Menace is doing some pretty interesting stuff in the indie strategy game space

I’m truly awful at Warhammer 40k, but that doesn’t stop my brother-in-law from inviting me over every Christmas break to prove how bad at 40k I still am. In the multiple years we’ve done this, I’ve forgotten nearly everything almost every year, got my ass stomped, and thought about buying an army (Orcs or Votann, if you’re curious). But I haven’t, because who can afford that right now? And, honestly, I barely understand the game, even if I have fun moving the pieces around.

That’s a bit how I feel about Menace, the strategy game from Overhype Studios and publisher Hooded Horse — the same publisher, notably, for one of my favorite indie games from last year, 9 Kings. I dove in thinking it looked a lot like XCOM, a series I adore. But it turns out the game straddles the line between XCOM and Warhammer a lot more than I expected. Which is to say: I’m still extremely confused, but I’m having a great time not paying for the minis.

I’m only about 4 hours into my Menace campaign, but the game goes a little like this. When you first start out, you pick some squad commanders and pilots from a list. Then you pick one of the planets from the planetary map, and select a multi-mission campaign. This sounds and functions a bit like Helldivers, but it’s actually more of a Slay The Spire kind of forked map. You can choose which mission path you’d like to take, and that not only determines your objectives, but also your rewards.

This is pretty neat, because it lets you augment your own difficulty in some unique ways. If you’re not very confident, you can take the lower difficulty path for some worse (probably) rewards. Or you can take a path that will reward you with additional allies in the final mission if you had some tough losses in the first mission. Or, if you’re confident, you can just look to see what rewards you might need and go for them.

Each mission asks you to scoot your squad across the board in turn-based combat, and each unit has a number of action points that they can use to move, shoot, duck down, or fire specialty weapons. The objectives range from capturing an area to eliminating aliens or pirates nearby. And when the mission is over, you collect your spoils and move onto the next mission or planetary campaign.