Video Game / MENACE

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MENACE is a grid-based turn-based tactics game developed by Overhype Studios, the studios behind Battle Brothers.

The player commands a strike force of marines, mercenaries, and criminals in a distant system, cut off from the Core Worlds. At the lawless frontier, the Wayback system is controlled by pirate warlords, questionable corporations, and fractured planetary governments who struggle for a new order with the occasional bug infestations happening on the planets of the system. While this happens and you are bringing order to the system, nobody sees (until it's too late that is) a wholly different kind of enemy rearing its head. One that is the stuff of nightmares...

The game has entered Early Access on Steam on February 5th 2026.

Previews: Announcement Trailer, Snow Biome Teaser, Gameplay Trailer, Cinematic Teaser, Release Date Trailer, Demo How-To-Guide, Cinematic Trailer, Launch Trailer

MENACE contains examples of:

• Action Bomb: MENACE fields at least two bomber units: a floater mine and a group of three suicide bombers which are engineered from humans.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Unusually common among the squad leaders - Renu Rewa, Ivory Isom, Sachin Singh... Marta Carda may not be a direct example, but the two parts of her name are extremely similar nonetheless.
• Aerith and Bob: The loading screen quotes give us characters with names like "Queen Hakimi of Toliman’s Remainder" and "Murdock" to contrast, while even among currently implemented squad leaders, there is a significant difference in origin culture between characters with names like Jane Darby or Edwin Pike and names like Tekko'Beo Phosa or Sachin Singh.
• The Aesthetics of Technology: Equipment tiers are easy to tell apart at a glance.
  • The early-game pirate gear looks crude and rusty, befitting its cobbled-together and poorly maintained nature.
  • The mid-game equipment of the Rogue Army is entirely based on real-world 21st century weapons and armor, with most pieces of kit in this category having the drab-green coloration that's widely associated with the military. It's the sort of gear you'd expect to find in a backwater army near the edge of civilized space.
  • Late-game materiel is forged in the TCR core regions and far more advanced than anything manufactured in the Wayback. Its designs are streamlined, often boxy in shape, with smooth surfaces and sharp angles. Most weapons have a digital ammo counter on their frame, and almost all of this stuff is painted a clean desert tan.
• A.K.A.-47: Most of the non-scifi guns are very obviously based on real-life firearms, but with custom names to keep things lawyer-friendly.
  • Unsurprisingly for a game made in Germany, several guns are inspired by Heckler & Koch's catalogue. The Crowbar for instance is a barely altered G3, the MP3A9 is a spiffed-up MP5, and the CTMP 45 is a tricked-out UMP.
  • The Griffin and its derivatives are based on the KRISS Vector.
  • Most assault rifles are heavily inspired by the classic AR15 and AK47 platforms. The R14A2 ARC is based on another H&K gun, the prototype XM8.
  • One of the handguns is a modernized Colt 1911.
• The All-Seeing A.I.: One of the main criticisms of the game's demo version was that the AI was blatantly aware of the player units' weapon ranges, as well as any incoming off-map weapon abilities, both of which it skillfully avoided almost without fault. While the latter was quickly addressed following the Early Access release, the former still holds true. That said, the player can check enemy weapon and sight ranges themselves at any time, so at least it's fair play.
• Always Accurate Attack: J.G. Wetteroth has an unlockable skill called “THIS is a knife!” that lets him do a melee attack on any adjacent enemy. It never misses.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • The rather unique governance system of the Backbone sees its prospective leaders willingly undergo amputation as part of their election process. This is done as a show of dedication to both the role of leader and to the people of The Backbone, as their self-inflicted crippling makes them reliant on the community for aid they are expected to return. Their representative to the TCR, Xiao Xiao, seemingly offered up both of her arms as part of this process.
  • Shooting up MENACE drone squads makes a whole lot of limbs go flying in all directions.
• Antagonist Title: The MENACE itself is the advertised Big Bad of the game.
• Antagonistic Governor: Field Marshal Zama, head of the corrupt Planetary Jingwei, constantly talks down on the Major and calls the intelligence officer "secretary".
