Menace has the bones to become one of the best strategy and tactics games released in years. The new early access game from the creators of Battle Brothers, years in the making, blends campaign strategy and platoon tactics—think the quicker-playing fun of Jagged Alliance or X-Com with the best bits of tabletop and board wargames.

In Menace, you’re in charge of a shipful of volunteer space marines sent on a politically unpopular mission through a malfunctioning faster-than-light travel gate to a remote planetary system ruled by criminals, megacorporations, and military juntas. Naturally, this goes disastrously wrong and your ship half-explodes due to that busted warp gate and lots of people on board die. You’re in charge because everyone above you in the chain of command is dead.

I can’t stress enough how much fun Menace’s core strategy play is.

So now you’re spearheading a peacekeeping mission that’s low on manpower, supplies, and weapons… but you’re going to do it anyway, because that’s just what a TCR marine team does. That means you’ll be recruiting new soldiers not just from your own ship, but from the scum and mercenaries and villains of the Wayback system. You’ll take them into different strategic operations, each a series of tactical battle missions against giant alien bugs, space pirate raiders, renegade local army units, and the eponymous Menace.

I can’t stress enough how much fun Menace’s core strategy play is, even with a few early access quibbles and only something like a third of its full content implemented. The basic rules simplify the kind of ultra-crunchy stuff you find in dense wargames into a faster-playing game without sacrificing any cool simulation—so you still have individual to-hit rolls for every bullet and five different assault rifles to choose from, it’s just elegantly automated or combined into more accessible systems.

You can go into this game with a basic understanding of combat infantry tactics and pretty much start winning missions using the core military theories of fire-and-maneuver or fix-and-flank.

(Image credit: Overhype Studios)

One of the most basic concepts in Menace is suppression and morale. Soldiers panic when shot at, even to the point of paralysis if enough lead (or lasers, or plasma) is flying at them. They’ll also decide to retreat and regroup if they don’t like their odds, or if something especially scary happens. You know, like an orbital laser cannon cutting a building and some soldiers and their tanks in half. (Shout out to the orbital ion laser cannon I put on my ship. Only required selling my soul to a megacorporation! Totally worth it.)

It’s cool because of how it applies to not just the enemy, but to you. Your soldiers can get pinned down, or take hits and decide to beat a temporary retreat, and that’s just a natural part of combat you have to work around. Unless you’re fighting a swarm of bugs. Pro tip: They do not care about getting pinned down. You also have to compensate for your squad capabilities meaningfully degrading over time—if a squad member dies that means they’re literally not firing their weapon, so the squad has fewer chances to hit and does less damage.

Each of your teams in combat is either a squad of 3-9 soldiers or a single vehicle, all built around a squad leader or pilot with a particular personality. They have individualized silly barks to say and even relationships with each other that come out under fire and in events between missions. You can bring along stuff like armored APCs, or battle walkers, powered armor troops, mortars, automatic grenade launchers, and a lot, lot more.

(Image credit: Overhype Studios)

The level of customization is truly a delight, and nearly every weapon feels like it has a purpose or niche to be useful—a mortar might not be much use against bugs because it doesn’t scare them, but pirates or rogue army conscripts will hit the dirt as soon as the first shell falls. On top of weapons, armor, and accessories, each squad leader has their own progression tree of perks that change up combat… and each one definitely has more than one viable build.

There are simply a ton of interesting choices to make, and it’s a surprise to me that this is only a portion of the final game.

Fan-favorite recon operator Darby, for example, can do work as a sniper-spotter able to lock down enemy special assets and identify their weak points—or can be built into the leader of a close-in, stealthy, aggressive squad that cleans up whole enemy units from the shadows before disappearing into the dark again.

There are simply a ton of interesting choices to make, and it’s a surprise to me that this is only a portion of the final game. New weapons and enemies have already been added since launch on February 5.

(Image credit: Overhype Studios)

Developer Overhype is actively fixing problems with enemy behavior and weapon balance, and there are definitely systems that feel like incomplete early access placeholders such as the availability of equipment and new squad leaders on the black market. There’s also no end game, as of now—again, just the first third or so of the campaign. But Battle Brothers had such a reliable update tempo both in and after early access that I’d be shocked if something went wrong here.

Cool choices

What really solidifies Menace for me is a part that some players seem to dislike but which I find profoundly refreshing. Menace is transparently running on specific wargame-style rules where you have a supply limit each mission and everything costs supply points to deploy. You can’t simply throw every single soldier you have in their best gear at every problem; these limitations simulate the situation you’re in, where your damaged, yet operational, expedition just can’t sustain going full-bore until it gets more capacity over time.

(Image credit: Overhype Studios)

Menace breaks with the tradition of other modern tactics games and gives you straight-up objectives to accomplish, after which the mission simply ends. One mission might ask you to stop enemies from getting past you—in which case some enemies really will try to blitz your checkpoint without stopping to fight. Another might have you defend a base location for a set number of rounds, but penalize you for not protecting its buildings from getting blown up.

One of my favorites asks you to break through an enemy position so that allies can follow up and exploit the weakness you’ve made. It’s not always about killing every enemy you see to win—in fact, it rarely is, because your few dozen marines serve as a strategic scalpel that cuts out specific problems, not a sledgehammer-sized army.

It means you’re always making a cool choice. You’re building a new setup to accomplish each mission based on the intel you gathered, the weapons you’ve scavenged, and which of your personnel is fit to fight right now. It’s pure thrill, the exact power fantasy for the side of you that wants to be a strategic-tactical field commander and run the operation to whatever doctrine you’ve cooked up. Do read the short manual before starting, though. It helps.

I really can’t recommend Menace enough if you’re a tactics fan, wargamer, or strategy enthusiast who isn’t scared of some sharp early access edges. If not, add it to your wishlist for launch—trust me. You can find Menace on Steam.

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