MENACE

A really great game, highly polished with solid core mechanics for an EA title. Visually very impressive on my weary ancient PC. Performance is solid too, frankly another banger from the Hooded Horse publisher; Overhype have made a fantastic turn-based strategy game here. I especially like the ability to play a mechanised infantry unit with customisable IFVs and thanks to a recent update a full blown MBT. Sounds are broadly satisfying too, giving the various weapons some "weight". The enemy factions feel reasonably distinct in their weapons, vics, etc. Only gripe with the game is the OCI/space ship HQ which you can upgrade with different components is a little lacklustre (although there was a recent update to this I haven't had a chance to play with yet). In particular the orbital weapons/off map rocket attacks you can call in just feel useless. They take multiple turns to arrive, at which point you can guarantee the enemy has moved out of that tile. My only use-case for them is to attack static OBJs before moving in with the main force. I guess that's kinda the point but in that case there's a clear hierarchy for which weapons will destroy a target and which will bounce right off, achieving nothing. Overall a great title even in EA, but with the price tag I have reasonably high expectations for the full development of the game.

Great voice acting, Superb Combat Sfx (gives you the feeling that yıou are actually on the field ) Its a fresh add on to the turn based tactics genre. I felt like I'm in one of the Tom Clancy's novels while playing combat missions. I also felt quite similarity with the Battletech series, you have a base ship orbitting up above, you not only modify your soldiers' gear and loadouts, but also upgrade the base ship features. Just like in Battletech, There is a limit that your dropship can carry (the game indicates this by supplies/supply limit) You can add a vehicle to your ground team (just like X-com, Xenonaut series) which increases tactical advantage immensely. You also have to deal with the morale of your teams. For instance, a leader whose team mates are all dead but he survived, becomes broken. (he needs time to recover) A lot of gear, you can capture from the field or you can barter from the black market. Again this gives some impression of battletech universe where you jump from planet to planet searching for rare goodies in black markets in every planet. Menace does not have this (vast selection of planets to jump from and to) functionality yet but I don't know about the future. Surely player is allowed to set difficulty parameters at the game start is a blessing. Devs know very well that there is a thin line between challenging and grind. It is good that players allowed to set the difficulty for themselves. The Game is not easy. In other words, its just not your grandmother's tactical combat game. Human opponents move to get tactical advantage, use flame throwers, grenades and you can find your teams wiped out in a single turn. Alien opponents are more straight forward and somewhat easier to handle. One should consider going with aliens first before confronting pirates.

fantastic game that takes a little bit of time to learn and love. The demo almost convinced me not to buy it, but Im glad I did. If you like turn based games like xcom or baldurs gate (combat) then youll find alot to love here, the adjustment in scale takes time, and understanding whats worth bringing/purchasing is still a little confusing to me. When something clicks it feels fantastic though, going from a useless squad made of tissue paper to a unit you can send in by itself on the total other side of the battle is so rewarding. My complaints: The timed missions are off, sometimes rng seems to just make it impossible to complete some mission tasks, sometimes it feels good to smash and grab something, and sometimes the spawns have made it literally impossible to move from one side of the map to the other in like 10 turns. I also feel like theres not much left for me to do but fight the Menace, who are not fun to fight in my opinion. Tanky bullet sponges who sometimes wipe a whole squad because they spawned in a great spot. The joy of mowing down tons of pirates or rogue army is where I find the game most enjoyable, controlling the morale mechanics and causing a whole army to route feels great. The problem is that every time you want to have a fun operation youre risking increasing the menace timer on each planet. These problems aside I think the game is already in a place that justifies the price, and as long as they keep these updates up I think we are in for a classic.

great game!

Просто ВАУ В усіх можливих сенсах

From a pure gameplay perspective this game is better than xcom. I especially enjoy how the different game mechanics for the weapons interact with each other. It gives you so much variety without the guns feeling samey. I can't wait till the story is fully included, but it feels less early access with each update.

Overall, it's a really fun game with a solid foundation. If it continues to be developed, there's still a lot of room for improvement. The balance is mostly good; you can tell the developers put a lot of effort into game balance. However, playing deeper, you'll realize some weapons are overpowered, and some are strong from the start. It's a high-quality tactical turn-based game. Adding more variety to the monsters or squad leaders would make it even more enjoyable. Here are some things I think could be improved: - New players without a tactical combat campaign background will be very confused, especially with suppression, pinnacle down, and AP cost. When I first played, I even crouched before firing every time, thinking it increased accuracy. The game doesn't explain many things; the tutorial needs improvement in this area. - While the rate of fire reduces the chance of missing damage to 0, grenade throws still result in a single grenade. I'd like to see a UI for grenade calculations made easier to visualize. - Regarding the UI graphics, the grid and boxes could have rounded edges. In missions, the fog of war visuals still feel strange and difficult to understand; it doesn't look friendly. Perhaps consider adjusting the font or preparation phase, as some parts are too small. - I felt the gameplay was a bit sloppy, but the recent OCI rework has improved it. - The ships can only be upgraded; there's nothing else added. I'd like to see a system that incorporates more decision-making throughout the campaign, such as a barracks system for training units that aren't engaged in combat, or increased resource usage for squad management. - For infantry, for sub-units, for those who've completed many missions, I'd like to see an opportunity to slightly upgrade individual soldiers. Perhaps a passive upgrade system where we can choose to dismiss them, or a permanent injury system for unit leaders, using expensive barracks and resources to manage permanent damage. - The game has very low losses compared to Battle Brothers. I'd like to see consideration for permanently destructible elements, such as permanently damaged ship parts or weapons and equipment. - I'd like to see bosses in the game that inflict significant losses and are truly terrifying, adding more pressure like in Battle Brothers.

