Having recently watched a streamer I like dive head-first into the beast that is Ironman X-Com 2 with all DLC (With no previous X-com experience) I was in a tactical turn-based kinda mood. As it happens, MENACE is on Game Preview on Game Pass for PC and seemed like a great mix of X-Com and Battlesector, 2 games I very much enjoy.

The game is in a great place for a Game Preview because it has issues, it isn’t perfect, but the core is strong. All the little gripes and errors are fixable, rather than the game being shaky at the foundations. After a stint in Game Preview I can imagine MENACE finding a dedicated audience, particularly with those who want large-scale battles but with customisation of units in a way Battlesector didn’t really allow.

MENACE at a Glance

Reasons to Install

• Huge amounts of modular customisation for armour, weapons, vehicles, accessories and perks
• 4 enemy factions with different optimal strategies
• Deployment map and ship upgrades for out-of-combat management
• Unique rewards for helping friendly factions

Reasons to Skip

• Campaign pacing is slow, with MENACE spawning very late into a run
• Annoying visual and input glitches such as no movement or weapon range shown at times
• Minimal tutorials, with no tutorials for unique mechanics like Wavering, Fleeing, Suppressed and Pinned Down
• Enemy AI makes the game a little easy

Most Unique Feature

MENACE is a relatively standard turn-based battlefield, but has a level of player choice I haven’t seen in the genre before. You aren’t just choosing which squads go into battle, but what weapons they use, armour they wear and location they deploy in.

I chose to run one of my Pilots, Rewa, in a mech with lock-on launchers while someone else might have her be the speedy scout in a jeep. The customisations you make affect how a mission plays out, but also change how you view your own squads and makes certain upgrades more exciting to you as a player. Seeing my “battle taxi” evolve into a full on MBT was a sight to behold, and made missions with enemy vehicles a breeze where before they were a chore.

Player choice is a name of the game in MENACE, which is really refreshing.

A New Sense of Planning and Scale

MENACE thrusts you into the captain’s seat of a mercenary vessel that has just entered The Wayback. This region of space is owned by quarreling factions, but you are a “neutral” third-party (And apparently stay that way even after boots hit the ground). You’ll be zipping between 3 different planets for 3 different factions, each facing thier own enemy and each rewarding their own brand of equipment, accessories and more.

It’s this combination of out-of-mission planning and in-mission combat that make MENACE stand out. The scale, in terms of how much you can customise on the ship, the squads and mid-mission via abilities and weapons, is far larger than other games in the genre.

Battlesector is definitely the closest comparison, but even then the game doesn’t have this level of customisation and freedom. Battlesector, like X-Com, is more focused around specific objective challenges and encounters. MENACE, by contrast, is more about how you approach missions, how you choose to solve problems, and what secondary objectives you prioritise.

Perhaps the Easiest Tactical Game I’ve Played, But Also Maybe the Most Fun

It’s actually very hard to fail a mission in MENACE, but it’s easy to have a SL (Squad Leader) go down, or to miss out on a Secondary Objective or two. By the 12+ hour mark you’ll be maxing everything with a carefully chosen and equipped squad, but the journey to that point is filled with decisions over who rests in the ship, what weapons you take and more.

There’s something so satisfying about wiping out a squad of Alien Warriors in 2 volleys from your specifically-equipped unit, where before they were taking multiple units to bring down. The array of weapon and skill options makes victories feel like a direct result of your choices, rather than feeling too “Rock, Paper, Scissors”. There’s not one single right answer to each faction, and that is a brilliant piece of design.

That difficulty balancing is what makes the game’s pacing feel a little off. We start a little “ragtag” but end up as an almost unstopable force. That’s when the 4th enemy faction, MENACE, is introduced. You have so many options and vehicles and squads by this point that the threat is a little…anticlimactic. It’s built up and hinted at, and the opening mission for them is atmospheric as hell, but mechanically and gameplay-wise it unfortuantely wasn’t scary enough. I didn’t lose any squads, and gained a lot of intel about what to bring on future MENACE missions to make sure they weren’t an issue.

Little Problems Lead to Big Frustrations

In a game that revolves around utilising troops well and making informed decisions, the current little UI errors can be more impactful than in another genre. Things like the movement or weapon range of a unit not appearing can make it a gamble whether you actually make it to where you have selected.

There’s some parts where the game lacks QoL through actual neglect, rather than just glitches, too. Most standard weapons have an optimal range, that is a range that they are the most accurate. Anything before or after this range is less accurate. So, it would be lovely to have this visualised. Currently, you have to look at the ballistics graph for the weapon, count how many squares the peak of the accuracy bar is, and then count that many squares from the unit on the actual map. It’s arduous and there’s no reason the game couldn’t visualise with marks or colours on the spaces that a selected unit will have maximum possible accuracy.

I’ll Watch It’s Career With Great Interest

But, overall, these are things you can learn to live with and don’t affect the core loop. Hopefully, issues like that will all be gone by the time MENACE hits 1.0 and I am excited to get back into it when it does. I got all the achievements in the current version of MENACE in around 25 hours of gameplay, but I’d say 5 of those hours it felt like it overstayed it’s welcome since MENACE hadn’t spwaned yet. Once MENACE appeared, it reignited that flame (But, then I had all the achievements so, I stopped playing anyway since I’ll play so much more at 1.0!)