I played the demo, but it didn't grab me. I played over 80 hours of Battle Brothers, but called it a quite well reviewed pain in the ass. Unfortunately, Menace is missing two major features that made Battle Brothers good: The oversized character heads on the battle map (characters in Menace are too tiny to recognize at all), and the map exploration part of the game. Menace does share the lack of accessibility of Battle Brothers, but that obviously isn't a good thing.

I really wonder if the game would have received any hype without that Battle Brothers pedigree. Honestly, just look at some screenshots: The game looks awful, the UI is all wrong, there is too much unnecessary tiny text all over, and the buttons are too small. In actual use it turns out that a lack of tooltips often results in information you can't understand or easily find out about. This is one of those games in which you would have to do hard work for hours before having any fun at all. Menace certainly is deep, and has a lot of replayability, but the learning curve is steep and painful.

I played the Menace demo on Steam. But then an instinct I required over the past few years kicked in, and I checked whether the game will be available on Game Pass. Yes, it will, from day one. Which means that I will absolutely not buy the game on Steam. I don't have a current Game Pass subscription, due to a money saving scheme of mine where I don't pay for subscriptions I am not currently using much. But I'll probably be subscribed to Game Pass for some months later in 2026, and I might have a second look at Menace then. There is also some suggestion that on release Menace will still be a bit rough around the edges, and waiting a few patches might actually be a good idea.