Explosive sandbox game Besiege is now ten years old, and developer Spiderling Studios is celebrating with a special anniversary update. The medieval-style building and destruction sandbox game has you manufacturing all manner of machines to accomplish tasks or stride into battle. Between putting together a perfect creation and using it to demolish everything in your path, Besiege remains one of the most satisfying games on PC, and this new overhaul is packed with reasons to keep coming back, along with flash from the past.
Spiderling remarks that Besiege has “absolutely transformed from its humble origins” over the past decade, and adds that it’s “incredibly proud of the community” that’s surrounded the sandbox game. It notes that 2025 “is going to be an exciting year for Spiderling” with “future plans for Besiege and more.” For now, however, it’s delivering a celebratory ten-year update. The focus here is on the core community of players, including “adding some extra replayability to the campaign, bringing back some nostalgia, and improving the quality of the game.”
First up is a very handy feature that automatically adjusts the timescale slider if the heavy load from all the physics interactions causes your fps to start falling. Essentially, this means that particularly chaotic moments will cause time to slow down, ensuring a more smooth experience. Spiderling explains that “an added bonus of this effect is that large explosions and crashes will automatically occur in slow motion,” so you can watch the destruction play out in truly cinematic style.
The final level of the second island, Tolbrynd, has been reworked – Spiderling says it has been unhappy with its design for a long time, so has reworked it into “something cooler and more exciting.” Additionally, the final mission of each island will now see its respective ruler taking to the field alongside their armies to fight against you.
Level scoreboards, stat tracking, and ranks also get an overhaul. Your completion stats will be recorded for time taken, damage received, and ‘block score,’ and you can compare them against other players globally. This last stat represents the total combined value of all the objects you’ve used in your construction, with weighting to ensure more powerful tools are accounted for. That means you’re aiming for this new rating to be as low as possible. You can still complete levels with machines downloaded from the workshop, but these won’t be eligible for leaderboards.
The Legacy Sandbox is a redesigned and rescaled version of its original sandbox. It’s been given a makeover with new models and textures, and has been adjusted “to better fit the larger machines more commonly used by players today.” Additionally, the very first alpha release of Besiege from its 2015 early access launch is now available to play – you can access this through the ‘betas’ tab in your Steam library if you’re curious to see how far the game has come since launch.
Rounding out this tenth anniversary update are the introduction of Steam Trading Cards and an achievement overhaul. Spiderling says it has added 25 new achievements in total, including some for its Splintered Sea expansion, while also improving “some of the less interesting ones” and removing a few that were unpopular, such as those focused on multiplayer.
There’s plenty of reason to return to Besiege, then. If you’re on the hunt for something new instead, try another of the best building games, or perhaps one of the best medieval games.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or join our community Discord to stay in the know.