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My mission is going south. I've already lost a squad leader who I had to medevac out. Two others - including the driver of my armored vehicle - are already out of commission, recovering back at base from injuries sustained in previous missions. Of the three I have left, one is pinned down in a desperate battle for survival, and the other is out of their most useful ammunition.
This is the final mission of the Steam Next Fest demo of Menace. My task is a simple evacuation - all leaders need to get their squad through the middle of an enemy base to the evac zone. But that enemy base is far heavier-armed than I hoped, and despite my careful progress at the start of the mission, things have gotten bad.
I sent my stealthiest squad out on their own, whereupon they stumbled into an artillery outpost that shredded them, forcing me to use a medical chopper to keep them alive. Down to three squads, I played extremely slowly, doing my best to pick off enemies one by one. But that's easier said than done when your foes are hiding out in their base, and when your game's cover system is as robust as Menace's. It's near impossible to get a clear shot, so I do my best to soften up enemy soldiers with grenades - until I run out of ammo.
While all this has been going on, my most robust squad - equipped with a leader who never backs down from a fight and a few adrenaline shots to keep them moving - has been getting torn apart. Trapped in a narrow alleyway between two groups of enemies, they're holding on extremely well, but now they can't really move. That's because of Menace's suppression system: when bullets or missiles fly, they don't simply remove HP, but affect how much mobility a squad has. A few distant pot shots won't bother you too much, but a heavy bombardment can leave characters unable to do anything except crawl for cover and pray.
This particular squad can soak up a lot of fire before it's truly immobilized, but by this point, it's simply running out of men, especially since an unseen artillery placement seems content to level this entire base if it can take me out in the process. I do my best to position my other squads so they can help out, and when the first squad finally goes down, someone else can rush to the leader's aid, but it's wasted a lot of time, and now I've got a stretch of open desert to sprint across if I want to get out alive.
By this point, my seasoned soldiers have managed to dispatch almost all of the undisciplined pirates between us and our goal, but the enemy artillery is still on both sides, and we've got no way of taking it out - my driver didn't even deploy and the other squad leader had the rocket launcher. This final mission was the one that really allowed me to get to grips with Menace's loadout system, but it hasn't gone to plan here. Each mission grants a certain weight of supplies that you can take with you, affected by exactly how many soldiers you're deploying. But you've also got to work out who should take what - I kitted my sniper squad out with lighter armor, a recon drone, and smoke grenades, which might have been a good loadout if they'd been able to fire a single shot. The grenades worked well on my auxiliary squad, and my shock troops did well with their LMGs, but I really hoped to be able to do more with the rocket launcher, and now it's come to bite me.
The first squad gets clean across the line, the result of a character trait I equipped them with that allows them to gain extra action points as they move. But the support squad is slower, and they're taking artillery fire from both sides until they're completely immobilized. I've got no way of dealing with the enemy's big guns, and so all I can do is watch. Eventually, I get a stroke of luck as an enemy bombardment fires wide, freeing up just enough space for my final squad to get to the evac zone.
Menace's demo is relatively slimline - just three missions on one playthrough, with a lot of predetermined equipment - but I immediately understood where the hype is coming from. I love a turn-based strategy game, but the leader of the pack has long been XCOM 2, which I never really got on with. Menace tweaks that formula just enough to make it feel pleasantly familiar, but gets rid of some of the cheapness that I felt XCOM suffered from. The suppression system is an excellent way to make you feel the impact of an enemy barrage without simply ripping your favorite characters from you, and it's made me very excited to get my hands on the rest of Menace next year.
A new contender on our list of the best strategy games, perhaps?
