There are games that hold your hand, and then there are games that throw you into traffic and see if you learn how to cross the street before you get flattened.
MENACE is unapologetically the second kind. Developed by Overhype Studios and published by Hooded Horse, MENACE will enter Early Access on February 5th, 2026, and right out of the gate it makes one thing very clear: this is a serious turn-based strategy game that assumes you’re willing to bleed a little to understand it.
For transparency’s sake, I received an Early Access key directly from Marcello, the guru of turn-based games, which let me spend serious time with the game ahead of release. I played MENACE on a high-end PC, an i9 paired with an NVIDIA 4070 Super, and performance-wise, the game never gave me a reason to complain. But MENACE isn’t the kind of game where specs are the story. Systems are.
From the moment you start playing, MENACE knows exactly what it wants to be. This is not a cinematic power fantasy, and it’s not a casual tactics snack.
It’s a squad-based, turn-based war game that lives somewhere in the same galaxy as XCOM, my personal gold standard for the genre, but it carves its own path almost immediately. You don’t command lone superheroes; you command squads. Units move, fight, panic, and collapse as groups, and that single design choice fundamentally changes how every battle unfolds.
The immersion hits fast. Choosing squad leaders, assembling teams, locking in early loadouts with strictly basic weapons, it all pulls you in immediately.
The sense of progression is deliberately slow and earned. New weapons don’t rain from the sky, and there’s no passive income stream quietly padding your resources. Everything you acquire comes from missions and operations, and what you don’t need gets traded on the black market so you can inch closer to what you actually want. MENACE respects scarcity, and it makes you feel every limitation.
That said, the game’s biggest early sin is also impossible to ignore: the tutorial is borderline useless. MENACE explains almost nothing. Mechanics, systems, interactions, you’re expected to discover them the hard way, through trial, error, and occasionally screaming at your monitor.
My advice is simple and non-negotiable: play your first run on Normal, which is the lowest difficulty, unless you enjoy being obliterated while still trying to figure out how half the game works. Even on Normal, certain missions hit hard, and once you realize how much the game is withholding in terms of instruction, the challenge makes more sense, but it’s still rough.
The core gameplay loop is where MENACE really starts flexing. On the strategy layer, you select leaders, build squads, and tailor loadouts for specific missions. Missions are grouped into operations, and operations are the true heartbeat of the game.
After each mission, you collect loot, new weapons, equipment, resources, and if you manage to complete the full operation successfully, you’re rewarded with something more substantial. Between operations, you upgrade ship systems on the Impetus, including weapons tech, intelligence capabilities, and medical facilities.
It’s a tight loop that constantly pulls you forward with the promise of better tools and harder decisions.
Moment to moment, MENACE feels excellent to control. Keyboard and mouse input are responsive, intuitive, and stable. I encountered no gameplay bugs during normal play, and everything from unit selection to movement felt smooth and deliberate. For an Early Access title, that level of polish is impressive.
The game is loaded with systems, and even at this stage, the mechanical complexity is impressive. The learning curve itself isn’t steep in theory, but because the game refuses to teach you properly, you’re forced to uncover basic rules through experimentation.
Strafing, rescuing authority figures or civilians, picking up cargo, none of this is clearly explained. You might logically assume vehicles handle cargo, only to discover after multiple failed attempts that only infantry squads can do it. The game never tells you. You just fail until you stop failing.
Gear descriptions are detailed and clear, but compatibility isn’t always obvious. You might buy a machine gun that looks perfect for a vehicle, only to realize it doesn’t fit that platform at all. You can trade items back, so you’re not permanently punished, but the time spent figuring out what works and what doesn’t adds unnecessary friction. MENACE respects intelligence, but sometimes it confuses silence with elegance.
In terms of content variety, Early Access already offers a solid spread. There are multiple mission types, several factions beyond the central menace itself, some of which I still haven’t encountered, and enough structural diversity to keep things interesting.
It’s also obvious this is a foundation. With more factions and mission types added over time, MENACE could grow into something truly special.
Difficulty balance is no joke. Normal difficulty, which is explicitly the entry point, can be punishing, especially while you’re still learning hidden mechanics. Many of my early failures weren’t tactical mistakes so much as knowledge gaps. Once I finish this first run, I fully intend to move up to Challenging and beyond, which says a lot about how compelling the systems are despite the initial friction.
