MENACE is Just What I Wanted in a Sci-Fi Battle Brothers - Preview

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MENACE might be one of my most highly anticipated video games this year. It is made by the same awesome guys who made Battle Brothers at Overhype Studios, and I highly recommend that game if you are interested in strategy titles. We were lucky enough to get a glimpse of the upcoming demo before it becomes available to the public, which should be available for you all by the time this goes live.

The demo is an early preview that showcases the base combat system in the game, but despite the streamlined features, there is still a chunky amount of content to get stuck into. I took part in some micro campaigns that randomize from a pool of mission types with no limitations, get to grips with the battle systems, and mess about the squad mechanics. While I couldn’t access the other features in the Early Access launch, such as interplanetary travel and the business management system, this is still a generous demo. I came away from my time with MENACE even more excited for the whole game to launch, although it can do with some performance improvements.

The basics of MENACE are pretty simple. It is a complex sci-fi military sim, essentially the guts of Battle Brothers but evolved for the modern age, writ large. In the preview, you only have the desert biome to fight on, and the only enemy available to destroy is pirates. That’s fine by me. Pirates are very annoying.

The visuals are 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 desert environments, and this is a rather nice game on the eyes that is also deeply immersive.

The gameplay follows classic turn-based combat on an enormous battlefield with destructible terrain and high lethality. You can deal a ton of damage to anyone foolish enough to stand in your way, but the same is true for the opponents. With high-risk and high-return combat, MENACE brings a wide range of units to the table with plenty of customization. The combat system is brutal, like in Battle Brothers, but the new technology and attention to detail are impressive. This is backed up by excellent sound design. When my troops fired upon the despicable pirates, the guns sounded great when they fired. I’m no expert in sound quality, but this might be one of the best-sounding turn-based shooters I’ve played.

That brings in the squad building, and while this demo is limited by what you can do, you can still attach many weapons, skills, and tools to squad members. There are vehicles, perks, weapons, and items you can include in your strike force, and even with this limited toolset, I had fun customizing my team for missions. I tried out a mixed force of light and heavy infantry, and even everyone was equipped with only rocket launchers. That was a lot of fun for me, and not much fun for the pirates.

My only genuine concern about MENACE is performance, and you will need a robust system to play it optimally. It’s essential to remember that this is a beta, so much work must be done. While the game scales fairly well on a mid-range system like my RTX 3060 laptop, I experienced frame drops during heavy environmental effects, for example.

This performance moves over to the Steam Deck, and unfortunately, I could not call this beta preview of MENACE playable. It took several attempts to get into the game. I had to lower the settings to their minimum to maintain a 30FPS framerate, and the textures and shadows at the lowest didn’t look very good. Even then, I got a lot of slowdown during heavier scenes with a lot on screen, so it's likely MENACE needs optimization work for it to be more playable. The biggest killer for me right now is the lack of interface and font scaling, and the vast amount of tiny text makes this a miserable experience. Time will tell how this will turn out for the Steam Deck, though interface scaling will be a great start.

Technical quirks aside, MENACE is shaping up to be as deep and captivating as Battle Brothers was. There’s some way to go before we get the chance to try the release version, but these are positive signs.

MENACE can be wishlisted on Steam ahead of its release this year.

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