Menace’s turn-based battles are the galaxy’s deadliest teambuilding exercises

The Battle Brothers devs’ next strategy game wants you to keep its soldiers sweet

If you’ve played Battle Brothers, you’ll know that Overhype Studios have a way of making you care for an underling, no more so than when you inadvertently send them onto the wrong end of a sharp blade. Menace, their upcoming turn-based tactical RPG, will also put the wellbeing of your chosen fighters at the forefront of your mind – along with a dramatic shift from 2D medieval sprites to the fully 3D battlefields of a unruly space frontier.

Whereas Battle Brothers filled your army with randomly generated serf lads, Menace lets you hire a cast of ready-made, "fixed" soldiers with their own backstories and personalities. It’s up to you how to recruit and deploy this gaggle of assorted mercs and charlatans, who range from aloof ex-marines to cheerful snipers and loudly pious mech pilots. For some, their roles as powerful squad leaders will likely result in them becoming the main characters of any given playthrough.

Thus, whereas Menace’s turn-based battles, grid movement, and heavy emphasis on cover will naturally invoke XCOM comparisons, the presence of these personalities more specifically brings to mind XCOM: Chimera Squad and its ragtag cast of interspecies cops. Except, Menace goes far heavier on both detail and scale than that pared-back spinoff did. Stat fiends will relish digging through the numbers that each pre-mission squad equip screen pours out, with such granularity as to include a line graph showing the damage falloff for individual guns. And, when you’re planetside, you won’t be fighting a preset handful of foes on a predesigned map, but a proc-gen army on randomised (and unpredictable) terrain.

Image credit: Hooded Horse

In a demo I was shown at Gamescom last month, the mission was simple – wipe out a garrison of space pirates – but Menace’s vast box of battle mechanics and unit systems quickly had multiple concerns jostling for my brainspace. The simplest way to delete a baddie is, of course, to flank around their cover and pop them sideways, but suppression and morale are also at play, so isolating and blanketing an enemy unit with inaccurate scare-fire can send them running instead. Assuming you were inaccurate on purpose; the chance to land a shot is represented by a red, orange, or green targeting line as you aim, dialling back the stat-crunching compared to XCOM’s hit percentages but tacitly encouraging riskier shots. In my mind, anyway. 50% is a rubbish chance, but orange is fine, right? I’d take a punt on orange.

Ever-present in these battles are the barks and bantz of your (fully voiced) recruits. There’s loads of canned dialogue, obviously, but it’s the interactions between these units that sounds most interesting. Depending on smoothly or bloodily a mission pans out, characters can either bond or quarrel with their comrades, adding a touch of RPG friendship-balancing to the turn-based action. Keeping them in a good mood will help, by succeeding in missions and avoiding injuries or friendly casualties, whereas careless play will sour them, leading to more inter-unit arguing and a less effective fighting force.

Image credit: Hooded Horse

Basically, rather than repeat Battle Brothers’ tactic of getting you attached to unique proc-gen men, Menace’s character drama is more conventionally based around actual characters. Still, there looks to be plenty of scope for scripting your own tragic deaths and/or war stories, particularly the kind where a seemingly minor misstep snowballs into desperate disaster. In my demo, for instance, the opportunity to simply roll a tank over some enemy pirates proved too good to pass up, cueing about half a turn of satisfied chuckles before another raider popped out from the fog with a rocket launcher. The price of that momentary valuation of black comedy over intelligent positioning? One piece of exploded armour and a squad leader in dire need of medevac, forcing other units to redirect, along with a complete offensive rethink.

Some keen sniping and liberal use of the battle-vicar’s heavy mech weapons still proved enough to grab the win, with only the unfortunate tank commander left growing a scowl in the infirmary, though I did get the sense that this was a relatively straightforward early-game victory against the least threatening of the enemy factions. Only through some of concept art did I glimpse the titular menace itself: an alien race of 80s body horror-inspired flesh lumps, sickeningly grafted with various metal tubes, guns, and on at least one poor sod, tank tracks. This lot apparently won’t show up until much later, suggesting that you’ll need to stay willing to mix up your tactics and squad loadouts well into the campaign.

Image credit: Hooded Horse

Menace, the game, is also a good ways off; the version I saw was playable yet buggy, and awash with placeholder UI. But in blending a tactically rich turn-based game with some meaty role-playing elements, its ambition is already impressive. Publishers Hooded Horse might not go out looking for hits, but if Overhype can bring together all of these constituent parts into a cohesive whole, both parties could at least have a quality slab of strategy on their hands.