Overhype Studios is probably not a name you’re familiar with, but if you’re into tactical RPGs, you’ve probably heard of Battle Brothers. Well, after six years, they’re making a new game in this genre titled MENACE.
Unlike its medieval and somewhat primitive-looking predecessor, MENACE promises a futuristic, world-hopping adventure where you go across the galaxy answering distress signals and fighting off enemies with your space army.
What is MENACE about?
In MENACE, you’ll be controlling a space-faring strike force tasked with defeating an unknown threat. Despite the threat being alien, you’ll also deal with government infighting, greedy corporations, and pirates.
This game looks very open, allowing you to answer whichever distress call you wish and go wherever you want to at any moment. You can spread your team thinner if you wish to, conquering multiple missions simultaneously.
The battles in MENACE start with choosing who to send where, like sending land vehicles to the desert planet and foot soldiers to a jungle planet, and ensuring you allocate your resources and strike force accordingly.
Each squad you create will have limited resources, and it’s up to you to ration that out and equip each to the best of your abilities. During combat, you’ll have to keep an eye on the range of your weapons, intelligently place your strike force, and suffer the consequences of permadeath.
This permadeath mechanic looks as impactful as it would be in something like Fire Emblem, as all the characters on your strike team will be real, fleshed-out people, not just numbers on the battlefield. If you want to win, though, you need to take risks and be willing to let some people die.
You can find people for your team from the planets you explore, grabbing recruits and trying to flesh out your battalion. All the characters are taken from a massive pool of hand-crafted ones, so they’ll all feel more unique and valuable than if they were just randomly generated.
What is randomly generated are the missions and maps, which get procedurally made whenever you start a new game, leading to endless replayability where there will always be a new challenge to find and new strategies to make to overcome them.
Overall, MENACE looks to be one of the most ambitious Tactical RPG and Strategy games I’ve ever seen. Whether you think a small indie studio with only one other game under its belt can pull that off is up to you, but I think any tactics fan should keep an eye on it.
When and Where can I play MENACE?
Currently, the only announced release date for MENACE is planned to be late 2024, with no further insight as to the month or time it’d be released. The only platform listed for it is currently PC, with a same-day release on the Epic Games Store and Steam.
Further Reading
If you’d like to hear more about strategy and tactical RPGs or some other games, you might be interested in, then stick right here at Indie Game Culture.
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