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Menace’s turn-based battles are the galaxy’s deadliest teambuilding exercisesThe Battle Brothers devs’ next strategy game wants you to keep its soldiers sweet
The Battle Brothers devs’ next strategy game wants you to keep its soldiers sweet
Image credit:Hooded Horse
Image credit:Hooded Horse
If you’ve playedBattle Brothers, you’ll know that Overhype Studios have a way of making youcare 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 tacticalRPG, 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 invokeXCOMcomparisons, the presence of these personalities more specifically brings to mindXCOM: Chimera Squadand 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
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 Horsemight 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.
