MENACE in Early Access: Overhype swaps the sword for the rifle, not the tension

MENACE does not need to sell itself as “XCOM in space.” The label helps place it, but it also shrinks it. What makes Overhype Studios interesting is not that shields became rifles: it is that they kept a very specific obsession, making every tactical decision leave a scar on the campaign.

The game arrived on Steam in Early Access on February 5, 2026, published by Hooded Horse, and it has already had a first major course correction. The SL Update 1 was not a cosmetic patch: it removed the unpopular promotion tax, adjusted supply costs, and reworked the Construct faction.

What matters now is not whether MENACE is “already finished.” It is not. Our reading is clear: it rewards patient players because it dares to be rough, but it will only become great if Overhype separates smart harshness from pointless friction.

You don’t command heroes, you manage losses

The real difference with XCOM is emotional scale. XCOM turns each soldier into an individual, almost cinematic piece. MENACE thinks more in terms of squads, resources, accumulated casualties and trade-offs. Losing people does not just fail a mission: it spends future.

That nuance matters because Overhype has always handled discomfort well. Battle Brothers was not brilliant for its pretty duels, but because every victory could leave you worse off than before: a one-eyed veteran, a broken economy, a company too battered to take the next contract. MENACE tries to move that cruel arithmetic onto an interplanetary front.

The sci-fi dressing is not just scenery. It lets the game bring in vehicles, heavy weapons, orbital support, rival human factions and threats less legible than a band of raiders. MENACE aims for that rare zone where turn-based tactics meets the light wargame: enough simulation to generate emergent stories, without turning every mission into a spreadsheet.

SL Update 1 fixes the wrong kind of friction

The most important data point of these months is not an average score or a Steam tag. It is the kind of change Overhype chose to make first.

The promotion tax penalised unit promotions with extra costs. In theory it protected squad balance. In practice it turned good news into a chore: progressing could feel like a fine. Overhype removed it and rebalanced supply costs to compensate. A small decision on the surface, but revealing in editorial terms.

A healthy Early Access is not the one that adds content endlessly. It is the one that identifies which part of its harshness produces tension and which part only produces chafing. MENACE needs to be severe. It does not need to punish the player for feeling their squad advance.

The same update touched the Construct. According to the summary published by PC Gamer, drones became more numerous but individually more fragile, soldiers lost their rockets, and Guncrawlers inherited the anti-vehicle threat role. A high-tier support unit also arrived.

That redesign heads the right way: an enemy faction should not be hard because it soaks more damage. It should force you to re-read the map.

What MENACE inherits from Battle Brothers

There is a direct line between Battle Brothers and MENACE, but not in genre. It is in the way mistakes turn into narrative.

In Battle Brothers, a bad pursuit could end with two brothers dead, a failed contract and the company selling gear to pay wages. In MENACE, the same logic shifts to soldiers, vehicles, supplies and factions. The fantasy is no longer “my small band survives the medieval mud,” but “my military operation tries not to break in a hostile system.”

That is where the strong promise appears: campaigns you do not just win, but endure. Missions where a timely retreat is worth more than clearing the map. Decisions where sending more soldiers raises immediate safety but drains a reserve you may need later.

It is a less clean fantasy than the perfect strike team. And that suits it. Memorable tactics games do not make you feel smart all the time: they force you to tell apart a good plan, an expensive plan, and a plan that only looks good because you have not yet paid its consequences.

What it still has to prove

Caution is still in order. MENACE is in Early Access, and Overhype plans a long development runway before version 1.0. In a game like this, balance can change completely: costs, factions, maps, campaign pacing, event variety and economic pressure.

The main risk is not technical. It is identity. If MENACE becomes too gentle, it loses the tension that makes it special. If it becomes too opaque, it will only speak to players who already forgave every rough edge in Battle Brothers. The fine line sits between the two: explain more clearly without domesticating, punish less through the interface and more through decisions.

That balance will be measured through consequences, not the size of the patch notes. A casualty can create a memorable campaign when the player understands which choice exposed the squad and what could change next time. It becomes mere irritation when the relevant information appears only after the punishment. Future updates need to preserve tactical uncertainty while making campaign costs legible enough for failure to teach something.

The real breadth of the campaign also remains to be seen. Impressions published by GamesRadar stress the strength of its missions and how each loss turns into strategic pressure. That is promising, but a tactics game of this kind lives or dies on repetition: how many times it can ask for “one more mission” before maps, enemies and objectives start to sound alike.

Variety alone will not solve that problem. MENACE also needs operations to ask different strategic questions: when to risk a vehicle, when to preserve an experienced squad, when a retreat protects more value than an objective provides. If every mission rewards the same cautious formation, the campaign layer will become bookkeeping. If enemy factions and supply constraints keep changing the acceptable cost of victory, Overhype will have translated the best part of Battle Brothers rather than merely borrowing its reputation.

Buy in now or wait

Buying in now makes sense for three profiles: Battle Brothers fans who want to watch Overhype learn in real time, turn-based tactics players who enjoy hard systems, and anyone who accepts that a campaign can change between patches. It is not a universal recommendation.

If you want a finished campaign, stable balance and an experience without visible patchwork, wait. The good news is that MENACE seems to be asking the right questions: SL Update 1 fixed structural friction, not just numbers, and the Construct rework aims at enemies with more identity, not more hit points. The recommendation stays conditional: yes for patient tactical players, no for anyone expecting a 1.0 disguised as Early Access. For more of Hooded Horse’s tactical lineup, our complete XCOM 2 guide covers the benchmark this genre keeps measuring itself against.

Sources: Steam — MENACE, Steam — SL Update 1, PC Gamer — launch date, PC Gamer — SL Update 1, GamesRadar — impressions after launch.