The player controls Fisher, who usually has the iconic trifocal goggles at his disposal, to overcome his adversaries in levels based on Unreal engines that were extended to emphasise light and darkness as gameplay elements.

The game's core development was started with EA's acquired Renderware engine, but it made the switch to the Unreal 3 engine in early 2006 which delayed the game by over a year.

A number of different video game developers, including Monolith itself, have used LithTech to power their first-person shooter games, establishing it as an alternative to other products, such as the Quake and Unreal engines.

In the early 2000s it became increasingly common to use middleware game engines, such as Quake engine or Unreal engine.

However, Andrew Sanchez of Maximum PC praised the game's graphics and noted that the Dark Engine went "feature-for-feature with the LithTech, Quake, and Unreal engines".

It uses the Unreal engine, making it compatible with both Windows and Linux.

The game uses the Unreal engine which was previously only used for first-person shooter games.

The bundled UnrealEd map editor uses the Unreal engine to render scenes exactly as they appear in-game, as opposed to external editors like Worldcraft attempting to recreate it with different methods.

Designed using the Unreal 3 engine, Moonbase Alpha features solo or team play, VOIP chat, and an alternate voiceable chat engine.

It was previewed at Konami Gamers Night, where it drew comparisons with Shadow Complex, also using the latest Unreal engine to development.