Moonbreaker hands-on preview: A world in miniature

The world of miniature tabletop gaming can seem a foreboding one from the outside, but like so many hobbies it’s actually really welcoming. Still, with paints and kits to buy and dioramas to build, it can be costly to get really into the likes of Warhammer.

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That’s one of the thoughts behind Moonbreaker, the new game from Subnautica devs Unknown Worlds, and we went hands-on with the new turn-based game that it’s come up with at Gamescom 2022. It’s an intriguing blend of concepts.

A game of two halves

Moonbreaker divides very evenly into two big sections, both of which show a clear love for the tabletop origins that it harks back to. The first sees you able to pick whatever figurine you like from the many heroes and units that make up its factions and fighting forces.

You can then paint that unit with a surprisingly deep but refreshingly approachable system that lets you pick from a huge range of colours, mix your own palettes, and paint with as much or as little precision as you like.

That means base layers, fine detailing, different brush types and more, including an all-important masking option that will keep your paint within the boundaries of whatever segment you’re on, helping you to avoid messy final products.

We didn’t have enough time to do a paint job from start to finish, but what we saw made it abundantly clear that the mode will let people make marvellously detailed and unique paint jobs for their armies, which they can save and use in multiplayer settings to really take ownership of their units.

The other half of the game is that multiplayer – a 1v1 matchup mode that lets you duke it out against another player. You start with your chosen hero and a randomised hand of units drawn from the pool you’ve chosen, and take turns playing new units or expending your resources to use powerful attacks.

It’s closest in its tactical rhythms to something like Hearthstone, where the tension between saving up for a powerful addition without leaving yourself vulnerable to attack is constantly bubbling away.

In this case, though, rather than just working out synergies between your units and their abilities, you’re also managing cover and positioning in Moonbreaker’s tight, compact maps.

Each round lasts from 10 to 15 minutes, giving you enough time to mount comebacks and explore different tactics, but keeping it brisk enough to remain moreish. We found it brisk and simple mechanically, but the amount of tactical flexibility on offer was immediately obvious.

World-building from scratch

Something that really attracts us to Moonbreaker, though, is that it isn’t just a cobbling-together of influences and visual languages cribbed off other universes or creators. There’s a cohesive universe at play here, all hatched from the mind of prolific and mega-successful author Brandon Sanderson.

Unknown Worlds got looped in with him some years ago after hearing that he enjoyed Subnautica, its breakout hit, and the partnership that it struck up has borne fruit in the form of Moonbreaker.

Sanderson has written a huge bible about the game’s futuristic setting, one dominated by different factions and with rampant personalities to explore and encounter, and Unknown Worlds seemingly has a long list of seasonal content options up its sleeve as a result of that world-building.

Unlike the work George R R Martin did for Elden Ring, for example, Sanderson’s involvement with Moonbreaker is apparently ongoing – he might provide more material at a certain point, and consult on the direction of the game’s lore.

The result for players is a cast of fun and interesting heroes, from frog-riding warrior queens to space scammers who’ve died but come back in holographic form, each with their own characterful miniature that you can paint how you like, or keep in its excellent default state.

We’re especially interested in how this story will unfold for players once the game hits early access at the end of September 2022 – there’s the promise of new character additions, but also a series of audio plays that have been written and performed with full casts.

These will be available on podcast platforms as well as in-game for you to listen to while you paint, a combination that we found so natural that we can’t quite believe it isn’t already popular for seasonal games like Apex Legends or Fortnite.

If that sort of invention and the imagination of Brandon Sanderson can work together as well as Unknown Worlds is hoping, then Moonbreaker could offer up a really interesting spacefaring world to get lost in. We’re hoping that there’ll be a full campaign to that end at some point, but it sounds like this won’t be in place at launch.

Mini vision

The attention to detail we detected in our playtime wasn’t just down to the story or tactics – Moonbreaker also looks really nice and distinctive. Everything is through a tabletop slant – there are tilt-shift effects to make things look appropriately small, and your units are all actual figurines.

This means that animations are limited, with fun clunky moves for bigger units and slinky ones for smaller fighters, and it comes together to really immerse you in this odd world. It’s a tabletop that you can almost believe is real, but with fun nods to its game-ness.

The maps are vivid and interesting to look at, and compact enough that you don’t have to learn funky layouts or anything in order to do well. Everything, meanwhile, has a hand-painted aesthetic that makes it really clear how much attention has gone into making the game look like it was indeed painted.

That’s a testament to how effective the in-game painting tool is, since it’s what Unknown Worlds’ in-house artists used to do the units’ default paint jobs, and the detail in those models is really great.

When painting for yourself, it’s hard to explain what’s so satisfying about paint jobs looking exactly as you imagine they would in real life, but it comes together to make for a really satisfying visual package.