The first time I played developer Overhype Studio's first game, the ruthless Battle Brothers, my plucky crew of medieval soldiers got immediately beaten to death by bandits while trying to complete the easiest mercenary contract I could find.
I was hooked.
Not because I'm a masochist, mind, but because the depth of the game's turn-based strategy simulation was immediately compelling. With only a minimum of description and dialogue, my doomed first attempt wove its own story, of an overconfident general leading inexperienced peasants to their doom.
All the specific details of that failure were laid out before me—from the bandit flail that bypassed a shield, to the hammer-blow that crushed a helmet, to the moment morale crumbled and my men began to flee—inviting me to try again with new strategies, new equipment, new tactics.
So when it was revealed back in 2023 that the studio was working on an even bigger, more ambitious sandbox as a follow-up, I knew it was one to watch. The intimidatingly-titled Menace has been top of the list of my most anticipated turn-based strategy games ever since—and now that I've gotten to play 30 minutes of it, I'm even more impatient to get it on my hard drive.
Set in a violent sci-fi future, the game casts you as a military commander cut off from the chain of command in the distant, lawless Wayback system. Pulling together whatever soldiers, mercenaries, criminals, and deserters you can into a small makeshift force, you have to pacify dangerous pirates, deal with local factions, and take on the eponymous Menace—a mysterious and disturbingly inhuman threat.
Mission critical
Thrown into a mission to capture and hold two important buildings on a remote desert planet, I'm surprised to find that the action feels like a collision of classic strategy series Jagged Alliance with the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000.
The former inspires the game's chaotic combat simulation, combining the explosive fun of an '80s action movie with an eye for detail that sees the path of every bullet tracked from gun to target. And like Jagged Alliance, your team consists of authored characters—named heroes with their own personalities and backstories—rather than the purely procedurally-generated minions of Battle Brothers.
Each player would be able to build basically their own army and see their own tactics come to life.
Jan Taak, Managing Director at Overhype Studios
But as I'm building my squad with a limited pool of points and dropping them into a deployment zone on the map, it's afternoons rolling dice across a battle mat that I'm most reminded of. Those named heroes each lead their own team of mooks, who copy their armour and equipment, and like a classic Warhammer 40,000 squad, can be assigned one special weapon, such as a rocket launcher or a flamethrower.
It's no accident. As I play, I'm guided by developer Jan Taak (managing director at Overhype) and his brother Paul Taak (creative director), and as we talk about the studio's ambitions for Menace, their love of tabletop gaming is a recurring topic.
"We are big Warhammer fans," says Jan. "I really love the army-building, theorycrafting, thinking about what item to give to what character. And this is something that you really find in Menace as well. Especially as you get later into the game, you have so many items, so many options, that each player would be able to build basically their own army and see their own tactics come to life."
As I move my forces up to capture the objectives, I'm a little overwhelmed by my own strike force. All those tactical choices in the set-up phase have left me with a wide array of tools at my disposal. Each squad has its own specialities and abilities, and the specifics of its equipment can make a huge difference.
It's that detail I loved in Battle Brothers, but on a different scale. Instead of worrying about a flail wrapping over a peasant's shield, I'm working out the best position for a unit of snipers to lay down covering fire, while another squad seeks the optimal range to deploy its flamethrower.
Sim city
All of a sudden you have a big story developing during gameplay, because you have so many moving parts that so many things can happen.
Paul Taak, Creative Director at Overhype Studios
The more I play, the more the simulation kicks up little surprises and discoveries. Shooting at an armoured personnel carrier, I realise the angle of my attack determines which part I'm likely to hit—flanking it allows me to catch it in the rear armour, and make my next discovery, which is that damaged vehicles have a chance to explode in a glorious fireball.
"If you are more on the simulation side, a lot more things can happen," says Paul. "You can run out of ammunition, you can resupply, but then you have to do this and that, and then all of a sudden you have a big story developing during gameplay, because you have so many moving parts that so many things can happen." Even just in this 30 minute slice, that's exactly how it feels.
