Hard Contact: MENACE

Clean up the galaxy's scum in this demanding turn-based tactics battlefield game.

Nov 12, 2025

‣ MENACE
From: Overhype Studios, Hooded Horse
Platforms: PC
Release: 05 February 2026
Genre: Turn-based Tactical RTS
Steam page • Developer Page
Demo Video • 10 Minute Video

Step up to command a militia group made of marines, mercenaries, and criminals.

[This week’s article was written by Gonçalo Santos. He’s typing mostly coherent gaming thoughts over at Button Musher. Follow him for reviews and coverage of relevant (albeit sometimes only to him) topics. Follow him on Substack.]

Can you lead your troops to victory against aliens and galactic pirates, or is humanity doomed? Welcome to the Wild West of space, in a system outside of the presumably peaceful Core Worlds. Your job is to fight outlaws and keep the peace, whatever the cost.

Step up to command a militia group made of marines, mercenaries, and criminals in Menace, a serious turn-based tactics battlefield game.

In Menace, you control full platoons of soldiers instead of single characters. Battles have a large scope, units are squads and not individual characters, and vehicles play a crucial role. This emphasis on managing units across a larger area defines the main gameplay dynamic. When your units take damage, they don’t just lose points on a health bar— they’re losing soldiers, lowering effective DPS and weakening the unit.

This makes positioning the most crucial skill to develop in order to master Menace. Position always matters in turn-based tactics games, but here it goes into some detail. Soldiers should be behind cover, vehicle weak points must be hidden, and the many gadgets available to you must be taken into account, especially because the enemy also has an arsenal of their own.

Selecting and preparing units is a substantial part of your potential success. What units will you take on a mission? The more you take, the less currency you have to equip them. Take too few units, though, and you risk being overwhelmed by raw enemy numbers.

Customisation is nearly limitless. You can choose primary weapons, special weapons, vehicles, and equip those vehicles with their own guns. Squads can have armor, that armor has pouches which you can fill with items or passive effects like extra ammunition.

Squads also have a signature skill which is always online, and they have exclusive skill trees that make them excel at specific actions. In which will you invest?

The enemy squads are ruthless. Even in the base normal difficulty, Menace is genuinely difficult. The AI is smart and will punish any mistakes you make. You need to plan your approaches, lest you risk losing entire units or having them pinned down for multiple rounds in a row, effectively neutralised.

This pinned down mechanic follows a staple of the genre, which is the suppress, but takes it to a new punishing level. Suppressed units will lose a portion of their Action Points (AP), but once the suppressed bar reaches its max, units will become Pinned Down, which will prevent them from doing any action other than crawl away. They’ll remain like so until they manage to evade enemy fire long enough to reduce their suppressed status.

The cherry on top of this bulky Menace cake are the procedurally-generated missions and maps. Missions in the demo range from holding your ground to rescuing units to forcibly removing some pirate warlords from a base that they had taken over. The maps are visually and thematically varied as you go from planet to planet creating allegiances and helping others fight the overwhelming threat of “pirate warlords, questionable corporations, and fractured planetary governments”.

📽 Demo Snapshot: Get them before they get you

Menace looks excellent, accentuated by its visual diversity. This Unity-built game has a striking style which manages to make a colorful take on grounded realism. Units can be identified by equipment, vehicle types, and color-schemes. The impressive visuals are paired with great sound design and a good soundtrack.

But the star of the show is the fantastic animation work which makes everything feel alive. Soldiers duck in response to enemy fire, cover their ears when an explosion lands close to them, and dive to the ground when the suppression meter reaches the pinned down status. Impressively, these animations look excellent whether you’re fully zoomed in or fully zoomed out.

Every playthrough will differ, at least slightly. You can have a taste of it in the demo, which will start with different missions every time you press New Game. Use this to experiment with different builds, max out units which you might have overlooked, and more.

If you’re up for a challenge and have been craving a tactical experience mixed with some grand strategy elements, I highly recommend you give Menace a try.

MENACE releases on 05 February 2026 on Steam.