MENACE: If you're not paying attention to this game, you should be.

Thoughts after a frankly embarrassing amount of hours playing.

What is MENACE?

MENACE is a pending turn-based tactical game, with a sci-fi setting, broadly inspired by the 40k franchise and classic analogue science-fiction ("retro-futuristic") movies and books. Don't roll your eyes. This game is going to be different. Let me convince you. 

MENACE is from the creators of the niche, but much-loved, Battle Brothers by Overhype Studios. Started by a pair of siblings in Hamburg, Overhype wears its inspirations on its sleeve, and Battle Brothers has given them a well-deserved reputation as developers with an attention to detail, willingness to provide long-life support (Battle Brothers got a free content update in March 2025), effective procedural generation, and keyboard-smashing difficulty. If that does not convince you MENACE is in capable hands, then the content you can see from diving into it's recently released Demo most certainly will.

As for what MENACE's actual story line is about, the details are deliberately slim. The main point is that there is one, a departure from Battle Brother's sandbox with merely hinted-at world building. What we know, or can readily deduce, is that you are playing a Major in the Terran Congressional Republic's (TCR) Marine Corps, leading an all-volunteer task force to the Wayback System, a nominal part of the TCR that has not been under any real central control for a century. The complicating factor is while the star system is accessible, it is a one way trip until the far end of a faster-than-light travel gate is repaired. A combination of political factors, not yet fully explained, put your small force on a single light cruiser to go stamp the Republic's authority and bring the system back into the fold. Needless to say, a century of being cut off has made the Wayback, to put it politely, something of a shithole. 

Gameplay is broadly split into a strategic, operational, and tactical layer. There is no world map, per se, but rather you have access to the myriad planets that make up the system and the major factions therein. In a bid to show the system the TCR means business, you must act quickly to build trust and demonstrate the means and willingness to govern the system. 

This can mean anything from helping control dangerous fauna, to crushing space pirate insurgencies, or destroying petty warlords and mutineers. The eponymous menace, which appears to be an intelligent alien threat, is always looming. Each of these potential missions lead to an operation of between three and five missions on a planet's surface, with branching options and rewards. Like any real, competently-executed operation, achieving objectives provides you with boons (such as better logistics, or local support), but in the final build this cuts both ways: you may have to forego trying to get an objective yourself to deny the enemy one (and a corresponding operational boon). Much like Battle Brothers, missions will vary in difficulty, with proportionate bonus or detriment to your reputation and resources. 

Naturally, once a mission is selected, you then move to the tactical phase, which is where the core gameplay resides. 

The Demo

So what separates MENACE from a genre that is absolutely saturated with games (often 40k) of questionable quality? 

In a phrase: it feels real. The game's audio and visuals are certainly immersive, but what really pulls a player in his how combat is handled. It is mature, realistic, and intense to a degree that shames other table-top inspired games in the genre.

I think it's best if I just give an example. Join me on a mission to deny a marauding band of Pirates from seizing a ground-to-air-missile site. In a lot of ways, this mission is the quintessential tabletop experience, a meeting engagement with both sides entering at opposite edges of the board. This is less typical for MENACE, and one side or the other is generally pre-deployed as you'd expect in more traditional scenarios. We're playing this on the "challenging" difficulty setting, which is the middle of the three difficulties.

The deployment screen. On the left, templated enemy based on your intel (which can be upgraded over time), on the right, squad armoury. Note the loadout logistical limit on the bottom right, which can also be changed over time. It can vary further still based on your selected difficulty settings.

I digress, back to the mission. We have two separate sites to secure, and I intend to try and contest both at once. On my right, where there's less cover, the PC and a mounted squad of 7 men are going to push for the nearest objective. I'm confident they'll get there first, and they need only keep the enemy at bay there for three rounds after entering to secure the objective. You start the Demo with 60 promotion points, and the character I choose to use as my armoured infantry is upgraded twice and given some disposable anti-tank launchers as insurance. A fully kitted out PC is expensive, though, and so he is not given any ballistic armour to stay within my logistical limits. 

Pike, the quintessential Marine, forms the base of fire. While Greifinger, a fugitive that clearly was once a marine himself, forms the assault element.

