MENACE
Squads in MENACE advance, hold and break as whole units rather than as individual soldiers, and each mission is one step in a longer operation on a hostile frontier. It is a turn-based tactical RPG for PC, single-player only, currently in Early Access.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- Leaders worth keeping alive. Each squad leader has a backstory, personality traits and reactions to wins and losses, and promotions unlock a branching perk tree. A leader who goes down can be revived within a short window; after that, the loss is permanent.
- Vehicles sit in the main roster: troop carriers, artillery, walkers and jury-rigged war machines. Each has trade-offs, and a heavy vehicle can come at the cost of infantry upgrades elsewhere.
- There is no passive income. Everything comes from missions and operations, and spare loot can be moved on the black market to pay for the gear actually wanted.
Story and Lore
The campaign takes place in the Wayback system, an isolated corner of space cut off from the Core Worlds and short on order. The player commands a Republic Marine strike force operating from the TCRN Impetus, and the opening assignment, a pacification mission, escalates into something larger.
The threat behind it is the Menace, billed in the game's launch material as unknowable constructs. Community documentation describes it as a force that turns humans into raw material for biomechanical creatures and keeps evolving.
Development continues, and the full story is listed as part of the planned final version.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Missions come grouped into operations, multi-stage campaigns that need enough manpower and gear to carry through every stage. Distress calls appear across the system and the player chooses which to answer. The Early Access build lists 50 mission types across three planets.
- Positioning, suppression and weapon range decide most fights: light machine guns can pin groups of enemy grunts, while sniper rifles can pierce the armor of pirate vehicles.
- Movement and defensive actions use up a large share of each turn's action points, and a squad that spends everything on a distant shot can end up without cover.
- Limited air strikes mark a section of the map grid for damage, and enemies must stay inside it to be hit.
- Soldiers and drivers pushed too hard grow tired, frustrated or injured and fight worse.
- Gear has limits too: some weapons will not mount on certain platforms, a machine gun on a vehicle being one example, and only infantry squads can pick up cargo.
Between operations the TCRN Impetus gets upgrades to weapons technology, intelligence and medical facilities, and before deployment the player can study the map layout and enemy placements.
Characters and Factions
Four enemy factions oppose the Marines:
- Pirates: raiders who go after weaker targets in fast vehicles armed with improvised weapons.
- Rogue Army: soldiers answering to no established power, with agendas of their own.
- Alien Wildlife: big, aggressive animals found on the system's planets, some of them moved around by hunters and black-market dealers.
- The Menace: the alien threat itself.
Other factions in the system include DICE of the Gods, a criminal outfit that turns the ice planet Dice into a tourist and gambling destination, fronted by Frankie Sallustio; The Backbone, a regime that has made the most Earth-like world an industrial and military base under Xiao Xiao and openly aims at control of the whole system; and the Zayn-Beecher Corporation, a rich company weakened by the loss of its Core Worlds links. Improving relations through operations brings supplies and unique squad leader recruits.
The squad leader roster mixes backgrounds: Republic Marines such as Jane Darby, mercenaries such as Fedor Yazhov and a pirate, Jean Sy, among others.
Editions
MENACE has a single standard edition.