Combining hand-drawn cartoon cinematics, isometric hexagonal game boards, and tactical turn-based combat, Armello is a very unique blend of various genres and creative styles all rolled into one big anthropomorphic adventure.

League of Geeks’ board game is brought to life through Armello’s enchanting art-style and complex story involving war, corruption, and a game of wits to reclaim a kingdom overtaken by a treacherous rot. The game has been described by a few outlets as Game of Thrones meets Zootopia, and you can definitely see the influences in the way the trailer is put together.

You get a decent glimpse of the basic premise of the story and the way the hexagonal overworld is setup along with the turn-baed combat.

The animated sequences are what really stand out to me. It’s not necessarily groundbreaking, but you can really see how the stylized art helps bring the portmanteau of warmongering and fantasy-storytelling together in a way that lures in gamers thanks to the charming allure of factional animals fighting to reclaim their land.

In some of the scenes you actually get a sense of the skewed and costly fate of war, with an injured and bleeding wolf walking out of a forest massacre, which is depicted through obliquely captured trees and a lot of long-reaching shadows stretching into the foreground.

A scene like that could have been captured 101 different ways, but the way it’s portrayed in the trailer gives it a lot of cinematic layers and plenty to dissect even for the short runtime where it appears on-screen.

It’s very similar to the shot of an armored warrior surveying the handy work of a razed village. He looks on menacingly while dancing flames bellow over the remains of the burning city, with the silhouette of crows etched in the horizon as they make their way to safer ground. It’s a really awesome sequence even if it only gets a fraction of a second worth of screen-time in the trailer.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, you’ll have turn-based mechanics at your disposal with cards, items, and spells to utilize before and during battle. You can use the cards to buff your team, equip with them certain abilities, and outfit their attack patterns with various weapons. You can then designate what sort of attacks you want them to utilize during the actual combat round, where different attacks and defensive options will be available.

If you’re into board games and you like tactical turn-based titles, you can look for Armello to make its way onto the Nintendo Switch starting September 27th.