On the left, which does have more cover, I'm sending the bulk of my infantry, broken up into three fireteams. The first, my intended base of fire, is four men with a GPMG and battle rifles. The assault element is four men equipped with the heaviest armour I possess, grenades, and SMGs. A three-man anti-tank team with shrapnel vests rounds out this force. In the middle, to provide intel and flank security, I put a four man sniper team. They're also only in fatigues, another risk I assume to keep myself within my logistical cap of 814. 

Note the off-map assets on the right: a dropship strafing run, and a tactical ballistic missile (from orbit!), respectively. 

I've passed over the details of who these characters are, but the squad leaders are all fully realized, voice-acted individuals with unique characteristics. The demo, somewhat disappointingly, gives them identical stats, but even with that they all play very uniquely. Squad leaders can be permanently killed off, and while each has a certain archetype, there's some overlap in potential perks and abilities. I have interpreted this as a recognition by the devs that you are going to take losses, and you are going to have to ask a character to do something that is not their forte on occasion. Most of these characters certainly have "intended" archetypes (such as sniper, anti-tank, etc.) but how much you lean into it is definitely up to you. For example, Jane Darby, can be turned either into a dedicated sniper, or a more general scout/commando team based on what perks you give her. 

Darby moving to cover. Cover is always important in MENACE, but is particularly vital for squads unfortunate enough to be sent out in garrison fatigues.

Things go to plan: Lim (our mounted infantry) and his ride get to their objective first, while my own ground pounders gain contact on a gaggle of pirates dismounting from makeshift transports on the other objective at about the same time. 

Pirates: in lore they are said to be ill-equipped for fighting terrestrial battles, and it very much shows. The picture-perfect early game target practice for a careful commander.   

By round three we're actively engaged. On the right flank, Pirates that attempt to close up on the PC are swiftly taken under fire, with significant casualties. A second squad of pirates retreat behind the truck they disembarked from, seeking cover. 

The APC suppresses a pirate squad that attempted to rush the objective.

That allows Lim to close on the pinned, isolated, enemy squad, who have been unable to act, and keep them pinned. Lim pushes around the corner of their cover and finishes them off at first opportunity, essentially executing them from the flank while they are pinned.

The same squad dispatched a few rounds later by the APC's support.

The enemy is in much greater force on the left, and things there naturally go a bit slower. The enemy begins taking cover wherever they can. I open the engagement with the sniper team, prioritizing a flamethrower squad caught in the open. Since Darby's innate ability allows her to temporarily disable the special weapon of a unit she does damage to, this also spares me the sight of watching this flamethrower wipe out a squad effortlessly. Her team's follow up rifle fire takes out another man and breaks their morale. 

The remaining pirates put down some fire, but none of it is particularly effective. The main dilemma on the left is that I have one final bound of open ground to cross and not enough cover for the many small fireteams I have to use when they get there. The pirates have a machinegun armed technical banging around here too, just outside of my own anti-tank range, complicating matters further. Use of smoke by the lead element is necessary to move my rear most elements through the danger zone unmolested. 

Pike bounds forward with the help of a smoke tossed by Greifinger.

With the GPMG brought forward, we're finally able to start breaking the Pirate's hasty defensive position. Pike has several squads he can take in enfilade, and two bursts from his GPMG pins everything except a small team of "boarding commandos", psychos in hulking assault armour. It's enough, though, for the assault element to enter the objective area and start taking the fight to the enemy. Grenades, and supporting fire from Darby help kill or push the pirates back, and most of the pirates either route or retreat to the opposite side of the objective, rather than take any suicidal, spiteful action. 

The only offensive action the Pirates take in the next few rounds is to try and flank with the technical, as the smoke obscuring it dissipates. It rounds the corner, using up all of its action points to put itself in a dangerous position for next round...and is promptly destroyed by my AT before it can act again.

By round eight, the PC has crossed the open centre to help my own infantry, who have bogged down due to the sheer number of contacts they have. A timely arrival on the right flank is just what we need to finish off the enemy heavy infantry and pin a pesky depth section that had been putting Greifinger under effective fire. 

