If you've played Battle Brothers, you know that Overhype Studios has a way of making you care about a subordinate, especially when you unwittingly send them on the wrong end of a sharp blade. Their upcoming turn-based tactical RPG, Menace, will put the well-being of your chosen warriors at the forefront of your mind – as well as making a dramatic transition from 2D medieval sprites to the fully 3D battlefields of a rebel space frontier.
Where Battle Brothers filled your army with randomly generated serf boys, Menace lets you hire a cadre of ready-made, “fixed” soldiers with their own backstories and personalities. How you recruit and deploy this diverse cast of mercenaries and charlatans, ranging from aloof ex-Marines to cheerful snipers and loudly religious mech pilots, is up to you. For some, their roles as powerful squad leaders will likely result in them becoming the main characters of any given game.
As such, while Menace’s turn-based combat, grid movement, and heavy emphasis on cover naturally conjure up XCOM comparisons, the presence of these personalities more specifically calls to mind XCOM: Chimera Squad and its ragged cast of cross-species cops. However, Menace far outweighs this stripped-down spin-off in both detail and scale. Stat buffs will enjoy examining the numbers, which are laid out in such detail by each pre-mission squad loadout screen that they include a line graph showing damage drop-off for individual weapons. And while you’re out on the planet, you’ll be fighting a proc-gen army across random (and unpredictable) terrain, not a handful of pre-determined enemies on a pre-designed map.
In a demo shown to me at Gamescom last month, the mission was simple — destroy a garrison of space pirates — but Menace’s vast box of combat mechanics and unit systems led to multiple concerns quickly jostling in my brain. The simplest way to take out a baddie is, of course, to flank them and blast them to the side, but pressure and morale are also at play, so isolating an enemy unit and covering them with inaccurate scare fire can send them fleeing instead. Assuming you’re intentionally inaccurate, the chance of landing a shot is represented by a red, orange, or green aiming line when aiming, which reduces the stat calculation compared to XCOM’s hit percentages but implicitly encourages riskier shots. At least in my mind. 50% is a garbage chance, but orange is fine, right? I’d give the orange a shot.
The ever-present barking and chatter of your (fully voiced) soldiers in these battles. There’s plenty of canned dialogue, of course, but it’s the interactions between these units that are most interesting. Depending on whether a mission goes smoothly or bloodily, characters can bond or fight with their comrades, adding a touch of RPG camaraderie to the turn-based action. Keeping them in a good mood will help by succeeding in missions and avoiding injuries or allied losses, while careless play will upset them, leading to more inter-unit squabbling and a less effective fighting force.
Essentially, rather than replicating Battle Brothers' tactic of tying you to unique proc-gen guys, Menace's character drama is more traditionally based around real-life characters. Still, there seems to be plenty of room to write your own tragic deaths and/or war stories, especially the kind of scenarios where a seemingly minor misstep can lead to a hopeless disaster. In my demo, for example, the opportunity to simply run a tank over some enemy pirates proved too good to pass up, prompting about half a round of satisfied giggles before another raider emerged from the mist with a rocket launcher. The price of this momentary appreciation of dark humor over clever positioning? An exploding piece of armor and a squad leader in urgent need of medical evacuation forced other units to reorient, as well as a complete offensive rethink.
Sniping and liberal use of the battle chaplain's heavy mechs were enough to secure victory, with only the hapless tank commander sulking in the infirmary, but I got the feeling that this was a relatively straightforward early-game victory against the least threatening of the enemy factions. Only through some concept art did I get a glimpse of the eponymous threat itself: an alien race of '80s body horror-inspired meat slabs, grafted onto a sickening assortment of metal pipes, weapons, and at least one poor thing, tank treads. This faction apparently doesn't appear until much later, which means you'll need to be willing to mix up your tactics and team loadouts throughout the campaign.
The game Menace is also a long way off; the version I saw was playable but buggy and full of placeholder UI. But its ambition is already impressive, blending tactically rich turn-based gameplay with some meaty role-playing elements. Publisher Hooded Horse may not be looking for hits, but if Overhype can pull all of these component parts together into a coherent whole, then both sides could at least have a quality piece of strategy on their hands.