I have a little experience painting miniatures, and this simulates those techniques pretty well -- you can do washes for shading and dry-brushing. Wet blending is harder, but you can get similar effects if you go into free mode. It allows a really high degree of customization for such a simple tool. Unlike with actual miniatures, you can also hide parts of the mini to make it easier to paint the remaining parts, nice for if you want to isolate a small detail with another piece partially blocking it.

The paints are limited (I gather that you can open access to new paints in the full game, so presumably there's a more complete palette for people who are playing actively) so there is only one light emitting color, but that can be shaded pretty well by blending into other colors, and likewise the lack of steel or silver can be somewhat remedied by color blending, though it would be nice to have a steel color in the basic set.

One nice thing is that it's possible to get a decent looking custom mini with very little effort: Go into "color components" mode, and paint on whatever base color you like to each sub-component (you can use the hide command to hide elements as you go to make sure you don't leave any little blank bits, since some of the components can be pretty small, or mostly buried inside the model.) Then go into the second wash mode and layer on either black or dark sepia. (The default mask of 50% will do fine for most models.) This will give depth and shadow. Then go into the third dry-brush mode and add a lighter version of the base color for highlights, or two different light colors if you want to blend to another color. This doesn't require any free brushing at all to get a decent look. If something seems too heavy, adjust either the mask or the opacity of the color to make it more subtle.

One flaw is that some of the sub-components are stuck together in illogical ways. For instance, in the first offered mini, all the armor is all one piece, including the horns and the lavish assortment of skull ornaments encrusting various joints, so if you want to paint those in a different color you have to go into manual mode and paint each little bit (I ended up doing a model where I did the skulls in a different color, and also "gilded" some of the little raised details on the armor, a level of detail that would be difficult on an actual 25mm mini, but was merely a bit finicky with zoom and a tiny brush size here.) Some of these details are isolated in some minis, and glommed together in others. So if you want to get exactly the look you want, you're probably going to need to get comfortable with the manual brush as well as the section paint mode. Zooming and panning can get glitchy as well if you're working on close details. I found that hiding all but whatever I was working on made it easier to zoom in, and if the panning got stuck I could zoom out to maximum, pan a bit to center the item I wanted, and then zoom back in and be able to pan again. These flaws are minor; the tool is quite functional.

All in all it's a very satisfying toy, and gives a good example of the kind of detail you can get on your minis if you want to play the full game.

I have a little experience painting miniatures, and this simulates those techniques pretty well -- you can do washes for shading and dry-brushing. Wet blending is harder, but you can get similar effects if you go into free mode. It allows a really high degree of customization for such a simple tool. Unlike with actual miniatures, you can also hide parts of the mini to make it easier to paint the remaining parts, nice for if you want to isolate a small detail with another piece partially blocking it. The paints are limited (I gather that you can open access to new paints in the full game, so presumably there's a more complete palette for people who are playing actively) so there is only one light emitting color, but that can be shaded pretty well by blending into other colors, and likewise the lack of steel or silver can be somewhat remedied by color blending, though it would be nice to have a steel color in the basic set. One nice thing is that it's possible to get a decent looking custom mini with very little effort: Go into "color components" mode, and paint on whatever base color you like to each sub-component (you can use the hide command to hide elements as you go to make sure you don't leave any little blank bits, since some of the components can be pretty small, or mostly buried inside the model.) Then go into the second wash mode and layer on either black or dark sepia. (The default mask of 50% will do fine for most models.) This will give depth and shadow. Then go into the third dry-brush mode and add a lighter version of the base color for highlights, or two different light colors if you want to blend to another color. This doesn't require any free brushing at all to get a decent look. If something seems too heavy, adjust either the mask or the opacity of the color to make it more subtle. One flaw is that some of the sub-components are stuck together in illogical ways. For instance, in the first offered mini, all the armor is all one piece, including the horns and the lavish assortment of skull ornaments encrusting various joints, so if you want to paint those in a different color you have to go into manual mode and paint each little bit (I ended up doing a model where I did the skulls in a different color, and also "gilded" some of the little raised details on the armor, a level of detail that would be difficult on an actual 25mm mini, but was merely a bit finicky with zoom and a tiny brush size here.) Some of these details are isolated in some minis, and glommed together in others. So if you want to get exactly the look you want, you're probably going to need to get comfortable with the manual brush as well as the section paint mode. Zooming and panning can get glitchy as well if you're working on close details. I found that hiding all but whatever I was working on made it easier to zoom in, and if the panning got stuck I could zoom out to maximum, pan a bit to center the item I wanted, and then zoom back in and be able to pan again. These flaws are minor; the tool is quite functional. All in all it's a very satisfying toy, and gives a good example of the kind of detail you can get on your minis if you want to play the full game.