The Pirate's sense of self preservation is in overdrive now, and even units that aren't routing pull back, and shift left. It's a move that guarantees I won't be getting the bonus for achieving objectives swiftly, as they are still contesting the objective. Now concentrated, and caught in the open on a utility road, the bulk of the enemy are cut down over the next three rounds.

Using the PC and abandoned pirate vehicles as cover, the Pirates are enfiladed.

For good measure, I call down my off map support to hasten the end of the cornered Pirates. Good riddance.

Note the minor collateral damage to the structure: limiting damage to assets increases your score, which is commensurate with the player's core mission of proving the TCR has the moral authority to govern the Wayback.

Now slightly annoyed at the delay imposed on this objective, I press the PC forward to let the Pirates know precisely how deep my displeasure runs...by running them over, of course.

I now understand why they call them crunchies...

While the derby is occurring, the rest of the squads are now sitting on an uncontested objective and capturing it. By round 14, the mission is accomplished. The end of every mission gives you a two-page AAR. The first lists objectives succeeded/failed (and yes, there are missions where you can win without achieving all objectives), and standard fare like that. More interesting are the mission stats: if you manage to use less logistics than allowed, you get rewarded, for example. It also tracks the collateral damage you cause. The less you cause the better your rating. The same goes for civilians, when they are present. Further points go to meeting a 'par' turn limit, which I narrowly missed, and limiting friendly casualties.  I have some reservations here, but not many. The main thing I question is the reward for under-utilizing logistics, I struggle realistically to see how it can be done on the expert difficulty. 

My understanding is the mission scoring are for more than just bragging rights, they directly impact how many promotion points you are awarded, and impact how much more authority you are awarded for a successful operation. How exactly "authority" works in its entirety remains to be seen, but it does impact your own squads' morale and discipline. It also, I suspect, impacts how quickly you build relations with a particular faction in the overarching story. 

One final thing to note: the rewards you see in the AAR screen are a legacy system that will not reflect final gameplay. I personally didn't mind it, but it seems the general thrust of feedback is they'd rather have captured equipment from the dead and defeated enemy. This will be more akin to how things worked in Battle Brothers, with the idea that you can either use it yourself, or trade it en masse for more appropriate equipment. I'm hopeful, but my memory of the resale system from Battle Brothers has me somewhat sceptical. Higher end equipment often cost thousands in that game, and most equipment you got sold for pennies, particularly if damaged. Hopefully the economy is slightly less punishing this time around. 

Why I think MENACE's combat system is genius:

At first blush, the system should appear rote. It's standard I-GO-U-GO, but there is no agility or initiative system. It plays more like Chess. The choice on what to move and in what order is entirely on the player. Much of the core gameplay loop can involve moving ancillary units around while hoping the AI is forced to take action with a potentially threatening unit. A laser truck or chain gun team that has 'wasted' its turn gives you a chance to close to cover, or a firing position, risk-free, for example. Once a player understands the rhythm, the system makes eminent sense. You start to learn its few hard-and-fast rules. If the round ends with an AI move, you will go first next round, and vice-versa. After a few hours in the game, planning two or three moves ahead, and anticipating, becomes a lot easier.

Some complexity to this rhythm is added by the sensible approach taken to suppression. A helpful yellow metre visualizes the level of heat a friendly or enemy unit is taking, and proceeds through broad stages. A unit that is suppressed will automatically take a battle position in its current tile, requiring more use of action points to get moving again. If it takes further effective fire, it'll likely be unable to do anything else, except maybe give one salvo of desultory return fire, and will often lack the capacity to use it's squad-level weapon (such as a rocket launcher). A fully pinned unit can't do anything at all, and misses it's next turn. If it hadn't acted yet in the current round, it will in reality be missing two turns. It's so, so, so simple, yet so effective a way to encourage closing with the enemy. 