Enemies scamper around in the fog of war, hidden from my forces unless I can secure vital sightlines. While most of them seem to be simply preparing to ambush, one has a grenade launcher, allowing them to send explosives arcing out of their hiding place and into my lines.
The Taaks point out, however, that I have the ability to deploy airstrikes—making an educated guess as to where my foes are hiding, I call one in. The resulting blaze misses them all entirely, of course, but it drifts enough to accidentally hit part of the structure they're hiding behind.
It reveals a particularly well-equipped unit of pirates, but from their newly exposed position, I'm able to catch them in the crossfire between two units and whittle down their morale, forcing them to dive to the dirt, pinned. With them occupied, I'm able to safely move up my own heavy vehicle without fear of their anti-tank weaponry, while a close-range team moves up behind it using it as cover.
With a bit of luck and a dash of guidance from the developers, the mission finishes out surprisingly smoothly—and even when things do go wrong, the consequences aren't quite as harsh as my first outing in Battle Brothers. But despite being named characters, my heroes can still permanently die—the grunts in their squads effectively act as HP, and if they're all wiped out the leader is vulnerable to being finished off—which keeps the tension high and my choice of actions weighty.
Brothers in arms
As the designers, we put up a challenge for you, but we don't design the solution for this challenge. It's up to you.
Paul Taak, Creative Director at Overhype Studios
It's a wonderfully layered turn-based strategy challenge, with alternating unit activations adding an extra level of tactical considerations as my enemy regularly reacts to me with its own tactical ploys. It's detailed but not dry, revelling in the drama and chaos that a really robust simulation can generate.
"As the designers, we put up a challenge for you, but we don't design the solution for this challenge. It's up to you," says Paul. "We give you a toolbox and say: 'Now come up with a solution.' This is what we love about this type of game."
And all of it was procedurally-generated and open for me to approach however I chose.
"Replayability is our number one thing," says Jan. "So all the battle maps, the missions, the mission rewards, the operations, the enemy compositions, what you're getting in terms of equipment, all of that is procedural."
That one mission is part of a small series of missions making up an operation, and all of that is just one thing I could end up doing in a whole sprawling sandbox that makes up the game's setting, the Wayback System. As its "space sheriff", you're free to handle the various factions however you choose.
Cut off as you are, you're reliant on the locals to help you gain new supplies, recruit new soldiers, and upgrade your spaceship—and that forces tough choices, as calls for help and offers of work can time out if you go for one over another. Over time, your trust level with the various groups will grow stronger or fracture, as your team of heroes builds in power and even develops relationships amongst themselves.
The story is, of course, about the Menace and how it comes into the system, and how people react to it, and what you can do to stop it.
Jan Taak, Managing Director at Overhype Studios
This wider layer is the part I didn't get to see for myself, but the promise of it is hugely enticing. It sounds like exactly the kind of sandbox I love—wide open for you to make your own choices, and primed to kick up emergent stories of peril.
But that doesn't mean it's directionless. More so than Battle Brothers, the game does have a core narrative—facing up to the new alien threat.
"So the story is, of course, about the Menace and how it comes into the system, and how people react to it, and what you can do to stop it," says Jan. "Once the Menace is defeated, if you manage to do it, the game is officially over… but at the same time, we try to keep these story beats as minimal and as not invasive as possible, because we don't want players to think, 'Oh, I have to do this again and it is the exact same mission'. We want it to be as procedural as possible, while giving some structure and some guidance to the whole thing."
All together it's a hell of a pitch, and the small slice I'm able to play gives me confidence that it's all heading in the right direction. The shift in setting is certainly appropriate to the step Overhype is taking here—as we go from ordering around a handful of muddy thugs across a chunk of fantasy Europe in Battle Brothers to trying to wrangle an entire star system with a small army in Menace, the ambitions have risen to match.
It shouldn't be too long now until we get to see the true scope of it for ourselves—the game is due to launch into Steam early access later this year. And you can find out more from Jan and Paul themselves in our full Menace interview video.
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