You start Menace with 4 squad leaders, chosen from a pool of 8. During the game you can hire additional squad leaders randomly, including those you didn't initially chose, out of a total pool of 16. Squad leaders come in two flavors, infantry or pilot. Pilot squad leaders don't actually have a squad, but have a vehicle like a jeep, armored personnel carrier, or walker mech instead. Infantry squad leaders have between 2 and 8 squaddies; they also have a squad weapon, which is carried by every member of the squad, and a special weapon, which is only carried by the squad leader. Thus when using the squad weapon, the damage output is multiplied by the total number of squad members, but when using a special weapon, the squaddies are just meat shields.

The interest of Menace lies in the huge amount of possible combinations this system allows. Squad leaders have a tech tree that has both generic skills, and skills only that particular squad leader has. For example, there are special weapons that usually need to be deployed to be used, but one starting squad leader looking suspiciously like Mr. T can fire them from the hip. For every mission you need to consider which squad leaders to bring, what squad weapons and special weapons they should use, what accessories like grenades or ammo pouches would be useful. The sniper rifle with the high armor piercing might be great against strong single / small group enemies, but relatively useless against large swarms.

What you can bring is double limited: You start out with crap equipment, and neither need to find better items, or barter other loot on the black market to buy some. But every mission also comes with a supply point limit, so even if you have a lot of different squad leaders and good equipment, you can't bring them all. Squaddies are also a resource, so you can run low on those if you have too many casualties. And the supply cost of your squad weapon and armor is multiplied by the number of squaddies (+1), so if you bring a squad leader mostly because of his special weapon, you might consider giving him fewer squaddies.

In addition to all that, Menace also has three friendly factions on the three different planets you can currently visit. Doing operations for them gives you trust with those factions, which unlocks special equipment for your spaceship. That can be some support stuff, like getting new squaddies, or repairing vehicles, or additional combat options like orbital bombardment. While at the start of the game you are fighting just two different types of enemies (pirates or aliens), a third type of enemy (rogue) appears after a few operations, and a fourth type (the cyborg Menace the game is named for) comes somewhere later.

And this is just early access. You currently have already great replayability, with different squad leaders, using different weapons and skills, fighting different enemies on different biomes (forest, desert, snow). And the strategic map suggests that more planets with more factions might come in the future, and there will probably be more enemies and more gear as well. Menace thus has a great potential longevity, and is already good value for money.

Having said that, it isn't easy to get into this game. Menace has three difficulty levels, normal, challenging, and expert. That there is no "easy" difficulty level is not just to protect the easily bruised ego of the average gamer, but also an accurate description: Menace is not easy on normal difficulty. The tutorial doesn't teach you much about the game other than basic controls. And in your first games you are constantly surprised by what the enemies can do, and that can easily result in major losses. Menace also doesn't appear to have any fail forward systems. Your combat missions are part of an operation of usually 3 or 4 missions, and there are limits to how much you can recover between missions. So if you are doing not so great, later missions can become increasingly hard. Or you could end an operation with more losses than gains. Which is bad, because while you have more supply points for your next operation, so does the enemy. If you don't manage to progress your team faster than the enemies do, things can go downhill quickly.

The lack of information can also lead to you taking wrong decisions with very bad consequences. For example you might have decided to stick your original squad leaders and make them stronger, instead of hiring additional ones. Then suddenly the game springs the "weary" debuff on you unannounced, and you learn that you need to rotate squad leaders in order to keep them operating a full strength. If at that point in time you don't have the resources to get new squad leaders, you are royally screwed. With various points in the game like that, where you get punished with a bad consequence for a decision you didn't have the information for to know better, Menace is one of those games which I restarted after reaching mid-game, just because I thought I could do a lot better after knowing more about the game.

The good thing in all that is that it confirms my suspicion that it is worth buying Menace, instead of having time-limited access to it on Game Pass. Menace is still very much early access, and often a bit rough. It is fun to play now, but if you are allergic to unpolished games, it will probably get better in the future. This is something I am having fun playing now, but can easily see myself playing again in the future, when there is more content and more quality of life additions.