MENACE (Early Access)

MENACE was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank you!

I was a massive fan of Battle Brothers by Overhype Studios, and MENACE is their long-awaited next game. They are published by the awesome folks at Hooded Horse, and we were lucky enough to get an early look at the game’s Early Access state before its launch. I seem to be our main point of contact for Hooded Horse titles, and I was delighted to get the chance to try the game firsthand after my experience with the demo last autumn.

Given the game’s early development, it’s important to stress that this is in Early Access and a lot of things need work. I play a lot of Early Access games, and my review philosophy when covering them is reviewing them based on their content and polish as it stands, rather than considering future patches. With this in mind, I’ve been impressed by the depth of MENACES’ gameplay and setting.

Despite the rough edges, this commercial build for MENACE is pretty comprehensive. While the demo only focused on a vertical slice of the core combat gameplay, the early access version contains plenty of content to dig into.

Players take on the role of a professional military corps dealing with a variety of foes in an interplanetary scope. If you have played Battle Brothers before, it's easy to tell that Overhype Studios has learned many lessons, with much of their ethos is carried over into MENACE. In my preview, I called it ‘sci-fi Battle Brothers writ large’, and that is certainly true! After a short tutorial to learn the basics of combat, the main game kicks off in earnest.

The best way to describe MENACE’s gameplay is to think of it like the XCOM games, balancing base management and punishing combat into a delicious package. Players must build trust with several factions, manage their budding squad of mercenaries, and carry out operations across the Wayback star system. These operations are procedurally generated and come in six types, and each of those consists of a string of missions that have branching paths. I would have preferred more curated story paths, but this is in the works for later updates, and the current mission system is pretty varied with some nice voice acting. The narrative is typical sci-fi corporate intrigue and pirates being assholes, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

The visuals are pretty nice for a turn-based game like this, especially when you have the specs to jack all the graphics up to full. Combine the great unit models with the destructible terrain and great sound design, and there are great guts in the core gameplay overall.

Gameplay is high-risk, high-reward on both sides. While the game gives a ton of different tools and customization options for the player with high lethality, the same is true for the enemies you will face, and it brings an emphasis on careful tactics. The stakes are high, and while the challenge curve is pretty brutal, I love the attention to detail. With the amount you can tweak your squad in base management and all the different loadouts, there’s a ton of replayability just off this alone.

This is a pretty hard game even on the standard difficulty settings, and playthroughs are in for the long haul, too. It’s not quite as complex and lengthy as something like Terra Invicta, but it’s not for the light-hearted. Despite losing many fights, however, I’ve always enjoyed myself. This is backed up by great sound design. When my troops fired upon a group of horrible pirate scum, I revelled in their sounds of pain when the guns went off. I swear I’m a normal person! I was impressed by the sound in the playable demo, but it seems Overhype Studios has made improvements across the board.

There’s a lot to do with the management. We got a glimpse at the squad loadouts during the demo, and I love games that let me organize my armies of destruction. There are four squad leaders available to you in the beginning, with the opportunity to recruit more through the campaign, depending on which factions you ally with, and there are a bunch of vehicles, weapons, and perks to attach to your team for missions. You can also access the Black market to pick up more equipment through a barter system, as well as upgrade the battle cruiser for additional options in missions.

Speaking of the demo, I do wish they kept the custom battle mode from the beta to mess around with, as I thought it was a great way to introduce players to the mechanics. My main concern right now about MENACE is performance, and you will need a pretty powerful system to play it optimally. It’s important to remember this is an Early Access game, and while there are plenty of graphical options to tweak with DLSS and FSR upscaling, there’s a lot of work to be done on the optimization.

While MENACE doesn’t really do anything new for the genre on both sides of the gameplay loop, it does enough right that I’m finding the game rather absorbing.

MENACE - Steam Deck Performance

MENACE has been given a ‘Playable’ rating by Valve for compatibility on the Steam Deck, while ProtonDB has a Gold rating for the game right now. While the game can certainly be played with the upscaling additions and the Steam Deck’s trackpad controls, it’s important to note that this isn’t the optimal way to play the game.

Back when I played MENACE in beta, I found the game nearly unplayable on the Steam Deck. Overhype Studios has brought a large array of options to tweak since, and clearly, they have done some work under the hood these past few months. To my pleasant surprise, the game is more playable now.

To achieve this, I did a medium graphics preset with FSR3 on Performance, with a native resolution, 50hz refresh rate, and an uncapped TDP. With these settings, the game had a fairly stable 50 FPS in most cases, although I still saw frequent frame drops during moments like terrain being destroyed or during gunfire. A default Keyboard and Mouse (WASD) setup allowed me to access all the standard controls as well.

The graphics don't look great like this on the Deck’s 800p screen, but this was the best option I had to make things somewhat playable. Lower settings make the shadows and textures look like someone plunged the console into an uncleaned toilet bowl, and higher settings tanked the framerate. The power draw is fairly high as I expected, though the 50 Hz refresh rate on my Steam Deck OLED brought the average down to 12 watts.

The main problem I found is still the lack of interface scaling, which makes reading text difficult. Until some font scaling is implemented, those who have trouble reading on a small screen will struggle.

アクセシビリティ

MENACE is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese, although only English has voiceovers right now.

Overhype Studios has included a decent toolset of accessibility options for launch. Plenty of options can be freely adjusted, including text speed, tooltip delay, unit movement speed, and several ways to pause gameplay during enemy action. There are also the usual things like VSync, DLSS, and FSR3 support, framerate capping, and some nice keyboard and mouse tweaks for how you want to control the camera.

There isn’t any colorblind support in the game right now, and there is no controller support.

結論

It is early days yet for MENACE, but I’m already impressed by what's on offer. I’ve probably played better turn-based tactics games in my time, such as Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, and I’ve also played games with better management systems. However, it’s the combination of the two that blends into something truly captivating. The game still needs work, and I would prefer to wait for some interface optimization before I’m comfortable playing it on the Steam Deck long term, but fans of Battle Brothers can expect Overhype Studios to be in this for the long haul.

このレビューはPC版に基づいています。

このレビューをお楽しみいただけたなら、SteamDeckHQ の他のコンテンツもぜひご覧ください！あなたのゲーム体験に役立つゲームレビューやニュースを幅広く取り揃えています。ニュース、ヒントやチュートリアル、ゲーム設定やレビューをお探しの方も、最新のトレンドを知りたい方も、ぜひご利用ください。