• Anti-Armor: Units have both an armor rating and armor durability. Weapons with sufficiently high armor penetration simply ignore the target's armor and deal full damage to the health bar underneath; laser weapons are particularly good at this. On the other hand, some weapons like plasma guns and (for some reason) shotguns are really good at destroying armor outright, allowing anyone else nearby to finish the now defenseless target off.
• Apocalyptic Logistics: Implied. Even had the 'Dis-Straightening' incident not happened, the TCRN Impetus would have had to make do with the degraded barter economy and haphazard resources available in the Wayback. Which would explain the seemingly infinite amount of semiauto carbines and fatigues available from the onset, and why you're forced to procure advanced Core Worlds equipment (implicitly including actual TCR military hardware) via the black market.
• Arm Cannon:
  • Walkers, especially the medium walker, have their guns where a humanoid would have its arms instead.
  • Some MENACE units, like the soldier constructs or the skirmishers, have their guns fused into their forearms. And similar to the human walkers, the MENACE gun crawler's arms are its cannons.
• Armor of Invincibility: The TCR Navy Breaching Armor Suit - Heavy (BAS-H) is the superheavy suit of Powered Armor that is worn by the TCR point man in the intro cinematic. With a higher armor rating than the APC, and only slightly less than the medium walker or the IFV, it makes the wearer almost Immune to Bullets for an extended period of time. The downsides? Heavy encumbrance, reduced vision, and enormous deployment costs of 55 points per squaddie, or 495 points for a full squad (in other words, very likely to at least double that squad's point cost). It's fairly hard to find on the black market, and prohibitively expensive to buy in case it does show up for sale.
• Artificial Limbs: Garry "Bog" Boganwright is missing both legs and they are replaced with mechanical replacements. Xiao Xiao, the representative of the Backbone also has two arms replaced with artificial limbs due to the unique election process of their planet. All MENACE units as well have some amount of cybernetic augmentation, from a few implants haphazardly added to the human seemingly being little more than a Wetware CPU for a tank equivalent.
• Artificial Zombie: Most of the MENACE troops appear to be these, looking like corpses in various states of decay crammed full of cybernetic implants and used as shock troops.
• Artistic License – Military: Aside from none of the "tanks" in the game actually being tanks, the Rogue Army's heavy tanks have all their ERA^note Explosive Reactive Armor bricks mounted on the vehicle's top side. Unless the Jingwei's armies normally fight enemies that only shoot at tanks when they're below them, or field nothing but advanced missile launchers that attack from above, this would make the ERA completely useless against the sort of threats it's designed to defend against.
• Attack Its Weak Point: True to Real Life, military vehicles have different levels of armor on their various facings, with the frontal armor always being the thickest. It's therefore recommended to try and attack enemy armor from the sides or even from the rear in order to maximize the chances of punching through the plating.
• Authority in Name Only: Downplayed. On paper, the Planetary Jingwei holds jurisdiction over the Wayback and answers to the TCR. In practice, it's one competing faction out of many (though still commands some measure of respect and control), with Field Marshal Zama acting more like a warlord than a representative of a distant government.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The game offers a variety of transport vehicles, from ramshackle pirate trucks all the way up to full-fledged military IFVs. Most pull double duty as mobile weapons platforms, either carrying medium and light weapons in addition to their passengers, or a heavy weapon system that removes the vehicle's transport capacity.
• Badass Normal: Most squaddies would qualify considering the initial marines that came with TCRN Impetus are quite limited and the other squaddies are manpower drawn from the locals (some are implied to be civilians).
• Bag of Spilling: An in-universe example. When the TCRN Impetus entered the warp gate to the Wayback it was stocked with all the gear you'd expect of a marine expeditionary force. On exit, it suffered a 'Dis-Straightening' incident that kills most of the crew, including the entire command staff and most of the marines brought along with it. Leaving you to stabilize the system with a handful of marines, a rocket launcher, one personal and one vehicle MMG, a light transport, and all the semiauto carbines and duty fatigues you could ask for.
