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Menace's turn-based battles are the galaxy's deadliest teambuilding exercises

The Battle Brothers devs' next strategy game wants you to keep its soldiers sweet

If you've played Battle Brothers, you'll know that Overhype Studios have a way of making you care for an underling, no more so than when you inadvertently send them onto the wrong end of a sharp blade. Menace, their upcoming turn-based tactical RPG, will also put the wellbeing of your chosen fighters at the forefront of your mind - along with a dramatic shift from 2D medieval sprites to the fully 3D battlefields of a unruly space frontier.

Whereas Battle Brothers filled your army with randomly generated serf lads, Menace lets you hire a cast of ready-made, "fixed" soldiers with their own backstories and personalities. It's up to you how to recruit and deploy this gaggle of assorted mercs and charlatans, who range from aloof ex-marines to cheerful snipers and loudly pious mech pilots. For some, their roles as powerful squad leaders will likely result in them becoming the main characters of any given playthrough.

Thus, whereas Menace's turn-based battles, grid movement, and heavy emphasis on cover will naturally invoke XCOM comparisons, the presence of these personalities more specifically brings to mind XCOM: Chimera Squad and its ragtag cast of interspecies cops. Except, Menace goes far heavier on both detail and scale than that pared-back spinoff did. Stat fiends will relish digging through the numbers that each pre-mission squad equip screen pours out, with such granularity as to include a line graph showing the damage falloff for individual guns. And, when you're planetside, you won't be fighting a preset handful of foes on a predesigned map, but a proc-gen army on randomised (and unpredictable) terrain.

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