Menace Early Access Review – Vague Threat

I do love me a good tactical turn-based game, and I’ve seen quite a few of them by this point in my life, so what works and what doesn’t is pretty well established in my mind. When Menace first popped up on my radar, I was a bit uncertain about it. The basic premise sounded interesting, but I wasn’t entirely sold on what it did differently or better than other games. Having spent some time with it in its Early Access state, I’m still not entirely sold on it.

Menace puts you in command of an expeditionary force in the far future which has been sent to the Wayback System for reasons which are not entirely explained, but presumably involve the words “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian assistance.” Unfortunately, an engineering casualty ends up killing everybody above you on the table of organization (putting you in command) and stranding the ship in the system. Your mission, ill-defined as it is, becomes a case of cleaning up the system against pirates, rebels, and strange pseudoarthropod aliens. You’ll build alliances with various factions willing to work with you, obtain gear through not-entirely-approved sources, and try to get your ship back to fully functional again while managing your forces to deal with the various hotspots that are breaking out.

Visually speaking, Menace has a grungy mil-spec flavor of sci-fi, strongly reminiscent of Aliens (and its equally grungy game spin-off, Aliens: Dark Descent). It doesn’t quite get down far enough into detail to make out varieties of weapons and such, but when it comes to enemy forces, the unit indicators are distinctive enough to help you prioritize threats. Movement is entirely on square grids, and you generally get a good indication of how far you can move, how many action points it will take, that sort of thing. The UI does a decent job of providing you with useful information such as the health of your units, the damage they’re likely to do against a given target at the moment, and other vital info. The environments are generally destructible, usually as a function of firepower, sometimes as a consequence of movement. Particle and fire effects are decently done, and unless you’re getting up close on a regular basis, the gore is pretty minimal. About the only real gripe is that text legibility is a bit cramped, but it’s a minor concern which can probably be addressed later.

As far as the sound goes, Menace is good but with caveats. The music seems to be low key and atmospheric, appropriate for building tension during an advance, but lacking the pulse pounding sort of battle anthems which help stoke players for a fight. Voice acting is pretty good in terms of clarity, but rather uneven in the direction. I do appreciate that when one of your squad leaders compliments another one, there’s a chance for a reply from the receiving party. It feels realistic. On the other hand, the pirate goons trying to sound like variations on David Patrick Kelly’s character from The Warriors or the Psychos from the Borderlands series every single time one of them opens their mouths kills a lot of that same immersion. Chittering hissing aliens is one thing, but at least give us some variety in the enemy speaking roles, too. As for sound effects, generally decent, though perhaps a tad muddy.

Gameplay is currently the big stumbling block in Menace. Or, more accurately, the balance of elements in the game is the big stumbling block. The core gameplay loop involves selecting a campaign on one of the worlds of the Wayback System, then undertaking a series of scenarios to bring that campaign to a successful conclusion. You may be faced with branches which will modify future scenarios. But fail one op in the chain, and you fail the entire campaign. This might almost be tolerable if there wasn’t so much grit in the gears at the tactical level.

Under most circumstances, you don’t have clear battlefield intelligence at the start. You move your squads around until they basically stumble over somebody and either get shot to hell or somehow survive the enemy’s first barrage. Starting gear feels inconsistent with the premise, with your squads forced to use basic battle rifles while your enemies have full auto and heavy weapons. Yes, you can scavenge (some of) them if you survive the op, but that “if” is doing a punishing amount of work in that gameplay loop. Fans of XCOM and similar titles will probably be more than a little miffed that you can’t really scum-save your way through the scenarios, so if you choose poorly, you either restart from a save before a busted scenario or you eat the loss of the entire campaign. Success theoretically allows you to build facilities to improve pre-deployment intelligence, obtain better gear for your troops, and improve your squad leaders with promotions that grant them new perks or modifiers. But success is all too often a case of screwing up over and over until you somehow hit the magic combination moves and RNG deciding not to screw you too badly when you land an attack. Add in things like lingering negative status effects for squad leaders which last far longer than bonuses, and the whole process becomes a punishing slog rather than a tightly paced tactical game. As a final insult, there’s a dearth of good tutorial material on important functions outside the tactical sphere. Pre-deployment positioning is one subject which should have been explained in the basic tutorial, and given the significant losses one can incur just by moving around, it’s a pretty serious pain point.

The core premise of Menace is pretty decent, and being Early Access gives Overhype Studios time to smooth things out in terms of balance. It’s OK to want a challenge, but if the only differentiation of challenge is how hard the game tries to screw you over, it’s seriously going to constrain the pool of potential players. Keep an eye on this one, but temper your expectations.

Axel reviewed Menace in Early Access on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and will not be changed.