• Big Damn Heroes: Essentially what the marine expeditionary force is to most of the locals, they can save locals citizens and protect settlements from hostile attacks by anything from native wildlife to cyborg abominations.
• BFG: Plenty of these, many of which require the using squad to deploy before using.
  • Special mention must be made of the MK22MOD1, a heavy assault rifle firing a fictional 12.7x55mm round (basically halfway between .50AE and .50BMG). Although rather short-ranged, the thing packs such a ludicrous punch that a squad equipped with these doesn't need to carry anti-vehicle weapons anymore.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: On one side, you have the Wayback factions, comprised of a corrupt government overseeing a collection of crime syndicates and megacorps, neither of which cares one bit for the people under its rule. On the other, the TCR, an expansionist high-tech civilization hellbent on forcefully annexing any independent star systems it can get its hands on. The only reason the TCR isn't just another villain in this scenario is the sheer awfulness of the Wayback's situation even before the MENACE gets involved, and the decent chance that things might improve a bit once they take over.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: The flavor text for the bonus granted by VIP rescue missions state that it is apparently standard practice after the TCR rescues an HVT to go through their belongings for anything embarrassing or incriminating to use against the rescued hostages, just in case the gratitude isn't enough. The fact that this is blackmail is of course, buried in euphemisms.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: If you shoot at something whose armor your weapon can't penetrate outright, said armor will act as a secondary health bar that must be chewed through first, barring the odd lucky penetrating hit on occasion. It's why the armor damage stat on weapons exists separately from the armor penetration value.
• Body Horror: The MENACE. Their units are grotesque amalgamations of harvested body parts from dead humans (if the operation where you first encounter them is of any indication) and salvaged machinery.
• Boom, Headshot!: Squad leaders armed with sniper rifles will aim for the head when ordered to shoot anything humanoid, with killshots either popping the target's head like a melon or ripping it off entirely and sending it flying.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The various universal perks that almost every squad leader has access to are the definition of this. They're nothing flashy, but they provide highly useful buffs like increased movement range, longer vision and detection ranges, better stat improvements over time, more health, or better mobility for drivers.
  • The Impetus' weapon slots can be filled with all sorts of firepower to rain Death from Above on your hapless enemies. Or you can outfit your ship to instead drop some supply crates that refill your squads' ammo, twice per battle. In a game where squads can quickly run out of ammo, this is often more valuable than any of the Cool, but Inefficient weapon abilities.
  • In a game with plasma guns, laser rifles, mortars, tanks and tripod-mounted autocannons, one of the best all-around weapons to field is the plain, boring space G3, the BR3A3 Kr-BaR "Crowbar" battle rifle. It's cheap to use, has a reasonable ammo pool, is surprisingly versatile, has excellent range and can punch through most armors short of a dedicated armored vehicle or powered armor, even capable of putting light walkers on the backfoot from the right angles. And because you're often going to be fighting the Rogue Army that field these guns as their main armament, you'll be tripping over the things before long. The only real downsides are that it's not great for close-in work, especially compared to the PDW variants or shotgun, and it has very low suppression capability.
    • This also extends to the Crowbar's two specialist variants. The one fitted with a suppressor is by far the best weapon choice for stealth squads like Darby's, while the HaMER variant is just an all-around upgrade to the base model whose range and damage output rival that of most sniper rifles. Although nominally a mid-tier gun, it remains an excellent piece of kit long after the endgame weapons become available.
  • For vehicle weaponry, even though you have access to exotic plasma and laser weaponry, the most effective weapon is the humble autocannon, which is a Jack of All Stats that can handle pretty much any enemy except for Heavy Tanks, especially if twin linked on a walker.
  • Carda's unique ability Share the Load, all it does is let her carry an extra special weapon ammo for every member of her squad, up to doubling the carried amount. It's simple, but a lifesaver in extended firefights, especially because her starting perk makes her best late in the mission. When combined with powerful special weapons like the ATGM or autocannon and the buff perk to cart them around without penalty, it borders on Simple, yet Awesome.
