MENACE News

Hey folks, we're incredibly excited to announce that the MENACE demo is going live on September 29, 2025. Check out the release map below to see when the demo goes live for you in your region.

We’re locking in the last updates and fixes as we head into the demo's launch. We know that releasing a demo means a flood of feedback and bug reports, which is why it’s being released on a Monday. With the full team in place, we’ll be ready to tackle issues, answer your questions on Discord, and most importantly, see all of you enjoy the demo.


[h2]What to Expect[/h2][hr][/hr]The demo offers a focused slice of the game with one operation, squad management, missions, and combat.

[h3]Operations and Replayability[/h3]Operations consist of multiple missions on a desert biome planet, giving you access to the tactical layer of the game. They are procedurally generated from a pool of ten mission types, so you can replay them as often as you like, even within this demo slice. Different operations can branch into multiple paths leading to the final mission


[h3]Squad Management[/h3]You’ll have six squad leaders to build your team, supported by a wide range of infantry weapons, special weapons, armor, and accessories. Leaders can be upgraded through promotions, and you can draw from a limited pool of squaddies in the upper left of the loadout screen to expand your squads.

Note: Supplies are limited, so not every squad can enter battle fully equipped.

[h3]Mission Prep[/h3]Mission prep lets you position squads within the deployment zone, adjust loadouts if you’re over or under the supply limit shown in the bottom left, and then launch into combat.

Note: Hovering over enemy squads can provide you with the type of unit you'll be up against.

[h3]Combat[/h3]Once planetside, you’ll face the pirate faction, working to keep your squads alive while completing the mission objective.

We introduced the pirates back in Dev Diary #10:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2432860/view/534342772300185778

[h2]Engage, Explore, and Stay Informed[/h2][hr][/hr]That's it for now! We can’t wait to see you jump in and experience MENACE for yourself on September 29.

You can find us on Discord, BlueSky, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit for discussions, updates, and feedback. You can also subscribe to our monthly MENACE newsletter on our website — just scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

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We have reworked the existing mission reward system into a completely different “real loot” system, where players can acquire the actual items that enemy units carry into battle.

Let’s find out why and how we did that:

[h3]The Old Mission Reward System[/h3][hr][/hr]The mission reward system, which will most likely still be in the demo, was rather simple. After each mission, the player would be confronted with a choice of two random items and had to pick one. These items were pulled from certain loot pools and scaled with item rarity that was increased over the course of the game, but could also be influenced by mission difficulty and other factors.

There was a generic loot pool as well as faction-specific loot pools, so that mission rewards from pirate missions will have a chance to reward the player with pirate-specific items.
The entire system was heavily inspired by Dawn of War 2, from which MENACE draws a significant amount of inspiration.

One of the main advantages of this system is the freedom to design enemies that do not necessarily employ armor and weapons that the player can use. Alien creatures or the Constructs, the game's main enemies, will usually not use items that humans can use. In the same vein, we could design and balance enemies without having to think about the player using the same items.

For example, changing the stats of an enemy would not affect the player, as the player does not use the same items. Also, handing out enemy equipment to the player would make the player units look just like the enemies, making the player units lose their characteristic looks.

Another advantage was the ability to hand out higher-rarity items to the player as rewards for especially difficult missions with maximum freedom. This provides designers with a powerful tool to guide player progression.

Finally, the mission rewards were teased during mission selection so that players could base their operation progression path on what kind of items they expected to get from certain missions. This makes the mission selection more impactful and offers meaningful choices to the player.

The Old Loot System
[h3]Flaws of the Old Reward System[/h3][hr][/hr]The old system does have its merits, but it also has a lot of flaws. The two most important aspects are immersion and player expectations. During early test sessions with press and influencers, we quickly realized that players expect a similar loot system to Battle Brothers, in which you can loot the items of destroyed enemies. What you see is what you get, and destroying a chaingun team will give you a chance to loot their chaingun.
The expectations during testing did not match what was in the game, and a mismatch between the two always creates a negative feeling.

Similarly, the old system was not very immersive. When judging how captivating a game is we always feel that immersion plays a crucial role, especially in games like ours that gravitate towards simulation and realism. When destroying enemy assets, it makes sense within the game world to loot and reuse whatever you can get your hands on. Especially when being stranded in a distant star system with no way to resupply.