Progression is constant and satisfying. You’re always unlocking something, new weapons, new skills, squad upgrades, and every completed operation brings that familiar, addictive moment where you survey the rewards and plan how to improve your forces.
Fatigue is a major factor. Soldiers and drivers get tired, frustrated, or injured, and pushing them too hard directly impacts battlefield performance. That design choice forces you to maintain multiple squads and vehicles instead of relying on one overpowered dream team. At least two vehicles early on is borderline mandatory, and three or four squads quickly become essential.
Enemy AI on Normal difficulty is aggressive and surprisingly resilient. Some missions throw relentless waves at you, often equipped better than your own troops at that stage. MENACE doesn’t rely on clever tricks as much as sustained threat, and it works.
Another thing MENACE desperately needs is a small reference map during missions. You can study the layout and enemy placements before deployment, but the second the mission launches, that intelligence might as well get flushed out the airlock.
If you forget where enemies or hideouts were positioned, all that careful planning becomes pointless, because there’s no mini-map or reference overlay to guide you. It makes you wonder what the hell the point of an intelligence briefing is if it evaporates the moment boots hit the ground.
At one point, I actually caught myself sketching enemy locations on a loose sheet of paper just to keep track of things. Let that sink in; it’s 2026, I’m playing a PC strategy game, and I’m using pen and paper like it’s a tabletop war sim from the nineties. That’s not immersive, that’s unnecessarily archaic.
Narratively, MENACE takes place across distant planets occupied by different factions, leaning more toward functional world-building than heavy lore dumps.
The writing does its job without becoming intrusive, dialogue during battles is restrained and effective, and squad leaders have distinct personalities without stealing focus. The pacing is solid, and the chaos of combat, explosions, gunfire, and collapsing structures keeps things moving without overwhelming the player. Importantly, gameplay and story are aligned; nothing feels like it’s fighting the systems underneath.
Visually, MENACE looks excellent. Running everything maxed out, the game delivers strong animations, convincing destruction, and environments that sell the weight of combat. Explosions feel heavy, buildings crumble believably, and the overall art direction strikes a balance between realism and clarity. Performance remains smooth throughout.
Sound design supports that weight beautifully. Weapons sound dangerous, ambience builds tension, and combat music does exactly what it should, keeping you on edge without overstaying its welcome. Voice acting is solid across the board, and the audio mix never became distracting or muddy during my time with the game.
Load times are lightning fast, making it easy to step away and jump back in without friction. Over dozens of hours, I experienced a single crash when steam itself gave up after the game was left unattended for hours.
Otherwise, the experience was rock solid. For Early Access, that’s a win, but one Early Access limitation that really needs to be addressed is the inability to save during missions.
Once a mission starts, you’re locked in until it’s finished. That means if you want to take a break, deal with real life, or simply step away for a bit, you can’t just save and exit, you must push through and complete the entire mission first.
In a game where missions can run long and demand full concentration, this quickly becomes frustrating. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it is annoying, and it’s something I hope gets addressed sooner rather than later.
MENACE doesn’t have many direct competitors because of its squad-centric structure, but if you need a reference point, XCOM 2 is the closest comparison, though the two games approach tactics very differently. MENACE pushes the genre forward by stripping away safety nets and focusing on momentum, attrition, and squad-level decision-making instead of overwatch chess and superhero turns.
This is a game for players who loved XCOM, Jagged Alliance 3, and Chaos Gate: Daemon Hunters, but it is not a clone of any of them. RTS fans may struggle with the pacing and structure, though some might still find something to love here. Be warned: this game is dangerously addictive. If you value your free time, or your relationship, plan accordingly.
MENACE’s greatest strengths are its innovative squad combat, its operation structure where one bad mission can poison the whole run, and its insistence that performance matters, stars aren’t cosmetic, they have consequences.
Its biggest weakness is painfully clear: the lack of instruction. The game desperately needs better onboarding and clearer explanations, and a mini map for God’s sake!
I don’t know the final price yet, but even in Early Access, MENACE feels worth the investment. The foundation is strong, the systems are deep, and the potential is enormous. This could easily grow into a genre-defining strategy game, and possibly a future strategy Game of the Year contender.
MENACE isn’t perfect, but it’s alive, ambitious, and unapologetically demanding. And in a genre that’s been playing it safe for far too long, that alone makes it worth paying attention to.