  • The Rogue Army's T2 RPG is as boring as they come, but there's no better anti-vehicle weapon for infantry squads. It can be fired on the move, is reasonably cheap and accurate, has good range, can punch through all but the heaviest armor, takes out light vehicles in one hit and medium vehicles in two, and carries a decent amount of spare ammo. It also fetches a surprisingly good price on the black market for how low-tech it is, making it useful even if you don't deploy it in battle.
  • The Salvage Teams hull OCI for the Impetus rewards a commodity worth 20 units for every enemy vehicle you destroy. Doesn't sound like much, but the Rogue Army and especially the pirates deploy a lot of easily destroyed vehicles, so this adds up quickly. The upgrade is quick to unlock and cheap to install, and having even a single one active on your ship can make frequent shopping on the black market considerably easier.
• Bottomless Magazines: Laser and plasma weapons have unlimited ammo, but they suffer from Overheating instead if you fire them too often in a short time. Averted hard for conventional projectile weapons, though, where running out of ammo in the middle of a battle can be a very real concern.
• Bug War: One of the early game enemy factions consists of some of the native(?) wildlife of the Wayback system, with operations to contain the spread and wipe out various hives of the creatures whenever they swarm over a planet.
• Car Fu: Any pilot driving a wheeled vehicle can opt to save ammo by simply running over enemy infantry. Walker pilots can do it too, but they're less effective at it.
• Cassette Futurism: Elements of this show up regularly, with CRT monitors being a common motif and the RMC apparently using slide decks for presentation, alongside the starfaring technology and holographic displays of the game.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: Even damaged to the point of near-inoperability, the Impetus seems to have no problems jumping back and forth between the Wayback's planets as the situation requires, which would imply that interplanetary travel has become a trivial matter.
• Civil WarCraft: The Rogue Army against the Planetary Jingwei, since they are just Planetary Jingwei military contingents gone rogue.
• Chicken Walker: Both available Mini-Mecha models have digitigrade legs.
• Combat Drugs: A wide array of combat drugs are can be used to provide temporary buffs to squads.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: If you do nothing at all for about 30 seconds during a mission, one of your squad leaders will pipe up to remind you that they're awaiting your next orders.
• Controllable Helplessness: If a squad is fully suppressed, their only available action is to crawl a short distance.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • Basic walkers when compared to... well, any other vehicle type within the same tier. They're more fragile, carry less firepower and can't transport infantry. Their advantages - slightly better sight range and mobility, as well as slightly lower point costs - aren't all that impactful if you utilize your non-bipedal vehicles smartly, leaving boring old IFVs and trucks as the generally superior choice.
    • That said, Walkers do find their niche in places with tight spaces and sharp corners. With jetpacks attached, they can excel in urban combat, able to jump over obstacles where no wheeled vehicle can.
    • Averted with Medium Walkers. They can be armed with two medium vehicle weapons modules, which are twin-linked if the same type of weapon is installed in both slots (e.g. 2 MMG’s, autocannons, flamethrowers etc). Twin-linked weapons cost the same amount of AP to fire as regular ones, effectively doubling thier firepower. On the flip side, mounting one anti-personnel and one anti-armor weapon provides the walker with both outstanding flexibility and more firepower than most vehicles.
  • The Impetus' off-map weapon abilities have a significant delay between getting called in and actually firing. It's rare for the player to be able to pin down several enemy squads in a small area long enough for them to be hit by the weapon; most of the time they'll simply move out of the area of effect. Even if you do manage to keep the targets in place the whole time, the incoming strike can still scatter and miss them anyway. And even if you actually score a hit on something, the damage dealt tends to be pitiful.
  • Related to the above, the air-dropped laser turret upgrade. You'd think that a twin-linked laser turret would be pretty deadly, but it has poor accuracy, struggles against enemy infantry units, overheats rapidly and becomes a priority target for enemy units, who can very quickly damage it even with basic rifle fire to where it's even less accurate or completely incapable of firing back before destroying it. That said, it does have some uses that are probably unintentional. You can drop it anywhere on the map within range of your units, clearing the fog of war and seeing what may be ahead as a low-cost recon unit that unlike the recon drone costs no AP to use, and because it's considered a fortification rather than an infantry unit, you can use it to block off narrow routes or as cover in areas lacking in it, which it can still function as even when it gets destroyed.