Another issue with the old system was the amount of loot; it was just not enough. The upgrades were big but few. This led to a large discrepancy in gear quality across squads, where squads would mostly have either very low or high power items, but there was little general increase in player gear quality.

Lastly, the trade value of the offered reward items was sometimes substantially different. This led to a situation in which players were forced to pick items they did not really want to pick because they were essentially missing out on big trade values.

[h3]The New “Real Loot” System[/h3][hr][/hr]We implemented the new loot system very straightforwardly: Each enemy entity on the battlefield has its own loot table containing all items it can drop on death. These items are mostly 100% the ones the unit is actually using, but dividing this into a separate table gives us a little wiggle room to sprinkle some extra loot drops in or have the enemies drop armors that come with a different look when used by the player. This way, we can make sure players use the same items as the enemies, but also retain their distinct looks.

Each item in the loot table has an X% chance to drop on the unit's death. The exact percentage will be tweaked during testing, but it currently sits at 20%. Each item in the list is rolled separately, so a unit with more items has a chance to also drop more items on death.

Items from destroyed enemies will not show up on the battlemap itself but are instead shown on the mission result screen. As there is no actual inventory system in the game, there is no way to pick up or change items during combat.

To compensate for the significantly larger loot pools, we have increased the trader prices on the black market substantially. With the new loot system, players will struggle to loot substantial upgrades to their equipment, especially when fighting enemies like pirates who use a lot of makeshift weaponry.

However, the black market offers a decent variety of factory-new gear that can be traded for.

The amount of loot now makes it much more feasible to trade for needed upgrades while still having constant, smaller upgrades to the player's arsenal. It feels much more rewarding and immersive, and matches player expectations much better.

Here is a sample of the post-battle loot when fighting pirates:

Alright, that's it for now until next Friday.

[h2]Engage, Explore, and Stay Informed[/h2][hr][/hr][p]That's it for now! We'll see you next Friday.

You can find us on Discord, BlueSky, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit for discussions, updates, and feedback. You can also subscribe to our monthly MENACE newsletter on our website — just scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

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[p]This week, we mainly focused on finalizing the MENACE public demo. Fixing bugs, adjusting the difficulty (aka making it more difficult), adding missing icons, and lots and lots of playtesting.

To publish the demo, we also have to prepare a Steam Build that can be uploaded and updated.

Apart from that, the whole project had to be transitioned to Unity 6, which also tied up a bunch of resources.

The tasks mentioned above unfortunately are not making up a juicy dev diary, so we don’t really have a lot of new stuff to show.

What is worth mentioning, though, is that the week began with a big media push as a bunch of new articles and previews about MENACE got published. On Monday, Jan and I invested an afternoon in visiting German streamer and YouTuber HandofBlood in his studio for a live MENACE play session, the first time.

To round things out, we also published a teaser for a MENACE cinematic that is in the works. The whole cinematic will be approximately 1 minute and 20 seconds long and will be released later this year. Syama Pedersen directs it, who is known for his video series "Astartes," and it was produced by the Canadian visual effects studio Hoplite.

To help you bridge the time until the demo is released at the end of the month, we have compiled a list of links to new articles and media for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy!

Gamesradar and PC Gamer Articles.
[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Interview with PC Gamer.[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]MENACE Play Session with HandofBlood.[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Party Elite[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Grid Commander[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Marbozir[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Easily Distracted Games[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][h2]Engage, Explore, and Stay Informed[/h2][hr][/hr][p]That's it for now! We'll see you next Friday.

You can find us on Discord, BlueSky, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit for discussions, updates, and feedback. You can also subscribe to our monthly MENACE newsletter on our website — just scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.
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[p]As we approach the release of a public demo for MENACE, the pace has picked up, and the team has shifted from implementing new features to bug fixing, polishing, and balancing.  [/p][p][/p][h3]Preparing the Demo – Tactical Focus and Replayability[/h3][hr][/hr][p]As we announced earlier, there will be a public MENACE demo in late September. We are currently working intensely on preparing and testing the demo to ensure it offers a substantial amount of playtime and has as few bugs and issues as possible. [/p][p][/p][p]The demo will focus on the tactical combat aspect of the game and will feature a full-scale operation comprising a series of procedurally generated missions. The missions themselves will be different every time you start the demo -- just like the item rewards, enemy army compositions, maps, and so on. Replaying the demo is highly encouraged, as you will find and encounter new things with every run! [/p][p][/p][p]The demo is set in an advanced game state, where players have already completed 8-10 operations. Players will have a wide variety of squads and equipment to choose from, and the tactical battles will be of a decent size. [/p][p][/p][h3]Pirate Idle Variations – Distinct Faction Identity[/h3][hr][/hr][p]Up until now, all human entities in the game drew from the same set of animations. This was necessary as we need to make the most of the limited resources available. With the zoomed-out view of the game, individual soldier animations are not a top priority for optimization.