This isn't a tactics game where you game percentages and try to get a unit somewhere where it can just obliterate everything around it. You can't sit a min-maxed sniper in a position and blow away large squads that are in complete defilade. You must close with and destroy the enemy, and judicious choice of who to suppress (hint: enemy units that have yet to act, or are likely to act first next round) and the fact suppressive fire often bleeds over to neighbouring tiles, means an effective squad can put two or three groups of pirate to ground and facilitate a devastating close assault. The limited ammunition provided to squads and vehicles further incentivizes aggressive, precise play. For a sci-fi, turn-based tactical game, it does immersive contemporary combat a damn sight better than quite a few contemporary combat sims. 

Where tension (and all good tactical games should be based on risk management and tension) creeps into this system is when a player has no good move to make, only varying degrees of bad options. On the default difficulty, or on expert, you will have to decide which of your units that is out of position will be taking some heat. It is an inevitability. The enemy, at least in the demo, always outnumbers you by a fair margin, so there will be times you have two units in harm's way and only one will be able to get to safety before the AI makes its own move. These situations make you consider a great many factors quickly: which unit is further away from an enemy shooter, which has more men (and therefore HP), which has more armour, is one of the potential shooters slightly supressed? The dev team has said that wrong moves can result in squad being wiped out, which I can certainly see, but you have to make egregious errors repeatedly, and then take no steps to mitigate those errors, for that to happen in my view. So, above all, the system seems fair. 

Finally, the total absence of overwatch abilities (i.e.: where a unit reactively shoots to movement if an ability is activated) is such a breath of fresh air I cannot tell you how glad I am to see it is entirely absent from the game. When it is done well, it's a useful system, yet I find most player bases begin to build their entire tactical outlook on it. I cannot think of a more arresting feature to capturing fire and movement than overwatch in small scale tactical games. In any event, if you are one of the people who are displeased with its absence, consider the following: with the way the action point system operates in the game, you will be hard pressed to find a circumstance in which an enemy unit can move more than 4 squares and put down fire. You will have ample time to react to enemy movement, and, even without intervening cover, most small arms fire is simply not punchy enough to bring a friendly squad entirely to ground at extended range before you yourself can cover open ground. Just like in real combat, at some point someone, somewhere, is going to have to gather their courage, grit their teeth, pray they've shaped an engagement well, and cross a danger zone. Now, you get to enjoy that tension too. 

The AI: Exactly where it needs to be.

I had hinted at my thoughts on the AI while recounting the GTAM mission, but I will spare a bit more space to elaborate.

I will never accuse a game of having brilliant AI, and MENACE is no different. I'm not going to pretend that it is anything other than serviceable. However, that's all it needs to be.  Compelling AI merely needs to be a consistent thorn in a player's side, that is to say, place pressure on a player and force them to make compromises, while also making believable decisions. The challenge of the game is not artificial, the AI does not seem to get hidden bonuses to its hit chances or cover, nor does it seem to have omniscience. From what I can observe, it plays by the same rules as the human. First point in its favour.

Now, we only have the Space Pirates as a barometer, and they generally behave as you'd expect a loosely organized gang of drugged-up idiots to behave. They're reckless at first, but tend to start taking their own mortality seriously when in contact. There's been many times I've played a round and thought "that unit will absolutely open fire twice on my own exposed unit, just to piss me off", but instead I'd see it back off and take cover. More of that, please, game developers. I detest AI that exists entirely to spite the player, and you can see I've come to expect it. Mistakes deserved to be punished by the AI, for sure, but it shouldn't break immersion. No unit that realizes it's about to get opened up on by half of the human-controlled squads should choose an option that maximizes pain at the cost of its own hide, unless the enemy faction is explicitly meant to be mindless or suicidally fanatic. I shouldn't expect irrational or suicidally brave decisions from an inherently cowardly opponent. Second point in the AI's favour, and really, shame on me for not expecting Overhype to get this part down. Battle Brothers absolutely had faction-specific AI that never made you go "Hang on, why is this man dying hard, he's a half-naked bandit?" and it's clear they've brought that philosophy forward to MENACE. 

Presentation: Sounds, Models, Animations

MENACE is a triumph in the making because of its gameplay, but it is the presentation of that gameplay that is going to get it there. So far, I've adored everything, from UI to audio. All of it shaping up to be excellent. The only complaint I have, so far as you can call it one, is the lack of a hide UI hotkey. It certainly made taking screencaps for this post difficult. Someone grumpier than me could argue the UI clutters the screen, but an option for scaling, if implemented, could address that complaint readily. 