• Cool Starship: TCRN Impetus, even after significant damage wrought by the Dis-Straightening incident, is arguably the best ship operating in the Wayback system.
• Crapsack World: Between aggressive alien fauna, amoral megacorps, criminal syndicates, rampaging rogue army divisions, and a fantastically corrupt central government that does nothing to keep any of the former in check, the Wayback isn't exactly a great place to live. And then the MENACE shows up and starts converting everyone it can get its hands on into horrifying cyborg zombies.
• Critical Hit: High-level units, your squads included, have a low chance of inflicting critical hits that deal more damage than standard hits. Some squad leaders can gain perks that buff their crit game. Vehicles that received critical hits will suffer malfunctions of different severities.
• Crouch and Prone: Squads can deploy, which makes them crouch. This increases their accuracy, makes them harder to hit, and allows the use of some special weapons, but prevents them from moving until they stand up. Walkers can do this too, adding defense against incoming attacks.
• Culture Chop Suey: The Wayback as a whole is a mélange of various cultures and ethnicities which have made the system their home. The Planetary Jingwei is especially indicative of this, being an organization named after a Chinese mythological creature ostensibly led by the very African Field Marshal Zama and consisting largely of British English troops, with Defector from Decadence Sachin Singh being a Sikh.
• Culture Clash: The animosity between the marines that arrived from the Core Worlds and the local Planetary Jingwei (with Field Marshal Zama as their leader) can be seen as this.
• Dangerous Deserter: The Rogue Army faction are all kinds of human forces in the Wayback that follow their own agenda or oppose the rule of the established factions, but unlike pirates, they seem to be better organized and look to be essentially deserters. They appear in the game after your first few operations when Field Marshal Zama calls you to inform that several of his subordinate warlords have broken away from his government and ask for help while simultaneously talking down to you.
• Death from Above: Many ways to inflict this, from mortars and stationary artillery emplacements all the way up to the various strafing runs and orbital weaponry your ship can unleash upon the battlefield.
• Defector from Decadence: Sachin Singh and his squad were among Zama's Planetary Jingwei until they left his army and open themselves for hire. The lack of concern about his defection from TCR Marines led Sachin Singh to better employment opportunities than Zama.
• Disguised Horror Story: The game initially presents itself as a tactical space RPG, pitting your TCR troops against rebels, pirates and native alien fauna. And for a long time, that is indeed what it is. But as the game goes on, you start to encounter strange biomatter, the corpses of your enemies begin to disappear...and soon after that, you encounter an Eldritch Abomination that twists the dead in cybernetic monstrosities, and it only gets worse from there.
• Distress Call: MENACE uses a fake distress call to bait ships to a long-abandoned colony.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Heavy weapons require the unit to be deployed to use. There can be exceptions, see Heavy Equipment Class.
• Drone of Dread: Makes up a good part of the background music while fighting the MENACE.
• Drop Ship: Your forces deploy from the Impetus via dropships, and you can see parts of one in the background of the Squads menu, complete with intricate nose art. It's also implied, though not explicitly stated, that they perform the minigun strafing runs and missile bombing runs you can call in as off-map abilities.
• Early Game Hell: In the beginning the enemy is better equipped and much more numerous than you can reasonably handle simply because you have no good equipment. To get decent equipment you either have to salvage it off your enemies - which is difficult due to them being very lethal because they have good gear and you don't - or trade for them off the black market which presents it's own challenges due to high costs and random spawning of gear.
• Elite Mooks: Xenos have alien warriors, pirates have boarding commandos and veteran scavengers. MENACE however overall feels like a case of Elite Army considering their most basic constructs can pose a significant danger. The closest to an elite that MENACE has is the Soldier Construct and Skirmisher with the Guncrawler standing out the most.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Downplayed.
