After losing 92 soldiers in Menace, I'll never call XCOM brutal again

I've called XCOM brutal for years. Menace, a new strategy game from Battle Brothers creator Overhype Studios, lives almost entirely on that same knife edge, but unlike XCOM it never lets you step back onto solid ground: there's always another fight to win, another compromise to make, and never quite enough resources to recover from the last deployment.

Menace measures your health in people. You command squads rather than heroes, and mistakes are absorbed by soldiers with names who die messy, horrible deaths. Each trooper costs supplies to field, so you must choose squad size carefully: a frontline team might go out with eight, while a mortar crew can get by with just three.

Recruiting is hard and expensive—after 15 hours I had lost easily a hundred men and found myself bartering looted equipment and organs from dead aliens to refill the ranks. The game feels very Starship Troopers when you move weapons teams into position to drop mortars or anti-tank rounds, and it echoes 1994's X-Com: UFO Defense in how quickly death arrives.