The audio certainly benefits from having fully realized characters. They're all excellently voice acted, with good variations in barks and contextualized interactions between characters. Much of what you can surmise about their back stories is based entirely on how they interact with their fellow NCOs, and that is consistent with Overhype's tendency to show, rather than tell, as far as background worldbuilding goes. Voice acting extends to the enemy. I've seen some grumbling that the Pirates' lines are cringe-inducing, and that is a fair observation, but they're strangely charming as a result. If the Pirates were being sold to you as anything other than incompetent morons, their voice direction would be distracting, as it is, it is a perfect fit for these strung-out idiots. I love it. Again, most of these criticisms (if you can even call it that), can be readily addressed with appropriate addition of options. Many games of this genre have a sliding scale for frequency of voice lines, and the devs may wish to consider implementing such an option further down the road. Indeed, it may even be in game already, I haven't checked because I'm perfectly content with things.

The music seems limited so far, but is certainly fine; it doesn't grate nor distract. The pause menu theme is an appropriately Alien-esque mix of background ambience that fits perfectly. The understated OST simply highlights how brutal the actual sounds of battle are. Again, if you are familiar with Battle Brothers, this will come as no surprise to you. The team clearly realize that audio is an important ingredient in the immersion pie, and the firearms are punchy and violent. Ambient gunfire between idle units helps sell an intense firefight is occurring. 

A medium mortar team provides support from a fortified position.

It is in the visuals, however, that the game really captures and holds me. If the move to 3D posed any problems for the studio, they've not shown it. Their attention to detail survived whole and healthy. The more you bother to get down to eye-level and look, the more you see. Rocket pods on a vehicle empty as they are fired off, and stay empty. Terrain deforms if there's a large enough explosion, and provides new cover in that tile. Buildings and vehicles show the scars of battle, that give you an at-a-glance look at their health. Blood trails can be seen when a unit takes HP damage. As said earlier, this development team wear their influences on their sleeve, and much of the game is a love-letter to what came before. If you look carefully around industrial areas in the game, you may notice an iconic loading device-turned Alien exterminator, for example. None of this should be notable, but we often settle for less in this genre, so it's commendable to see. 

Animations are likewise excellent, units try to coil up and cover every angle, units will dynamically shift where they are taking cover in a square to react to threats around them, and factions have/will have different animations. Pirates rarely move with the type of discipline you see from the Marine-trained forces, for example. Stuff like vaulting, slicing pies around corners, and crew-served animations are all icing on the cake. Most people will play this game from a high camera angle, as many in the genre do, and I think that has convinced some dev teams that putting effort into details like this don't matter, but to me, they do. 

A crew-served 20mm cannon set up in cover.

The game is also sufficiently violent to sell you on the idea it is a sim-ish game. Some of the gore is what you'd expect for sci-fi (hit by a laser? Skeleton and a pile of ashes!), whereas sometimes it's just brutally real. Flank a unit and issue a fire order before the enemy can complete the dynamic animation of shifting cover in their tile, and you'll have a heap of bodies reminiscent of a group of men who tried to cut and run. 

Death comes quickly in MENACE, and the game is keen to visually remind you of this.

I understand level of violence in games is far from a worthwhile discussion to have for most people, but I do think it helps if done right. Actions have consequences, and watching your own men get tossed about and vapourized is going to make you feel bad enough that you don't want to make a habit out of it. So far as it goes, it's a level of detail I welcome. 

Finally, the developers have committed to a highly modular system for both men and machines. This obviously results in noticeable visual differences based on equipment worn. There seems to be generic models for classes of weapons, which is understandable, but you can at least tell at a glance if your men are using a battle rifle, assault rifle, or SMG. There's so much content, even in the demo, that I'm sure we may see many more models than we currently have access to at release. 

Some of the vehicle variants and how their appearances can change based on weapon assignment.

Bottom Line?

Just bloody download it, already! Current release date is February 2026, and I'm not sure I can bear to wait.