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Wake up, babe. The release-date trailer for Menace just dropped, plus a Steam demo. The short version is that I am trying to remain calm about it and failing.
The premise sounds like someone took a Marine logistics officer, asked him what keeps him up at night, and then turned the list into a video game. You are the XO of a cruiser that is definitely not the USMC, dispatched to a distant system where governance has failed. You arrive underprepared, underequipped, with no resupply on the calendar, and your job is to impose order on chaos using a handful of professionals, some local goodwill, and whatever spare parts and recruits you can charm out of the nearest settlement.
The tactics layer feels like a love letter to small-units reality. We are talking platoon-scale fights, weapons that behave like their modern cousins, and engagements where suppression and angles decide the story more than crit rolls. The core loop is the canonical four-step sermon your squad leader gave you on a hot range: find, fix, flank, fuck. If you execute it cleanly, the map opens. If you skip a verb, the map closes on you.
Randomness exists, but it is escorted to the party and kept under supervision. Shots are not coin flips. They are more like probability distributions with manners (it helps that each bullet is individually simulated, and there are plenty of bullets). A poorly placed team can still win a duel through luck, just not reliably, and the game keeps reminding you that reliability is what we pay commanders for.
Structure matters too. There is very little of the superhero problem. No demigod hero units, no psychic artillery, no cool-downs that feel like a designer handing you a hall pass. The interesting choices happen at the margins: where you put your machine gun, whether you burn a smoke grenade now or save it for when the geometry gets unfriendly, how much risk you accept to clear a compound while you can overhear pirates shooting civilians. You're usually outnumbered, often outgunned, so it's handy that your cruiser can provide orbital fire support (in very limited doses).
Between missions the logistics fantasy takes over, and by fantasy I mean a spreadsheet with narrative lipstick. You have relationships with locals to cultivate so you can recruit and scrounge. Your ship is an upgrade tree with personality, and your squad leaders are upgrade trees with mortgages. The campaign asks you to befriend people not because friendship is abstractly good, but because friendship can be exchanged for 5.56.
I tried the demo after watching a few early-access runs. It is good in the way that makes you reevaluate other games that you thought were good. The maps push you to care about frontage and interlocking fields of fire. The suppression system punishes recklessness and rewards audacity, which is the correct moral. There are customization options tucked into every seam. I kept having the sensation that someone had finally smuggled doctrine into a toy and gotten away with it.
I have quibbles. My biggest is ammunition. LMGs and MMGs seem to go dry after roughly half a dozen bursts. Thematically it tracks with scarcity, and yes, machine gunners really do live at the intersection of mass and logistics. Still, there is a difference between teaching conservation and turning your base-of-fire element into a limited-use power-up. If the goal is to model the discipline of sustained fire, the numbers might want a second look. After all, a dedicated AT launcher modeled on a Carl Gustav allows you to fire 3 rounds, which is pretty realistic. The MGs need to scale better.
There are a few other aspects where there's a clear concession to game design over realism, such as RPGs or AT vehicles only killing a single unit of an infantry squad even on a direct hit, but eh, I can live with that.
But if this is what the vertical slice looks like, I am comfortable being publicly optimistic. The demo is already doing that annoying thing where you start composing post-mission AARs in your head while brushing your teeth. If the full release lands early next year on the same trajectory, I suspect it will become the default recommendation for anyone who ever said they wanted tactics that reward adults.
You forgot to mention that it's from the developer of Battle Brothers, an acclaimed game in the low-tech end of the same genre. (Unlike those of Battle Brothers, the characters of Menace do have legs.)
The game will also be available on GOG.
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