  • The expeditionary force sent to the Wayback is ostensibly comprised of some of the best the TCR Marines have to offer. That matters little however, when faced with the chaotic mess they're forced to deal with, to say nothing of the titular MENACE. The surviving squad leaders you start out with also run the gamut from fresh rookies to grizzled yet scarred vets.
  • It's possible to play more by the book in terms of recruitment, namely by primarily attracting TCR Marines and operatives scattered throughout the Wayback. Much like your starting squad leaders, however, their expertise isn't a guarentee for success.
• Endless Winter: Dice of the Gods is an ice planet that has large craters on it that make the planet look like a dice.
• Emergency Weapon: The C1A2 SPC carbine is an infantry weapon that has unimpressive stats and only fires 2 shots per squad member. It also costs little Supply and you have an infinite amount of these carbines, so once you get past the Early Game Hell, it can serve as something to dump onto squads dedicated to a special weapon, compensating for the fact that you can't send them into battle without an infantry weapon.
• The Empire: The Wayback factions consider the TCR a colonizing occupation force, and aren't exactly enthusiastic about the idea of being forcefully annexed by them.
• Even the Subtitler Is Stumped: One of the voice lines for pirates has them make some kind of a weird noise, then laugh like a madman. The only thing the subtitles offer is "*Insanity*".
• Eye-Obscuring Hat: Kody Greifinger's profile picture has his cap covering his eyes.
• False Flag Operation: It's not certain if he actually believes it or not, but Zama accuses the TCR of secretly creating the MENACE in order to justify them deploying a full battle fleet to the Wayback.
• Fantastic Slur: Rogue Army troops often refer to the player's units as "tekkers", which is most likely derived from pronouncing the TCR acronym as if it were an actual word.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: The Heavy Tank's main gun is mounted into the hull and can only swivel a bit to the sides, so the whole vehicle must turn to face its target.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Laser weapons exist in various shapes and sizes, from infantry rifles to vehicle-mounted armor killers. They're unique in that they generally penetrate armor without damaging the armor itself in the process, which - as the item description points out - is great for the shooter, but not so great for anyone else who's shooting at the same target and just hitting its armor.
• Fun with Acronyms: The titular MENACE: Mechanically Enhanced+Neurologically Augmented Combat Enemy.
  • This appears in the translated versions as well: In the Russian version it is referred to as "Constantly adapting genetically upgraded biomechanic agressor" which abbreviates to ПАГУБА, which can translate as ruin, doom, or scourge among other things.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Several of the character bios make mention how TCR puts heavy emphasis on the position of squad leader and the high standards therein, fitting quite well with the gameplay's focus on cultivating the talents of your squad leaders.
  • One of the combatants in the intro cinematic is a pirate chaingunner who keeps hosing a heavy TCR marine in lead until his gun jams. Pirate chainguns in-game work exactly like that, having a prodigious rate of fire but also an increasing chance to jam every time you fire them. The cinematic in general is an unusually accurate representation of the gameplay in many ways, especially in terms of how weapons and armor look and work.
• Garrisonable Structures: Certain structures on the map, such as towers, can be garrisoned by your units to provide an advantage in sight and shooting.
• Gathering Steam: Carda starts each mission with a severe penalty to her accuracy and discipline, but gains a bonus to these stats with each turn, removing the penalties at 3 turns, then capping out at 8 turns.
• Gatling Good: Heavy rotary machine guns are available for infantry and vehicles alike, with vehicles being able to mount a twin-linked version for even More Dakka. Although these guns can certainly do a number on opposing infantry, their main use is for suppression. Notably, their rate of fire is depicted unusually realistically, with a 15-round burst taking less than half a second.
• The Generalissimo: Field Marshal Zama fits this trope to a T, he is nominally the leader of the Planetary Jingwei, the Wayback's nominal government. His uniform includes a parted coat with both sides covered in medals a striking deep blue sash and a golden belt. He and the Jingwei are apparently so hated that the mere act of killing Jingwei guardsmen will earn popularity among the locals, leading your Number Two to suggest going against protocol to put down subordinate warlords that rebel against him.
