There was a crowded second there when I read the press release and thought they’d militarised the Beano, but Menace is not, in fact, about Dennis the Menace joining the Colonial Marines. It’s the new turn-based tactics RPG from the creators of Battle Brothers, and look at that, it has a freshly deployed gameplay trailer.
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In Menace, out later in 2025, you lead a squad of assorted jarheads to the lawless wilds of the Wayback system, not to be confused with any internet archiving projects. Here, you’ll deploy tanks, mechs and infantry against or in alliance with the minions of “pirate warlords, questionable corporations, and fractured planetary governments”.
It’s a bit like XCOM, in that you have a set of planets under threat and must decide which distress call to respond to, from turn to turn. Your strike cruiser is your mobile base, where you’ll equip and upgrade your squads. Missions take you along branching paths of several battles apiece, with players deciding whether to, for example, take out some air defences before assaulting the enemy frontline. Combat itself is a rich brew of flanking, suppression mechanics and questions of weapon range or managing with finite resources. Maps are procedurally generated.
James previewed this in September, commenting of its unexpectedly storied NPCs that “whereas Menace’s turn-based battles, grid movement, and heavy emphasis on cover will naturally invoke XCOM comparisons, the presence of these personalities more specifically brings to mind XCOM: Chimera Squad and its ragtag cast of interspecies cops.
“Except, Menace goes far heavier on both detail and scale than that pared-back spinoff did,” he went on. “Stat fiends will relish digging through the numbers that each pre-mission squad equip screen pours out, with such granularity as to include a line graph showing the damage falloff for individual guns. And, when you’re planetside, you won’t be fighting a preset handful of foes on a predesigned map, but a proc-gen army on randomised (and unpredictable) terrain.”
Fancy it? I do. I’ve not played Battle Brothers, but this gives me Battletech vibes. Again, it’s out in 2025. Read more on Steam.