I’m not typically a fan of turn-based, XCOM-style games; the pacing of these games usually fails to keep my interest and I often find a lot of mechanical choices made in the genre to be off-putting. That being said, my expectations weren’t high when I went into MENACE, a turn-based military strategy game that seemed to be inspired by the XCOM series to its core. You can only imagine my surprise, dear reader, when MENACE turned out to totally suck me in, capturing my attention like no other game in its genre has yet managed to do, even in its less-than-perfect Early Access state.
MENACE sees players taking command of a small battalion of space-faring marines, cut off from communication with the greater command structure and alone in the hostility-ridden Wayback system. Here, you must command your squads throughout small, multi-stage planetary campaigns, defeating aliens and pirates while increasing your reputation with factions and relying on black-market weapon vendors to upgrade and resupply your troops.
Perhaps one of the features that made MENACE stand out from other similar titles was the inherent roguelike nature of its gameplay. Each campaign in MENACE is procedurally generated, changing the foes you fight, the maps you fight them on, and the objectives of each mission you complete, alongside the rewards you recover for your success.
To complete these missions, you begin the game with four squad leaders, each one capable of bringing in eight soldiers (or one vehicle, if your leader is a pilot) with a uniquely selected loadout designed by the player using the supplies you gather. Each squad has unique attributes and passive skills defined by their squad leader and the amount of upgrades you invest into them.
Something else MENACE does with these squads and squad leaders is assign each one their own personalities; your squad leader is a person with a story, and the squad itself is tied to a regiment that comes with some inherent personality of its own. My personal favorites were the injured infantrywoman designated to vehicle work since she no longer was physically fit enough to serve boots-on-the-ground, or the plucky Martian Expeditionary Force, who had a lot to prove compared to their fellow soldiers. You really grow attached to these characters, and upgrading or losing them in battle becomes something of an emotional experience.
With that being said, I wish the game’s upgrade system was less of a universal currency and more of a per-squad, performance-based XP system. I would have preferred each squad to earn their own promotions based on what they actually did during missions, instead of having to share a currency across multiple squads and inevitably leave some behind as it makes more tactical sense to upgrade some leaders over others.
Not that you can really do much to choose how they improve, but the attributes on each leader should really have a tooltip explaining their use in battle, so you know exactly what the strengths and weaknesses of each character are.
The actual in-battle gameplay also shines over other similar titles just for the fact that it manages to include a sense of “total war.” Tons of weapons with their own unique uses and fire modes are made available to your squad, as are orbital bombardments and a variety of vehicles, ranging from armored cars to mechs. Every single unit on the battlefield is relevant, as squad weapons take into account the number of soldiers firing when dealing damage, as do armor and armor penetration. In rather realistic fashion, I often found myself parking my armored vehicles in front of unprepared enemies and mowing them down mercilessly.
Rather than flat hit percentages, accuracy and, more importantly, cover are taken into consideration when dealing damage to or receiving damage from enemies. Cover is considered from every possible angle of fire and is often the difference between life or death in combat. Interestingly, cover is also pretty scarce across the game’s wide-open maps, making holding valuable positions very important to your success. Vision is also incredibly important, as wandering blindly around corners can lead to entire squads being wiped out by previously hidden enemies.
Consequently, the game mimics an important truth of real-life combat; defensive positions are usually at a distinct advantage, with aggressive pushes being incredibly risky.
That being said, the game doesn’t always seem to calculate cover correctly. I’ve had battles in MENACE where I’ve positioned squads behind massive obstacles, such as stacked shipping containers, only for enemies on the opposite end to apply suppression or even kill my squad through the wall. I lost an entire squad this way when a flamethrower was able to magically penetrate through a 12-foot-wide steel container because… reasons. Other times, visually exposed enemies were “entrenched,” making my shots from their flanks ineffective.
Besides some fundamental fixes to mechanics, I’d like to see MENACE add a bit more variety to the game. Specifically, I think the game is limited in enemy types, but I’d also like to see even more infantry equipment and vehicles added. This is a bit of a greedy ask, I know, but the game has so much potential; I can’t wait to see what a possible modding scene for MENACE would look like.
Pros:
- A strong combination of turn-based total warfare and a roguelite gameplay loop
- A very character-driven military sim, with a lot of personality in squads and squad leaders
- Tactical gameplay that closely mimics real-life warfare
- Lots of customization for squad armaments and vehicles
Cons:
- Cover system occasionally seems inconsistent or broken
- A lack of tooltips explaining more nuanced mechanics, like character attributes
- Something of a lack of variety, especially in enemy types
TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of MENACE. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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