One of the absolute BEST game of the genre. Strongly recommend. High replayability. Can't wait to see what devs add next. Ability to replace squaddies with androids for parts price would be fire tbh.

Game’s shaping up great, hits well one of my favourite genres. At it’s core It’s really more of a WWII type of combat with grenades, trucks, rpgs, deployable machine guns and all that, it just has a sci-fi setting which is fine. After few hours of rather boring, repeatable, too easy missions on “normal”, (shooting bugs felt a bit like a chore sometimes) more enemy vehicles started showing up and time pressure to save civilians was introduced. It became really fun, but still way too easy. Maybe “normal” should be called “easy”? Vehicles add a lot dynamism (btw let’s give our driver a chance to get out of vehicle with destroyed engine!) But I want to point out mostly what I didn’t like as a feedback. Very first impression: inconsistent visually. After semi-realistic, cinematic intro and another retro feeling cinematic with WH40000 vibes - it suddenly switched to anime-style backgrounds with cartoony characters crudely pasted on top - it’s a bit of a mind**ck: polished cinematics - unpolished actual game screens in totally different style. I’d much prefer if you hired good senior environment artist for a few months instead of putting resources in cinematics, because maps are where the game needs most work imo. Now, I like the graphic, cartoony style of the game, UI is elegant and well thought out. Great care has been put into 2D aspects of the game, writing, fleshing out characters, portraits, voicovers, stats, perks, even voiceovers for status effects give that extra rpg feel. Even 3d squads look and move okay (just please don’t give *every* pirate a gas mask - it’s so cliche). But in contrast to that, actual maps look bland, rudimentary and random generated. Many missions feel super generic, they lack that feeling of uniqueness and purpose. Winter and Desert Terrain is just poorly textured, scale of natural terrain elements reads wrong. We have something like weird mini-mountains sculpted with a brush in engine on otherwise flat terrain. Please make actual different rock formations instead, they can be simple but need to look right and feel like a legit cover). Colony buildings (at least in aforementioned biomes) are super simple, blocky meshes. Scale of some of the buildings reads wrong, they lack detail that would ground and integrate them with enviro properly. Cylindrical fuel tanks need more triangles so they don’t look faceted like from a 2010s game. Mediocre quality of these environments (winter and desert, earth-like planet is okay), generic feeling missions along with not working line of sight system is the weakest part of the game atm. Line of sight system is incomprehensible (shooting through buildings and multiple obstacles from several tiles away often has high accuracy, whilst shooting enemies point-blank behind a very low wall is low-accuracy? How? Also shooting through hills is not a problem..) Hope that aspect is just not done yet at all and will be sorted out. By the way, these low knee-walls are too thick and they need some sort of visual breakup so they don’t always form perfect rectangles (like the sandbag version in later missions). Shotguns feel OP, they always have high accuracy at full range. Lame secondary objectives - “complete mission in X number of turns”. Why? Makes no sense in rpg-flavoured tactics game unless it’s in the narrative. Why would completing, say, sabotage mission in 12 turns instead of 14 matter. If anything, defence missions could have that objective - hold position longer for bonus reward, which gets more difficult every turn! As well as rescue or escape missions - get out on time or reinforcements show up - if they never do, why the time objective is even there? Couple more remarks. “Defend marked rectangle from aliens for x number of turns” - these missions are lame, let’s defend *something,* not random piece of terrain for X-number of turns. Squad leaders’ voiceovers are great, enemies barks not so much. Pirates sound like they are doing standup comedy or something. Takes away immersion. Maybe introduce something like armor penetration Tiers in regard as to what enemy armor is penetrated by what weapon, as it’s not very clear how it works atm. Sometimes tooltips say “no penetration” (certatin heavy machine gun), yet two salvos from it obliterate a vehicle. Regular machine guns should have somwehat better AP than regular rifles. It’s cool however that you still have chance to damage crew/vehicle HPs bypassing impenetrable armor if accuracy is high, but game needs to explain that in tooltips, etc. I’d like to be able to highlight enemies when pressing hotkey - it can be easy to overlook an enemy unit, and keeping track of them on the map feels more like a nuisance than part of the challenge. Our vehicles should be able to pass through a tile occupied by our units unless they are deployed. I’d like to have the ability to switch units faster, without waiting for unit to finish movement (at least if there are no enemies left). It’d give the game better flow, especially that there are often times when we just need to traverse the map for multiple turns. Preview of which units haven’t moved yet shouldn’t disappear when playing any given unit’s turn. Fog of war looks ugly atm, needs soft transition. Fingers crossed, I’ll gladly revisit the game once it’s out of early access!