The first thing that hits me about Moonbreaker, the very-different-from-Subnautica game by Unknown Worlds, is how rigid and awkward it feels. It’s strange because turn-based combat games are something I’m really familiar with, but Moonbreaker takes some getting used to though, and some of that I don’t like, and some of it I really, really do.
It stems from Moonbreaker being a miniatures game. A friend called it Warhammer without the licence and that’s exactly what it is. You collect and paint the figurines you use in battle; figurines are the whole point, so it’s not surprising they behave like them and don’t move around like animated characters. They are frozen in whatever dramatic expression they’ve been given: cheering, charging, taking aim, whatever. And when they move, it’s as if someone picked them up and plonked them down somewhere else. And when they attack, it’s like a child twizzled them in an emulation of the real thing. The figurines are voiced – there’s a lot of energy and character in the game – but there’s no escaping you’re playing an adaptation of a tabletop game.
But the camera feels rigid too, fixed on rails you’ll struggle to pull it off. It won’t let you spin around the battlefield, viewing the action from varying angles, which I’d really like to do – if only to admire the figurines I’ve painted. But I also want it for gameplay reasons, so I can see bunched stand-offs more clearly. When large figurines stand near smaller ones it can be hard to see what’s going on. As it is, I can only nudge the camera’s rotation slightly before it pings back to a fixed angle, and it doesn’t help much.
Source – eurogamer.net
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