Rally Point: Strong simulation and team building can't carry Menace forever

Starship who-pers

The Rally Point is a regular column where the inimitable Sin Vega delves deep into strategy gaming.

It's probably poor form to do another "what I said in a group chat" (this time, to culture critic Rowan Kaiser. Hermits can namedrop too, shut up) intro, but "Oh i already liked menace, that's why I hate it" feels too useful to spurn.

I don't really hate Menace. You've been there, though: a game you enjoy, perhaps even begin to love, but it keeps aggravating you, forcing you to vent before you can play it more. This one is carried through that by a core of turn-based shooting, with some interesting simulation and character levelling that often work well together. And some of its annoyances are natural update fodder during its early access period, as perhaps are some areas that currently feel lacking. But man, does it need that carrying sometimes.

The premise is more intriguing than its execution. Your imperial space marine ship is stranded in a semi-rebellious region, whose three local factions can't survive the eventual retaliation if they kill you, but could use you to take over and become strong enough to. They have resources you need, and problems you can solve, so will essentially hire you, paying directly in "OCI" (ship upgrade points), and indirectly in experience and loot. As your relationship improves, they also offer unique modules to spend those ship points on. Refreshingly, there's no money, so that loot is directly traded on a semi-randomised "black market", which also offers an emergency trickle of manpower at emergency (read: scalping) cost, and new recruitable characters for a more reasonable one (though you can't influence which one shows up).

The removal of money adds a little extra consideration to missions, and the trade-in for newer or more specific gear much more engaging, and those characters mark Menace out as more interesting than the usual theoretically infinite - but in practice, flat - random generation. Still, everything else about faction interaction is a dud in its current form. Most strikingly, which one you work for is irrelevant, as you have to do every mission offered for more to appear, and they never conflict. You only ever fight the usual insectoid hive aliens, "pirates" (ie: random omnicidal idiots), a "rogue" faction that also want to kill everyone for no apparent reason, and eventually, the titular menace itself.

I won't spoil what they are, but it's one of the two or three things you guessed it might be. Although which you guessed might as well be random, as there's no build up to their arrival at all, beyond a very obvious trap. It comes surprisingly far into a game, which I like, but only then are you suddenly expected to know and care who these unskippable and annoying NPCs are, which I obviously don't.

I'm not sure if I disliked the menace (faction) and the challenge they offer, or that they came when I already needed a break, but Menace (game) is either holding back a lot of story, atmosphere, and factional systems for later updates, or it's going to remain a boring and wasted premise that might as well be replaced with "get next random mission". Even the ship upgrades they reward are mostly either terrible, appealing but terrible compared to an alternative, or so wildly useful that they make any other choice feel like a deliberate mistake. Factions don't offer a free choice, either, but a random four from their pool, which meant that several times I was being offered 12 options, of which 11 were worthless to me. In theory, this could mean working with what you've got; an intentional constraint that can elevate a good design into a far more interesting and varied game than boring minmax efficiency. In practice, ship upgrades are so expensive and your slots for them so limited that any sub-optimal picks are worse than installing nothing. There's no reason to pay attention to the factions at all.

Fortunately, they offer those missions, and here's where Menace shines through its blemishes. Your first choice in a campaign is which characters to bring. "Squad leaders" bring infantry, and "pilots" drive ground vehicles (including mechs) solo. Each of these is designed by the developers rather than randomly generated, and instead of classes, each gets a tailored collection of perks to choose from. It's more Jagged Alliance than Battle Brothers, and more interesting for it. You have a free hand to develop them, as instead of individual experience points (though stats like accuracy slowly grow through use), levels are gained when you spend points from a shared pool on whoever you like. These "promotions" are pricier for already perked-up characters, and a multiplier makes some innately cheaper to promote. Promotion only gives a perk, so there's a natural benefit to promoting evenly rather than creating four indispensible XCOM superheroes and a b-list of useless emergency losers. But many perks make other perks more useful, whether it's the more advanced ones unlocked after a few promotions, or, excellently, dipping back to a perk in the first row that could be just as powerful.

It also means you can immediately bump a newcomer up a few times, and since you've no control over who becomes available next (the black market makes a random recruit available, not recruited. You must still pay in Authority to take them) you might do that with an eye for fitting them into the team, not for maximum individual efficiency. Although characters don't meaningfully clash or vibe (some voice lines do fire back and forth, and mercifully I've found nobody as obnoxious as some of JA3's posers), you naturally find pairings who support each other, and a team that supports the whole. There are, no doubt, already guides to the "best" way to "build" everyone, but the design encourages personalisation, and some flexibility, especially since the equipment you give them could double the length of this article.

Each squad leader, see, must bring 2-8 "squaddies" to form a unit, who all get a copy of whichever gun and armour you gave the leader. This adds another figure, and thus more shots to each attack action (like Khaligrad [link], more guys = more shots), and more resilience, since bullets hit individual figures, not a puddle of HP. The same is true of enemies, so a rocket will atomise one, and only one guy of a squad (but even that will reduce their damage output, and probably morale).

But larger squads also mean horrendous losses to explosives and alien ("substances" - sudden low appetite Ed), and cost in "supplies", essentially a per-mission cap on how much you can bring. Smaller units can thus mean bringing more characters with you, but you might bring cheaper weapons instead, or less equipment, or swap the APC for a truck. Four guys can mean eight accurate shots with the good rifle, or 20 shots with the 'weaker' one, each potentially killing another enemy and sapping the morale of the rest. Menace models each individual shot, making them all feel a little tense, and excellent sound effects keep them all satisfying. It also models armour not as flat damage reduction, but a hard barrier that an attack either bypasses, damaging the wearer, or is stopped by, damaging the armour instead, and raising the risk that the next attack will slip through.

And that combines with the realisation you can field 'weak' 2-man teams, who exclusively use specialised weapons that fire once regardless of squaddie count, to exploit their leader's double morale damage or accuracy-reducing perks, refilling their limited ammunition thanks to another leader's scavenging perk. But even these are very rarely limited to specific weapon types - Morale Sapper Guy could be a sniper or a full gang of charging SMG flankers, or a surprise tank buster, or all three on different missions.

Menace has its annoyances, and I expect some refurbishment of its UI in particular - mostly to present and clarify information, especially in battle where there's no saving. Some mission designs have similar problems (having to manually move to specific zones to "evacuate" a map you control uncontested, arbitrary turn limits, and so on), but also feel like they're demi-placeholders probably in the overhaul queue already. Its morale system somehow making a unit with "wavering" morale more vulnerable and useless than a fully pinned or panicking one feels terrible, as does its new system of reducing your morale cap every time you hire, but none of this critically undermines the pacey and satisfying simulated combat, or the just-complex-enough decisions about equipment and army composition.

What limits it most is that I could tell you the name of two characters, and even one of those was just "plucky child soldier" (it’s not an endorsement, more a Starship Troopers kind of light satire) for ages. It's fine for the plot to be fleshed out later, but its existing characters somehow convey less personality than the dynamically generated ones of Battle Brothers, and the NPC characters and factions come across as obnoxious and self-consciously wacky, screaming unfunny jokes, awkward Warhammer references, or po-faced US military genericisms. They are the heart of the game mechanically, and that side of the design is strong, but it lacks the humanity and charm it needs for its big game-changer villain to feel like more than a new chore on the list.