Construct a Chaotic Contraption in ‘Besiege VR,’ Available Now on Meta Quest

An army of sword-wielding soldiers bounces toward you over a field, while more stand waiting behind portcullises and atop stone parapets. But you don’t have an army. What you do have is a giant wooden cart with a huge spinning propeller attached to the front, ready to mulch up all those armor-clad troops and bring the walls of their fortress crumbling down—or to completely fly apart under the force of its own unbalanced mechanical power.

In Besiege VR, your goal is to build powerful siege engines to smash through Medieval armies, castles, cities, and whatever else might get in your way, and it’s available today on the Meta Horizon Store.

Besiege VR features a campaign of 55 levels, each functioning as a self-contained puzzle where the solution is causing as much destruction and mayhem as possible. Each level starts with an opportunity to build and add on to your siege engine in order to meet new challenges. A level might require you to annihilate soldiers approaching from multiple directions or to build something strong enough to level the stone walls of a keep.

Physics systems determine how your siege engine works, however—so if the centrifugal forces are out of whack with your spinning death blade or there’s too much strain on the axles of your rocket-powered battering ram, your vehicle could just as likely blow up spectacularly as dish out destruction. And sometimes, causing your vehicle to crash, explode, and set a lot of things on fire might be just the solution you’re looking for.

Besiege began its life as a PC game, and with its VR version comes a host of new features and additions. You’ll get a strong sense of the scope and size of your siege engine as you’re creating it, thanks to the immersive experience of VR. And once it’s complete, you won’t have to watch from afar as your creation careens into castles and sends soldiers scattering—you can actually climb aboard and pilot your vehicle to witness first-hand the havoc it can wreak.

For the launch of Besiege VR, we sat down with 3R Games CEO Piotr Surmacz to get an idea of what it was like bringing the beloved PC game to VR and how the new perspective has changed the experience.

Piotr Surmacz: This question comes up often, and the answer is a nuanced one. Besiege is a powerful IP on flat screens, but we have to remember that most VR brings in new, younger players. For them—and certainly for some older players too—this is an entirely new game, and the first time they’ll hear about it is through the VR version.

For those who already know the game, there are two big benefits:

First, for the first time, they’ll get to experience the sense of weight and mass of their machines—something only possible in VR.

And second... there’s the thrill of playing with their own PC-built machines in VR because the game supports importing them and even coding their functions.

We played around with this in testing, and the phrase we heard often was: “This is a total game-changer!”

PS:Stabilizing the VR camera in a way that reflects the intensity of the action (which can be very dynamic at times) while also avoiding discomfort. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning this mechanic, and personally, I think it works fantastically. We can’t wait to hear what players think!

PS: Oh yes, absolutely. One major advantage was the sense of scale and weight of the machine you’re building—in VR, that feeling is incomparably stronger than on a flat screen. There were also a few challenges tied to that, like the need to physically walk around the machine, which some players found inconvenient—hence the idea for a quick player teleport system to various positions around the structure, which significantly speeds up the gameplay.

One of the most surprising elements, though, was the dynamic Camera Follow feature (e.g. when your machine explodes), as well as the so-called God Tools—separate tools that let players interact with the environment independently of the machine. Manually tearing down a castle wall with a lasso in slow motion? Pure poetry!

PS:I started working in game dev as a composer and sound designer, so I was well-prepared for this. The sense of weight is conveyed through low frequencies, and after working on Thief Simulator VR: Greenview Street, we’ve learned how to craft samples that still deliver that feeling of heaviness.

We also had a fantastic specialist on the project who provided most of the game’s audio samples and calibrated them with the haptics. As for the haptics themselves—our goal was to give players a sense of power, weight, and the rattling vibrations of these clunky machines.

How well have we pulled it off? The players will be the judges very soon.

PS: Oh wow, where do I even start? (laughs) We were ambitious about delivering fantastic visuals along with smooth, seamless gameplay, even with extremely intense physics calculations. After all, it’s a sandbox, and you can never predict what kind of chaos the player might come up with.

So I’d say this: The biggest challenge was constantly calibrating the core systems, which we rewrote, and balancing Meta Quest’s resources to handle hundreds of interactions running under the hood—all without dropping frames per second.

Thankfully, we had great support from Spiderling Studios, who’ve been working on this game for years and know it inside out.

PS: A huge amount of knowledge about VR game optimization because Thief Simulator VR is a beast—its largest scene features nearly 5,000 interactive objects. Also, the constant readiness to refine the core gameplay loop based on player feedback and needs.

As a player myself, I want games to look good, run smoothly, and feel as intuitive as possible. I actually have a background in psychology, and I’m really interested in the physiological aspects of gameplay—like how long a specific interaction should last to be satisfying without ending too abruptly or dragging on and boring the player by just one extra second.

Every game—especially in VR—is built on hundreds of such tiny decisions.

PS: It’s worth mentioning that this is our second release in just a few weeks. On June 26, we launched the VR spelunking game Cave Crave, which climbed to No. 14 on the Meta Store bestsellers list. That’s a huge reason for us to celebrate, especially since we have big plans for it—including new maps and a multiplayer mode.

Be sure to check it out!

Now’s the time to put your mad engineer skills and chaotic creativity to the test to see just how much damage you can do. You can find Besiege VR on the Meta Horizon Store now for $19.99 USD.