However, we always loved how, in other games, different factions feature different animation sets, especially their idle animations. This helps to quickly identify units of different factions and also really helps build the world, as the animations are a visual tool to tell players about the factions.

A pirate will have a completely different body language than a combat-trained Marine. The pirates are wild, undisciplined, drugged up, and not well-trained. This should reflect in their animations. They have to be immediately recognizable, even at a distance, by breaking up the classic “combat-ready” marine silhouette we have been using so far.

This is why we started adding unique idle animations to this faction.

We hope to keep expanding on this system to include more factions and more animations as development continues:
[/p][p][/p][h3]Alien Wildlife - New Enemy Units[/h3][hr][/hr][p]For the alien wildlife faction, we started creating a flying creature that gives the faction a lot more mobility and speed to disrupt the players' plans. Up until now, the aliens have been restricted to moving on the ground, which makes it easy to predict their next move and assess their threat range.

The new flying creatures will move over long distances, ignoring obstacles in their path, and are a lot less predictable.
[/p][p][/p][h3]Testing and Balancing - Polishing Before Early Access[/h3][hr][/hr][p]We have now reached the point at which we have shifted our development focus to playtesting and balancing to improve progression, game flow, difficulty, and so on.

The whole game in its Early Access state is now playable, but it still lacks a lot of polish, minor fixes, and improvements. This includes such trivial things as missing item icons -- and yes, the EA build will have some placeholder icons in it. But it also extends to finding out why certain lights do not work properly under some lighting conditions or why an enemy unit refuses to use a certain skill effectively, which can take a lot of time.

In order to minimize the impact of new content messing up balancing, breaking up systems, or introducing new bugs, we almost stopped adding new things to the game and instead focused on improving everything that is in the game.

After launching into Early Access, we will go back to regular large content updates, of course. [/p][p][/p][h3]Squadleader VOs – Bringing Characters to Life[/h3][hr][/hr][p]All the Squadleaders and Pilots in the game will come with voiced combat barks. There will also be VO for certain characters and situations outside of combat. Over the past week, we had numerous recording sessions with professional voice actors, alongside SIDE, who have already worked on games such as Cyberpunk, Kingdom Come, and Baldur's Gate 3.

The voice lines really help bring the characters to life and push the immersion to a new level. With the extreme range of different backgrounds that have to come together to fight the MENACE, bringing on a new SL into combat always brings a fresh angle and new barks. Each character has their own lingo, attitude, expression, and speech patterns.

[/p][h2]Engage, Explore, and Stay Informed[/h2][hr][/hr][p]That's it for now! We'll see you next Friday.

You can find us on Discord, BlueSky, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit for discussions, updates, and feedback. You can also subscribe to our monthly MENACE newsletter on our website — just scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

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Hey MENACE fans!

Hooded Horse team here. As Jan and Paul make their way back home after an eventful Gamescom, we wanted to share the promised updates on MENACE in their stead.

While at Gamescom, Jan & Paul gave press and content creators some hands-on time with MENACE. Expect to see some new information and footage from those sessions in the coming weeks.

And we know that you all are eager to get your hands on the game as well. So we’re excited to share that the development team will be releasing a demo of the game in late September!

For the sake of transparency, we’d also like to confirm that MENACE will not be released in Q3 of this year as originally planned. We’ll have a more detailed community update to share in early September regarding the new release timeline, so keep an eye out for that.

Thank you all for your ongoing support of the game and the team, and for your patience as they make MENACE the best it can be. We look forward to hearing all of your thoughts on the upcoming demo!

– The Hooded Horse Team