We don't cover many videogames here at Wargamer, unless they're directly connected to a major tabletop game, but we sure do play them, and hoo boy has the team played a lot of Menace this week. This sci-fi turn-based strategy game puts you in charge of a mercenary company in a backwater star system, taking jobs from different factions, squashing bugs, putting down rebellions, and blowing up pirates with your personal team of professional killers. It's peak strategy gaming - and I am desperate to see what developers Overhype Studios could do with the Warhammer 40k license if they only had the chance.
Now, the narrative framing for Menace is nothing like Warhammer 40k, more of a near future military sci-fi compared to 40k's grimdark space fantasy. BattleTech or Helldivers are both closer in tone. But from a gameplay perspective, well, I'm adding it to the "honorary 40k game" section of our guide to the best Warhammer 40k games.
The Rebel Guard units you face off against, with their man-portable gun emplacements, scout walkers, and chuntering main battle tanks, feel like the Astra Militarum. The alien xenos look more like Termanids than Tyranids, but they're an alien swarm faction with razor talons and biological artillery all the same.
The units in Menace scale from basic infantry to main battle tanks, artillery, and mechs, and the disparity in scale is communicated viscerally through the animation and sound design. Mortars and machine guns send infantry diving for cover, low-caliber bullets will just bounce off the shell of a fully grown bug warrior, and tanks feel totally invulnerable - until an enemy scout target locks your APC for a weapons team to put a guided missile through its turret. Ranged fire can come in from unseen quarters, whether that's a heavy mortar shell arcing out of the fog of war, or your own sniper picking off an enemy HQ from a concealed position.
This isn't a sim, but it puts the effort in to simulate enough variables that combat feels believable while still being a fun tactical challenge. Critically for the sense of danger and dynamism, every unit has weaknesses, and the missions are varied enough that you need to bring out all the tools in your arsenal at one point or another.
Storming a fortress requires a smoke screen or serious anti-structure firepower to penetrate enemy bunkers, but high explosives are a liability if you're defending a civilian settlement. Covert ops call for infantry and camouflage, while point defense missions will pay dividends for your emplaced weapons teams.
At this point I'm just raving about how good Menace is, so let's bring it back to 40k. There's never been a 40k strategy game focused on this scale of forces, nor dialled in to precisely this gritty tone. Mechanicus, Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters, and Necromunda: Underhive Wars all focus on tiny kill teams of infantry in close quarters engagements, and they're all very pulpy; Gladius zooms all the way out to 4X strategy; Warhammer 40k: Armageddon abstracts to massed army engagements and has a board game vibe; Dawn of War has visceral graphics, but extremely gamey mechanics.
When I say Menace is a bit like a sim, I mean that the way weapons function and units operate is built up from underlying systems. This leads into very believable sci-fi, because anything that isn't real is simply extended from reality.
So vehicles have masses of armor and can field much heavier guns than infantry, but they have turning circles, vulnerable rears, and may have a fixed facing for their main gun - all very realistic. Mechs share armaments and armor plating with vehicles, but they move like infantry, even to the point of being able to crouch down for better cover or to take aim.
Getting to experience that with sci-fi elements taken from the 40k universe would be outstanding. Menace could absolutely represent units like Space Marines as infantry armored like light vehicles, with stacks of health, near invulnerability to suppression, an armed with extremely high caliber assault rifles. Battling against them would feel more epic, more tense, and more like the combat in Warhammer 40k novels than any other game out there.
For full disclosure, team Wargamer was given review samples of Menace by publisher Hooded Horse; the head of communications there is in fact a former editor of the site, Joe Robinson. We've all been playing in our spare time, with the exception of Mollie, who - as a console gamer - is stuck listening to our anecdotes in morning meetings, and gently sobbing into her tea.
If you're more of a fan of Warhammer Fantasy, I can heartily recommend Overhype Studio's first game, Battle Brothers, which has devoured countless hours of my life. If you're getting stuck into Menace at the moment, come and chat about it in the Wargamer Discord community - the whole writing team (minus Mollie) is having a fantastic time. And for a weekly roundup of all our best stories, sign up to the Wargamer newsletter!