After losing 92 soldiers in Menace, I'll never call XCOM brutal again

(Image credit: Hooded Horse)

I've called XCOM brutal for years. It used to feel brutal. Brutal when a 95% shot misses. Brutal when a beloved soldier eats a crit and dies instantly. Brutal when it drops you on a knife edge, daring you to save the world as everything slowly spirals out of control. Menace, a new strategy game from Battle Brothers creator Overhype Studios, lives almost entirely on that same knife edge but unlike XCOM, it never lets you step back onto solid ground. There's always another fight to win, another compromise to make, and never quite enough resources to recover from the last deployment.

The biggest resource in Menace is manpower, and every misplay or mistake will cost you it. Here is a sci-fi game that riffs on Starship Troopers and Aliens, casting as the commander of a doomed ship that's jumped through a one-way gate to a far-off cluster of planets. With depleted resources and several competing factions to appease, you'll have your work cut out as you tackle mission after mission to try and keep the peace.

Squad up

Menacing ways

Menace gamescom 2024 — (Image credit: Hooded Horse)

This turn-based game looks like tactical Mass Effect, and it's all down to the "light RPG" mechanics

The magic ingredient is perspective. Menace doesn't really ask you to control heroes at all. You command squads, and your "health" is measured in people.

When pirates ambush you, or my personal nemesis the bombardier bug starts lobbing balls of acid at you, your mistakes aren't absorbed by a hitpoint bar. They're absorbed by soldiers under your command — soldiers with names, who die messy, horrible deaths because of things you did or didn't do.

Each of these soldiers also costs you supplies to field, so you can choose how big you want to make your squads. A bigger squad is more expensive to field, but gives you more ~~redshirts~~ allies to protect you from more permanent consequences. I'll send in my frontline soldiers with a full complement of 8 troops, for example, while my mortar team can get by with just three friends along for the ride as they're further from combat.

I've quickly become desensitised to the bloodshed.

It feels very Starship Troopers as you move weapons teams into position to drop mortars or powerful anti-tank rounds on your enemies. It feels very Starship Troopers when an alien drops a steaming glob of death on your squad and two people die instantly. It feels closer in tone to 1994's seminal X-Com: UFO Defense in the way death comes so quickly. XCOM, by comparison, feels like controlling a SWAT team.

Positioning and cover are key. There's no feeling quite like pulling back to a defensive position and drawing your enemies in so that you can shred them with a mounted machine-gun, or outright eviscerating your opponents with an anti-material rifle.

In my 15 hours I've lost easily a hundred men, bartering looted equipment and organs pilfered from dead aliens for a handful of new troopers when stocks get low. Recruiting new soldiers is hard, much more expensive than it feels like it should be, but it adds a touch of friction to proceedings.

I haven't yet lost any of my commanders permanently - although it can happen, and as you have to manually assign skills through promotion, it's definitely going to hurt when that starts – but I've quickly become desensitised to the bloodshed.

It didn't used to be this way. I viewed every death on my watch as a failure. Then I had to push into an enemy base to destroy a fortress ringed with mortars, walking mechs, and artillery. Commanders get tired if you send them on too many operations, and when I decided to take on the fortress, most of my A-team were recuperating. This wasn't a mission for my B-team — and yet, here we were.

I restarted a few times, save-scumming to keep my hands clean, until I eventually realized there wasn't a win to be found here, only different degrees of loss. I lost around 15 troopers and had to sell every scrap of loot I earned just to recruit 10 back. But that was the moment Menace finally clicked for me. It isn't a game about making the right choice. It's a game about choosing between several bad ones, then living with the consequences long after the shooting stops.

Check out the best strategy games of all time to play in 2026 if you've already tried Menace in Early Access.