I'm happy to report that Menace feels just as deadly and uncaring as Battle Brothers
If not quite as charming
Unlike Battle Brothers, there's no hoofing it across an overworld map in the hoo-rah space marine tactics of Menace. Instead, you'll build your squad and deploy them across strings of missions on what I assume at this point are multiple different planets. I'd love to be able to tell you more about the context surrounding the battles, since that context was what, for me at least, made Battle Brothers interesting. Edwin's got you somewhat covered there, anyway. For now, though, I can tell you that Menace feels intricate in its detail and occasionally cinematic in its skirmishes, with a focus on terrain, positioning, and line of sight that evokes a particularly chaotic and deadly tabletop miniatures game.
It's also a big tone shift. Comically sudden axe mutilation is out, panicked comms about the "sitrep" are in. There's a bit of snark - dare I say a touch of goof - in the combat barks and starting traits of your soldiers, but while Battle Brother's vaguely Germanic and Norse medieval fantasy soup felt very much like an intentional sandbox, the tonal lines are more vividly defined here. What is new is how chaotic, cacophonous, and genuinely painful each burst of gunfire sounds and feels. Thus, we've fallen into a predictable pit: the prettier and more technically impressive games wot have bullets get, the more seriously they apparently have to take their stupid cartoon violence.
This being the third preview we've done, I figured the most useful thing I can do here is go hard on the granular detail. Perhaps this will become tedious? We'll just have to find out together. So, I'll spend the next few paragraphs walking you through how I built up my squad. To be honest, I did somewhat lament being thrown in with a heap of combat supplies - effectively a sort of point limit for squad building - and what seemed like a pile of advanced equipment. Again, it's about context. The light machine gun you're given freely just doesn't chugga chugga as hummingly as the light machine gun you pried from some unfortunate bastard's shivering grease mittens. I can understand Overhype wanting to let the press play about with different options, though. Let me introduce you to the gang, then.
First up is Lance Corporal Jane Darby, a "full ace graduate of the pathfinder school" with an eye for disabling enemy special weapons with her attacks. As you've likely picked up by now, infantry units in Menace consist of several individuals. And, for the enemy, this sometimes means they've got an array of different gear. Jane's shots would later often result in a 'specialist disabled' notification, making her perfect for gradually weakening the pirates I was up against. For now, though, I just picked it because it sounded snipey, and I'd already decided that's how I was going to kit her out. So, she gets a rifle and the 'take aim' skill, which boosts her accuracy but piles on a hefty additional AP cost for subsequent attacks. Next, she gets 'well placed shots' for additional crit chance, some extra ammunition, and some soft armour - I don't plan on putting her in the line of fire.
Next, it's Lance Corporal Charles Lim. He's an aspirational lad, this one, with a discount to promotions. He gets a rocket launcher - basically essential for taking out enemy vehicles with any sort of efficiency. He also gets a combat drone for scouting, and some protective plating against small arms.
Oh, it turns out they're all Lance Corporals, so I'll stop writing that now. Curse my dedication to the authenticity of making notes chronologically and not trying to hide gaps in knowledge in the editing process. Edwin Pike is 'stalwart', giving his squad good morale. Into the vanguard he goes, with a machine gun and some frag grenades. Then, there's Jean Sy. The game tells me she's a megacorp scion and "likely the richest person in the wayback". Were I the money queen of space, I do not think I would fight in a doomed intergalactic megawar. But then again, maybe this is why I am not the money queen of space. Jean gets a grenade launcher and some smoke grenades to protect her less well-heeled comrades.
Last up, there's Cody Greifinger. An ex-terrorist with a penchant for assassinating political, business and military leaders, says the game. He gets big defense bonuses when he's adjacent to enemies. So, I swap his carbine for an SMG, give him a light machine gun and an explosive charge, and we're into the first mission. My objective here is to take out 80% of the enemies to protect civilians. In theory, anyway. In practise, I'm still not quite sure why that 80% is there, since the mission didn't complete until I'd taken out everyone. Perhaps I could have extracted, or perhaps Overhype simply wish to massage my ailing self esteem by letting me feel like I'd overachieved. Thanks Overhype!
Right, we're in. First impressions? This map is dense. Buildings and walls of varying heights. Abandoned vehicles. Sandbags. Like Battle Brothers, actions and movement feel expensive, and it doesn't take long to realise how important positioning is as I move my squads north through the fog of war. There's a stretch of open ground between the two urban areas, but squads can go to ground to make themselves harder targets, and they'll also need to do this to deploy heavy weapons like missile launchers. It makes for a slow, stop-and-start approach, but one bolstered by that familiar, satisfying feeling of a crack squad not leaving anything to chance. There's always those smoke grenades if things get a little dicey, too.
We make contact after a few turns, and this is where the importance of suppressive fire reveals itself. Suppressed units take big morale hits and have their movement penalised, so spreading your attacks over different threats to keep them on the back foot feels like the play. This is me strategising in hindsight, however: we got absolutely fuckbustered on my first attempt. Still, this did clue me in to another nice trick Menace pulls by giving you squads instead of individuals. There's more tragedy to go around, basically, and you get a more convincing sense of a larger skirmish unfolding.
Thankfully, though, this doesn't mean moments of individual derring-do and derring-doh are absent. Take the ignoble end of Edwin Pike, for example. Towards the end of the mission, I was left to mop up a few units and one roving vehicle with a laser railgun. Unfortunately, I'd spend all my missiles, leaving poor Edwin to limply hurl grenades at the armoured truck to little effect. Unfortunately, he had to be quite close to the truck to throw them. And the problem, I learned, with being close to a truck is that the trucks quite like running people over. When Edwin got run over, he went "aghhh!". Actually, it was more like "arrrrghhhhugg!". It was quite funny. Soz, Edwin.
A detail I found worth noting once I'd finished the mission was that we'd gained both trust with a local faction, and a trading bonus. Again, I didn't have access to the parts of the build that would have made these things relevant, but it's good to know they're there. I decide to launch another mission to apply what I've learned, and that's when I spot it: I can bring in a vehicle. Also, the vehicle can have guns. Really big ones!
And this is the map that really drives home what a huge difference cover makes in this game. It's a lot less dense, this one. A few scattered rocks. A speck of industry. Mostly, though, it's me rolling my battlebus around uncontested, two-shotting bands of pirates with casual glee.
Did I have fun? I don't know! As I said, I need the sort of context built up over hours for these missions to mean anything to me, really. I can safely say that, should that context land in the full thing, Menace absolutely has the cinematic chops to make those emergent story moments hit incredibly hard. I'm cautiously optimistic about enjoying some absolutely horrible things happening to pretend soldiers I've grown to care about, in other words.
