Menace – Early Access Impressions

The early access release of Menace is here, and after giving it twenty sweaty coffee-infused hours like the nerd that I am—I’m ready to give my first early impressions. While I do feel it’s a much better experience than the demo, since we are actually in control of progression and the campaign now—sadly, my issues with the general gameplay remain. This means that the combat is still mostly abstracted, with a strong wargame (board-game) feeling that work against the immersion in parts.

War games
The problem I have with this is the zoomed out nature of something that should be more personal, akin to Battle Brothers. Battle Brothers, of course, shares this board-game approach to a degree, but to me, it overcame it by having detailed and involved combat with highly customizable mercenaries in a sandbox world. In Menace, the combat is much more abstracted than simulated, and the game actually comes across as less “free” which has you locked into specific operation paths. It also has more arbitrary board-game rules than BB—for example, by limiting basic equipment like grenades.

It just doesn’t have that cozy sandbox feeling with you controlling a tight-knit band of brothers in a world set up for you to explore and eventually overcome. Instead, you are a commander over a couple of marines that all come with their own pre-set personality and traits. Now, the roster of marines will always be the same, which is also annoyingly diverse in the modern political sense. It’s so stereo-typically weird that I question the intention. Why is one of my squad leaders an inner-city ghetto guy, when I recruited him from a backwater colonial planet infested with alien bugs? Imagine if the characters were created on the fly, where recruiting someone from a backwater planet would give that soldier a specific trait instead of randomly pulling from a fixed list. Much more immersive to me, and ironically it would make the agents more unique than all the writing and cool art ever could.

Look, I understand, they are going for the Jagged Alliance 2 vibe, but it just doesn’t work for me. These characters are not particular funny, and it’s definitely not set in the same kind of world, tonally, as Jagged Alliance 2. The intro alone tells you that it is something serious, leaning towards horror instead of humor. I know I’m waffling on about this, but it’s important because it fundamentally changes the enjoyment of Menace to something less compelling compared to Battle Brothers, and other games of a similar nature. It’s just so “gamey”, with very little input from you to permeate the experience. X-com, Xenonauts, Battle Brothers, and even Jagged Alliance 2, since it allows you to make a custom merc, are much more personalized, which in turn makes the campaign immersive as hell—here, not so much, unfortunately.

Pick of three
When Menace opens up a bit, in its so-called “sandbox” aspect of the game, you can’t exactly roam freely. You are restricted to three planets, each having a campaign with an enemy faction, completely generated at random. So, technically, you can have all three planets be infested with the most uninteresting faction: the alien bugs. Have fun! (Seriously though, these guys are not that fun to fight as the other factions, since they are essentially beasts). When you have finished one kind of operation, it feels like you have finished them all, which means the grind kicks in fairly quickly for very little interesting progression. If you are hoping for a strong narrative here, you are mostly out of luck. One day, pirates might threaten a city, and the next, aliens show up to be a nuisance—and that’s basically it, until you hit a rare story crossroad.

Also, there is no research to discover, there is only loot to be picked up, and shared XP to accumulate, which also contributes to making no unit stand out beyond combat. You see, when you hire a new squad leader, you can waste your gained XP on that unit instantly, without ever using him or her in battle. There are no ranks, medals, or a sense of progression outside of loot and how much XP you decide to invest into the squad leader. It frankly dulls the experience after a while, which leads to a feeling of disconnect from the campaign and the marines under your command. There is so little flair here, it’s baffling, even when a squad leader dies, he is just gone. No memorial or nothing. There are no permanent stats to check overall. The game tells you how many kills a unit got during a mission, yet, I have not found any campaign stats anywhere. This could be attributed to the Early Access side of Menace, but the lack of flair is tangible nonetheless.

Before we talk about the tactical combat, I just want to finish this segment by saying that, paradoxically, the game has too much writing and at the same time too little. So much effort has been allocated to the mercs—giving them personalities and interactions—when something simpler would have been better, especially for the longevity of the title. The focus should have been on a campaign thread and fleshing out the world‑building, because we are given so damn little where it truly matters.

Blasting things
The combat is very similar to the demo, being a mix of abstract board‑game mechanics with splices of XCOM 2 gameplay—but overall, it plays more like a wargame such as like Headquarters: World War II. The battles can be engaging, but they’re heavily limited by rules decided by the developers. For example, there are no defensive options like overwatch, as the devs wanted a more action-oriented game—instead of having you “sit on your ass”, so to speak. The strange thing about this, besides excluding an entire way to play, is how many missions are defensive in nature. It’s an oddity, considering you can never prepare for enemy units or set up ambush points, which in the end becomes irritating—especially if you enjoy creating deadly traps for the enemy to waltz into.

You always have to be proactive, even in scenarios where it doesn’t make sense, like holding a fortified tower. You essentially have to let the enemy take their attack to get them into range, or leave the fortress if you want to strike first. It just feels a bit backwards and not very elegant, simply because the devs didn’t like this mechanic in similar games to theirs. So, instead of creating rules around it, to make it more balanced, it was just ditched to the game’s detriment. For shame.

However, Menace got some really cool aspects to the combat mechanics, like the suppression and the moral system that survived from the days of Battle Brothers. If you do enough damage, or kill enough men or aliens, you can trigger a total rout of the enemy. It’s pretty darn exciting to pull off, especially when you perform a perfect flank to zap the enemy’s morale in one strike.

It’s a good-looking war
The graphics are excellent and filled with detail, as every weapon and piece of armor is modeled on the soldiers. The game also has all kinds of cool battle effects, but unfortunately, because it’s fundamentally a board-game underneath, much of that visual fidelity feels somewhat wasted. Units will be firing through and around buildings, for example, which can look a bit fake. Beyond that, though, it generally looks great with extremely smooth animations for a game of this type. A pleasure for the eyes, in other words.

Conclusion
Despite all my endless complaining, Menace is absorbing for a good while, as the combat has its moments under the sun and the squad management is engaging. Yet I’m not sure if it will have the same staying power as Battle Brothers, since it doesn’t offer an in-depth survival layer in a world that truly feels alive, being as static as it is.

My main issue probably stems from it not exactly what I expected coming from the Battle Brothers developers. It has many aspects I like, and the squaddie system is unique and adds another resource (manpower) to juggle. It’s absolutely not a bad game, but I’m not sure it’s entirely for me, even if the setting is badass. I mean, science fiction with marines battling all kinds of creatures and pirates—what’s not to like? Anyhow, time will tell where it leads us, as Menace is slated to be in Early Access for a year. I doubt the basic mechanics will change much, but I’m hoping the story gets expanded to show us more of this creepy, alien‑infested world.

Thanks for reading.

– Thomas