Siege the Day strangely opens with a “cutscene” that feels more like an advertisement for the game. Explaining the game’s features, the whole thing had an extremely “commercial” vibe, like something I would see interrupting my six-hour YouTube drama videos. I was right; that’s precisely what it was, as searching for “Siege the Day gameplay trailer” netted the same video as a result. I’m not entirely sure why the game felt compelled to try and sell me on something I was already playing or why they used a trailer from 2021 to do it.
Surely they could have made a new, dedicated opening cutscene by now?
Next, I was launched immediately into a tutorial that explained the how-tos of the features, just shown in the little intro commercial. Unfortunately, the tutorial, which was incredibly hand-holding and made you place the buildings in the right places (in case you didn’t know how to click and place buildings on your own), failed to function as a tutorial. Some of the buildings you must place simply wouldn’t appear in the menu. You are essentially soft-locked in this tutorial until you choose to skip it.
Thankfully, I did and went about learning the game myself. The narrator’s voice acting was a little grating, but the music was nice enough, and the cartoony graphics, while not my thing, were starting to grow on me as I quickly grasped the basics of Siege the Day’s castle building. Putting a dingy little motte-and-bailey together, I was ready to proceed into the wider Siege the Day game, and this is when its potential first really showed itself to me.
See, Siege the Day isn’t like other castle or city-building games. Where in most similar titles, you would plant your capital building in an open field, gather materials, and fend off hordes of attacks, Siege the Day makes a dramatic step towards originality by completely subverting the city-building genre as a whole.
Yes, you’ll see familiar mechanics when building your castle, but Siege the Day is actually a match-made battle game. Your castles are built in the main menu, saved in several configurations of your choice, and then pulled up to battle other players or AI as you see fit.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, imagine your castles as sort of decks in a TCG (Trading Card Game). You build them to a configuration of your choice, given a point limit, and then are matched against someone else with that same point limit. Going heavy on walls, infantry-spawning buildings, or siege weapons is entirely up to you.
This creates an exciting game of offensive defense, where your impenetrable fortress must also be a weapon capable of destroying another.
In these matches, catapults hurl stones, spells descend from the sky, and waves of troops run across a short bridge at each other. Again, the mix of which is up to the castles’ builds in question. You can have an infantry powerhouse with many barracks or forgo them altogether to build layers upon layers of defensive walls.
Siege the Day is one of the most conceptually interesting and deep PvP games I’ve seen in a while. Unfortunately, I emphasized conceptually because, in execution, the game is lacking.
For a game with such potential depth in the player customization field, you have a shockingly small amount of resources to play with. Unit variety is sorely lacking in both siege weapons and troops. Your two types of wooden and stone walls raise the question, “Why not just use the stronger, slightly more expensive walls in every build?” In the tutorial, you’re taught to build your castles as fully enclosed squares, but without any pathfinding that allows troops to walk around walls, you never really have a reason to place them in anything but a straight line across the buildable space.
Said walls, by the way, do not clip into the towers or gates you place, leaving massive unfillable gaps in your castles that are hideous to look at. This issue was solved by other games in the genre as early as Age of Empires II, so I was shocked to see it here.
Castle vs. Castle combat quickly devolves into a boring slugfest to see who can throw rocks at the other faster. That is if you haven’t beaten the campaign, which hard locks access to many of the unit types and deployables in the game (though there aren’t many more.) If you’re looking to enjoy the PVP aspect of Siege the Day, you may find yourself with nothing but a few catapults fending off against an opponent with knights and battering rams to wear you down with superior variety.
The battles immediately lose the potential to be visually interesting when you realize your camera can’t pan past the enemy walls. This is an odd choice, as there’s nothing back there that you can’t already see, giving you no unfair advantage or tactical edge to simply being able to follow your unimpressively small units of soldiers once they breach the enemy gates.
Beyond denying players the fun of watching their soldiers smash the enemy’s fortifications, this can also deny you critical information, like how many soldiers you have left on the field. You’ll just have to hope the damage indicators behind enemy walls give you enough information about what’s happening.
Siege the Day gave me a bad first impression but caught my interest with its unique concept, only to fumble the ball in the execution. With time and maybe a bigger team, Siege the Day probably could have been a breakout hit, challenging the likes of Clash Royale in its theming and competitive gameplay as it is now, though Siege the Day is, unfortunately, a pass for me.
The Final Word
Siege the Day has a promising concept, but bugs and underwhelming mechanics hold it back from its full potential. I’d like to see this game improved with time, love, and care, and I hope to return to a much better game someday.
5
Siege the Day was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Siege the Day is available on Steam.
