Besiege

my brain struggles to comprehend but still fire

I played this a LOT on xbox years ago so when I saw it for sale, specially a 90% sale of course I immediately grabbed it. Somehow, someway, its...not great on pc. Still the same awesome game, if you're a fan of destruction and building then this is for you. I will say it's limited in scope, not a lot of parts to choose from and the maps are all one shot. As in, build a toy, use it to complete an objective, that could be destroy x amount of things or simply travel from point A to point B. It does tweak that simple premise however to give you many many hours of fun without becoming (overly) repetitive. A pretty good metric I go by these days that I didn't have 20 years ago and certainly not 40 years when I first picked up an atari stick is, "Can it hold my kids attention for more than 5 min?" If not then taking into account how in depth the game mechanics may be and how far out of their wheelhouse it is ie. screen text, rpg elements, basically anything not roblox, I have a pretty good indicator if I myself will enjoy it longer than 5 hours. This game is overly complicated as far as being able to intuit what you're building, what blocks to use and how they interact. Now I'm not gonna flex why I have the prerequisite knowledge to rule out anyone saying, "Oh he's to dumb to understand what a winch does or read a tool tip." I have it and I'm not. But a pretty good example comes by the third or 4th level. I wanted to build a trebuchet. Pretty simple machine, cup for the ammo, long pole/lever to hold the cup, counterweight to overbalance said ammo, tension line and tensioner, maybe a winch if you want to get fancy. I couldn't build it, not quickly or simply and in a game promising to build anything you can imagen to destroy everything, something that simple shouldn't have been an issue. But the lack of a UI to even tell you how to pick up an already placed block? I'm sure there is a way, tried holding shift and left click, that kind of thing, nope, I have to delete every block, even when it's the same block I need just want to move it down a peg, and then because I deleted it I have to go back into the menu, find that part and then put it back on. Annoying, tedious and exactly the type of thing that after two hours makes me bail. And it has been this way since day one with very little response from the devs, at least on console, and obviously no changes. Now I'm sure the expansions add more parts, blocks and levels. Which is great, like I said it's not a bad game, and I notice in the description it said something about playing against your friends, that sadly in all likelihood means competing against their score on a random scoreboard and not actually building cool toys to battle it out in real time. But who knows? I won't anytime soon because while I had a lot of fun, the lack of an intuitive UI makes playing this game more of a chore than a good time after a good amount of time.