if there is an obvious winning strategy, you could experiment to accelerate this – why not use a cannon to quickly change direction to reach a goal faster? The possibilities are endless.

For a game with a complex crafting system to build these vehicles and traverse large areas, Besiege has made such a seamless transition to VR it’s sometimes hard to imagine that this wasn’t originally conceived with VR in mind. In the crafting mode, all the blocks you can use to build these vehicles are assigned to the left. By holding your hand in a neutral position, this helpfully brings up a menu that splits these blocks into different categories: basic blocks are your essential wood blocks, steering hinges, and wheels, the foundation of any build. Another tab houses weapons, another houses flying parts, and so on.

While many games would restrict blocks until they’re necessary to slowly introduce the arsenal at your disposal, Besiege VR makes every block available from the very beginning. That’s alongside more advanced templates, access to a modding menu for loading user-created vehicles, and even god tools for if you want to simply mess about in a level rather than focus on the objective. Sometimes it’s nice to just watch the world burn, which you can do here!

Select these items with the right trigger, followed by pointing and placing them anywhere on your vehicle, gesturing as you place them to change their direction. You can fly freely around the vehicle using the analog sticks if you need a better angle or wish to see the level ahead, which is particularly useful when these levels get tougher. You can helpfully customize the buttons that must be pressed for each individual tool to be used, even differing them between multiples of the same tool. This is something that becomes crucial in completing later levels, rather than firing 10 cannons at once and having no more firepower for the rest of the level.

Once you’ve built your masterpiece, send it to battle by pressing the play button on your wrist. Here, you must use the grips alongside the analog or button necessary to move the vehicle around the level. Completing the level gives you a fanfare before moving onto the next, and if it makes things easier, you can even choose whether to set the camera in a fixed location or lock it behind the vehicle as you move. In theory, but we’ll get to that.

It’s amazing how natural all this feels in VR. Many games making the jump from flat to VR can feel flawed, not always adapting well when adapting controls to the motion controllers often necessary in the new medium. Here, this forces you to consciously think of how to plan your next move at all times. The biggest compliment I can give Besiege VR is that the controls melt into the background, allowing both the mechanics and time itself to just pass you by. You lull yourself into the zone of crafting, iterating, trying, failing, and trying again to complete whatever the game throws at you.

Indeed, there’s only two aspects where Besiege VR begins to fall short. The more time passes, the more it becomes necessary to fly to complete levels. For all the game may be a natural fit control-wise for the new medium, flying is one area where the game stumbles. Perhaps this comes down to my own resilience to motion sickness, but as someone who never feels queasy while playing VR even for long stretches, flying is where I get nauseous. I feel forced to take breaks after reaching these points. It’s difficult to avoid since these flying missions and flying itself not only add complexity and are core to the game. However, it’s one area where you can’t help but feel an adaptation built from the ground up like this would approach things differently.

Secondly, in its current state, there are a few notable bugs and stutters. We played most of this review on pre-release code where some bugs were noted, and it’s a factor we were made aware of in advance, but it’s still noticeable between some menu visual bugs and buttons failing. While these can be overlooked, a more pressing issue is that the option to lock your camera behind your machine to follow it through the level would occasionally become inaccessible, even after updating to the 1.0 release version. All of these issues at least occasionally rear their heads.

More than just an inconvenience, the need to control these vehicles precisely and react quickly (depending on your approach), alongside the difficulty following the action in larger levels, makes it noticeably harder just to complete some objectives. While minor issues can be understood, something so core to the game is much harder to overlook.

Besiege VR Review – Final Verdict

These are mostly minor faults in a game that makes a seamless jump to VR with grace, never mind the fact that some of these issues can be addressed in future updates. While it won’t take too long with intuition to clear through the stages, the ability to improve your times and find new solutions encourages replayability in a way that makes this a great choice. Besiege VR is a worthy addition to any headset – it’s always worth the wait when the transition to the new medium is handled with such care as this.

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