Menace wants you dead

Take a good look at that title font, you'll be seeing this shade of red a lot. Menace is the new XCOM-flavoured turn-based tactics lad who just dropped in from orbit to shoot you in the shinbones and make a mocking crybaby face at you as you bleed out. It is quite difficult.

It's also a very slow burner. I have put nine hours into the brutal early access build and all I have to show for it are three dead friends and a rocket launcher made out of sellotape. If you're familiar with Battle Brothers - the previous tactical death sentence this studio released - you'll know how it goes. You are once again raising a mercenary army, yet are persistently outnumbered, outgunned, and underfunded. There is an element of sci-fi horror to how quickly you can run out of money. In space, no one can give you a small business loan.

A disaster has occurred aboard your military spaceship, and as the highest-ranking officer to survive the catastrophe, you are now in charge. Great timing, as your vessel has arrived in a foreign solar system of pirate scum, insectoid aliens, and mysterious murderbots. To make a name for yourself here, you need to perform military operations for a handful of factions. Dictators, cyborgs, you know the sort. Every operation sees you rock up to a planet's surface and complete a few missions in a row for rewards like new weapons, ship parts, and sellable goods.

But the real point of missions, of course, is putting your soldiers through the wringer. You can only deploy a limited number of squads, each led by a named character. There's a sneaky sniper woman, a scarred tank pilot, a decorated veteran, and a bunch more. There is also a howlingly bad Mr T caricature who speaks and acts like Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder, with none of the irony. But maybe he just sticks out because a lot of the rest of the visual and narrative design in Menace feels bland, in the sense that everything you look at makes you think "where have I seen this before?"

Anyway. You take your goons into battle equipped with as much gear as you can balance among them (there's a different limit for each mission) and hopefully bring them out alive. The missions themselves are a classic tile-based affair where you've got to take cover, suppress enemy units, and toss grenades as many squares as you can. At first, it's all your basic flankwank. But things get more complex as jetpacker troops appear, or turrets start getting in your way, or civilians need to be protected.

The breadth of abilities and weapons starts to reveal some tactical richness underneath it all. You can squash bugs by driving over them in your APC. You can climb little watchtowers and set dirtbags on fire from above with a flamethrower. You can throw EMP grenades to disable turrets, smoke to obscure line of sight, flashbangs to make enemies miss a turn. When you are pinned down by suppressive gunfire you can crawl away to a safer position, provided you do not crawl face first into a far more bullety position than before. There's depth here, for anyone who survives long enough to witness it.

The inspirations are many. Read the developer diaries and you'll see mentions of Jagged Alliance, Dawn of War 2, and UFO: Enemy Unknown. I can't tell you how close Menace comes to replicating those at their deepest level, but on presentation alone it does seem to be summoning all the classic tactics geezers. You've got your base to upgrade between missions, an armory to slowly build up, a pre-battle map that lets you plop down each unit at the exact insertion point you want. In almost every way Menace is nothing new, and that sometimes makes it feels less like an XCOM replacement and more like an XCOM substitute teacher who is surprisingly strict and hates explaining things.

I say this because Menace also currently has no tutorial. Well, it has a single mission that teaches you how to move and shoot during a battle. All the complex machinery of the game (the base building, the recruiting, the squad customisation, the factional schmoozing, the turn order, basically everything) is just dumped in your lap (Edit: I've learned there's a now a big textdump that pops up early in the game - this wasn't in my review version and, having seen it, it's still not a good teaching aid). It's not completely debilitating. Even if all you've played in this genre are the newer XCOMs you'll get the idea quickly enough. You just might miss some important menu buttons.

For example, I played for three hours before I realised you can increase your squad size using a tiny + symbol on the squads menu. I was going into every battle at half strength. Oops. I also limped through a handful of tough missions before discovering you can choose between "routes" on a mission tree rather than always accepting the three-skull difficulty one you've been handed. And when it comes to the array of stats on the soldiers themselves, I had no idea what "Growth Potential" was until I looked it up in a dev diary (I still don't fully understand it, to be honest).

Some on-the-hoof learning is inevitable in any number-crunchy tactical sim. But I'd be grateful if Menace would at least put me through basic training before it breaks my ankle bones. As it stands, dying is the fastest way to learn. I played two short campaigns before scrapping them and starting over. The third run was going swimmingly, until I got my entire squad wiped out by a meagre band of space goons by performing what I believed was a flanking manoeuvre but was, in reality, a sort of self-flanking manoeuvre. This is another thing Menace has in common with its forefathers - notwithstanding the obligatory Ironman mode, you will be save scumming an awful lot.

This is as far as my reconnaissance of the game has got. There is definitely something moreish about it. In the same pistachio nut crunching manner of its inspirations. Part of me does want to reload from that squad wipe and continue building up my band of merry idiots, mission after mission. But it also feels a bit like playing a game for which the many problems of this exact genre have already been solved to perfection in a previous, more colourful world, where everyone called me "Commander" instead of "Major". So I'll break line of sight and wait for the reinforcements of early access updates, before I subject myself to the next severe disemboweling.