Yes, Besiegement is another tower defence game. That much you can glean from the first line of the App Store description; and like all games in this class, you'll be preventing enemies passing through your medieval themed battlegrounds. Unlike other similar titles, however, it features 8 towers (with 6 upgrade levels) that show the upgrade effect information (pictured below), both styles of levels (path based and create your own maze), statistics and achievements. We'll get back to those in a minute.

Each tower (apart from the cheapest, the arrow tower) is basically one of the elements - you have fire, ice, water, earth, poison, wind and lightning to play with. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to fighting enemies and the general attributes of the tower. For example, wind has incredibly long range, but is slow firing - and the arrow tower is the cheapest and lightest, so is great for weak swarms - but useless for larger creatures. Additionally, you can earn gemstones for purchasing power ups that help out in a tricky situation.

The strategy is placing the towers in such a way that each wave gets obliterated - without running out of cash by upgrading too hastily. It works well, like in all of these types of games. It's made all the more challenging, because often the levels will contain multiple crisscrossing paths - and even on the create your own levels, there are certain areas in which you cannot build, adding another element of strategy into the mix.

The interface is great, with two ways to build towers. The first is tap on the tower button, where a grid will appear over the map - select a square on the grid to place the tower. The second is if you drag the icon onto the map, the grid appears again but the map zooms in for finer placement. Because you can zoom in with a pinch gesture we found ourselves using the former method much more. In addition, there's a button for game speed, and there are two faster and two slower speeds than the default setting.

What we liked about Besiegement is that each campaign map has it's own set of achievements - to get a gold medal on each map can involve building a certain number of towers, or upgrading one to the maximum level, or getting through the level without losing a life. This carries over into the challenges too, and there's some good ones. Fire and ice has you playing a map with only fire and ice towers, and there's also one map that only permits arrow towers.

Furthermore, the game has a global achievement and statistics system - achievements such as beating three levels in a row, or killing a certain amount of enemies. And detailed statistics show everything from monsters defeated to towers built, and even how many times you've tapped on the game. When coming to write our review, we had over 6,000 taps registered!

The package as a whole isn't the most well presented, especially when compared to some of the games in it's class. The map textures can look ugly when zoomed in, and the title screen looks like a horrible blurred JPEG image. We definitely think there's a great deal of improvement that can be done in certain areas, but the towers themselves look excellent. The sound effects are good, but the funny medieval music doesn't play in game. It's no big deal when the game is compatible with your iPod.

If you're prepared to let the fit and finish go though, Besiegement is a fantastic, difficult game. The easy mode is just right to ease you into the game (although some of the later levels are pretty hard!), and the challenges are great and add a new gameplay element into the genre. Yes, there's many similar titles, but this one stands out for it's sheer amount of depth and fun times. We highly recommend that you download this, especially at it's current bargain bin price of 59p.

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