Plenty of exciting RTS games are coming in 2025 and beyond, but it’s not often we’re captivated by the sheer ambition of a development team. Of course, the bigger genre is home to several subgenres targeting specific niches, and wargames have slowly but steadily become a huge chunk of the strategy market on PC. Now, Steel Balalaika’s Broken Arrow is aiming to go both big and deep in that space with a modern warfare setting, and our recent hands-on time with a generous multiplayer build left a positive impression on us. Plus, we’ve talked to creative director Félix Habert.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to play through a promising single-player demo that did a pretty good job of explaining what Broken Arrow is all about and teaching me the basics… before throwing me right into a pretty serious ground invasion scenario. As fun as that bite-sized build was, however, we had many questions about the multiplayer side of the game, so we were delighted to be invited to test that element alongside other press members and content creators earlier this month by publisher Slitherine.
At the same time, we were able to get a list of questions to Habert in order to get a solid idea of how the development process has looked like and what the team’s plans for the future are (spoiler: they’re promising). The buzz around Broken Arrow has only grown in recent months, yet the creative director started off by saying Steel Balalaika has just “kept going” and remained focused: “We have read the feedback of players, kept what they liked, improved what they criticized, but nothing has fundamentally changed.”
We also wanted to ‘clear the air’ regarding real-life parallelisms and potential players drawing wrong conclusions, and Habert was kind enough to answer that: “The initial scenario was supposed to happen in Ukraine in 2013 as a uchronia with a Russian invasion that didn’t stop in Crimea… Clearly we were overtaken by reality. We started Broken Arrow two years before the invasion, and at that time, a full-scale conflict felt unlikely, and no one thought it could happen… So we changed the setting for the Baltic States since it is not our intention to depict an existing conflict. Our stories explore the “what ifs” of the world’s geopolitical situation through imaginary conflicts that could happen, but hopefully won’t.” As far as we know, Steel Balalaika’s team includes members from Russia, Ukraine, and France.
What I played of the MP portion of the game was quite similar to the single-player experience on a basic level. The pacing is much faster and the difficulty ramps up when you’re fighting human opponents who (most of the time) coordinate their attacks and defences, yet a good understanding of how resources, production, and troop/vehicle movement works can get you halfway to victory. “The game is intended to be fun to play, even if you don’t have the tank encyclopedia as your bedside book,” Habert tells us. While Broken Arrow is mainly targeting a very specific niche, I’ve found it to be quite welcoming so far. It’s one of those “low entry bar, high skill ceiling” kind of games, and having human teammates who can help with ‘newbie’ questions and more obtuse mechanics as you go helped me better appreciate the ‘larger picture’ as I tried to fend off attackers while supporting my allies.
This multiplayer test consisted of several maps that could be played in a Conquest-like mode. The locations were as sprawling as in the single-player levels I’d played, and the matches (which lasted 45 minutes, so plan accordingly) were split in three phases. The goal is to capture and hold as many control areas as possible while getting extra points by destroying enemy forces. At the end of each phase, points are added to the overall score. This means a team might be doing quite well when it comes to holding conquered zones… but badly when it comes to neutralizing enemy forces and keeping its groups of defenders alive. With income coming in passively and ‘spawning areas’ typically located way behind the frontlines, much of Broken Arrow’s multiplayer becomes a huge balancing act of keeping the pressure up while not burning through your units before the next batch of reinforcements can arrive. While Habert says players can have fun without going all RTS diehard on the game and “just following the story of the campaign and enjoying the explosions,” I’d say the multiplayer experience is far more demanding in spite of its ‘easy to pick up and play’ nature.
The ‘ease of use’ approach to the design of units and actions is very clear when you call in planes; most players in the test agreed they were a highlight, as they handle more like limited-use attacks and less like selectable vehicles. Habert summed it up quite well: “It is true that we really spend a lot of time trying to make the planes at the same time easy to use, you can simply select them and click the enemy to attack. But also very deep, you can select the direction of attack, change altitude, activate afterburner, etc.” Of course, their speed and destructive potential (especially when they drop bombs lightning-fast on fortified enemy positions) make them more expensive to buy, making them rare but decisive if used well. Many times over the course of the games I played, the tide of battle changed thanks to a well-timed bombing run on a contested zone. They aren’t a guaranteed blow to the enemy though: “Our missiles are following the rules of physics; they accelerate for a short amount of time and then slowly lose speed, so you can outrun them or dive close to the ground to hide from radars and break the lock.”
For the most part, Broken Arrow feels like a real-time chess match, which may sound familiar to anyone who already enjoys wargames. It’s less about micromanaging and more about keeping track of the bigger picture and reacting to possible manoeuvres in advance. The more knowledge of the battlefield and your own units you gain, the better equipped to deal with surprises you are. It’s deceptively simple because it’s not hard to control, but the depth is there. A good example of this is how Steel Balalaika has made sure the default army builds are solid… while also letting players go wild with in-depth customization: “For the final number of units we say over 300 because that’s a safe number… Some customizations could even be considered as new units, as they totally change the way the unit is played, but some people could argue that a Bradley infantry carrier and a cavalry recon are mostly the same thing so they should count as a single unit, etc.”
The tentative number of different units across two factions or the size and scope of the missions and maps aren’t the only things which are impressive about Broken Arrow. It was confirmed to launch as a complete 1.0 release a while back, with the publisher and studio skipping an ‘early access’ period altogether because “it was not needed.” This includes a full-blown mission and map editor “accessible from the main menu and compatible with Steam Workshop.” We’re told it’s essentially what the team used during the development of the game: “You can include cutscenes, dialogues, interactive choices, play your own music, import images to have portraits for your characters, or illustrate your dialogues. You can create basic scenarios simply by putting units and waypoints on the map, but we also include a visual scripting tool with nodes that allows you to make complex scripts without writing a single line of code.” Programmers who aren’t into visual scripting will be able to launch their own code too, though it remains to be seen how all this works in the final release.
Habert confirmed they didn’t have to start from scratch “earlier than in 2019” thanks to the Unity engine, but he pointed out some elements had to be modified to adapt to the sort of game they were making. And of course, the huge mission editor was built from the ground up. As for Slitherine’s involvement, the creative director states “they believed in the project right from the start and never tried to force us in one direction or another.” It also sounds like both parties agree there’s a future for Broken Arrow past its launch and on top of the community-made content, as the plan is “to add more armies, campaigns, map settings, etc.” Moreover, they also want to “introduce new game mechanics, new tools, organise tournaments, and multiplayer sessions.” After one of the most community-centric and welcoming multiplayer tests I’ve been a part of in my games media career, this doesn’t come as a surprise and makes me quite hopeful about its positive impact in the wargame space.
Last but not least, we asked about the possibility of Game Pass and/or console ports. For now, it seems Slitherine and Steel Balalaika aren’t looking into putting the game (built with just PC in mind) on traditional consoles: “A mouse is required. The RTS as a genre is a child born from the mouse, so trying to adapt it to hardware without it is really trying to make squares fit into rectangles.” The mouse capabilities of Switch 2 are tempting and check “many boxes,” but Habert says “the question of the hardware remains.”
Broken Arrow’s Vanguard Edition, which includes ‘early play’ on June 16, the digital original soundtrack, nine digital wallpapers, and one special skin for each specialization, is available to pre-order now via Steam for $59.99. The Standard Edition will follow on June 19 at $49.99.
For the latest gaming news, follow GameWatcher on BlueSky, check out our videos on YouTube, or give us a like on Facebook. We sometimes include affiliate links in our posts, which grants us a small commission, thank you.