• Geo Effects: Your troops' performance on the battlefield is influenced by various environmental factors like the time of day (vision and detection are reduced in the dark of night) or the weather (snowstorms and other inclement weather also reduce visibility). In the former case, night vision goggles can be equipped to counteract these effects.
• Gorgeous Greek: While Achilleas Kainoo is technically not Greek in the sense that he is not born on Earth and never set foot on Earth, he is from Greek ancestry and looks quite dashing.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The titular MENACE, short for Mechanically Enhanced Neurologically Augmented Combat Enemy. Something that can be called the bastard offspring of The Thing and The Virus with even more malevolence.
• Great Offscreen War: The various reunification campaigns most of your older marines are said to have participated in. The most notable of these was the Martian campaign, which apparently was so bitter Mars is still denied access to terraforming technology (apparently the reason for Carda's low stats), and Mars has become a fervent backer of further reunification campaigns to try and improve their standing.
• Heavy Equipment Class:
  • Tech is so strong and ignorant of regulations that he can wield most special weapons without having to deploy first, making him far more mobile with them.
  • Ivey is basically Tech's pilot equivalent due to a perk that lets her fire heavy vehicle weapons more often than any other pilot can.
• Heavily Armored Mook:
  • Pirates have Boarding Commandos. These units wear heavy armor with jetpacks, which originally allows them to board space vessels. They are the only heavy infantry unit (with the First Mate being a variant of them) for the pirate faction.
  • The Rogue Army has their Heavy Infantry, special forces wearing heavy armor and advanced weapons up to and including laser rifles.
  • Xenos have their warriors and, of course, their huge queens.
  • The MENACE has... well, pretty much everything. Their soldier constructs are especially tanky.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Most squad leaders don't wear helmets, with Marta Carda being the only exception. This apparently rubbed so many players the wrong way that the devs quickly introduced a menu option to make everyone wear a helmet.
• Hero Unit: The various squad leaders are essentially hero units, as opposed to your average squaddies.
• Hold the Line: Several mission types require you to keep an area under your control while killing off enemy units.
• Hunter of Monsters: J.G. Wetteroth was a former Core Worlds CEO who escaped to the Wayback from a corporate malfeaseance trial. He runs a big game hunting operation and his profile pictures looks the part.
• Infinity -1 Sword: If a gun is painted desert tan or a light brown, you can bet that it'll be better than anything else in its class because it means it's of TCR make. That said, there are weapon categories that the TCR doesn't appear to cover, so the reverse isn't entirely true. For instance, they don't seem to like tripod-mounted heavy weapons all that much, with just one example out of many hailing from the core worlds.
• Item Crafting: A major gameplay feature that makes use of the various exotic materials salvaged from destroyed MENACE units. Players can acquire leaked/stolen experimental blueprints on the black market that may then be used to turn MENACE components into powerful weapons and equipment in the Impetus' workshop.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: After your first encounter with MENACE, FM Zama complains about you nuking the site of the encounter after evacuating. Unfortunately, that isn't enough to stop it.
  • As a side note, this whole nuke business is dubious at best because none of the TCR's internal communication even hinted at the site of the last mission being sterilized afterwards, much less with a nuclear weapon. The Player Character certainly never gave this order, and you only learn about it when Zama calls you to complain about it. With the MENACE's origins being unknown and the story still being deep in development, it's entirely possible that Zama himself, or someone else, ordered the nuking, assuming it even happened to begin with; you never see proof of it either way.
• Jerkass: Field Marshal Zama seems to be written specifically to be as disagreeable as possible. The same goes for several of the less upstanding squad leaders you can recruit, with flavors ranging from hyper-arrogant narcissists to full-blown psychopaths.
• Jet Pack: Pirate Boarding Crews wear heavy armor fitted with jetpacks, allowing them to fly over obstacles easily. The Major can equip these to his own units if he's lucky enough to find one, giving his own troops an easy way to outflank enemies. The Black Market also sells a larger version that Walkers can use, and an early patch soon introduced one that can be equipped by any infantry squad as a gadget.
• Jurisdiction Friction: The marines under the Major's command and the Planetary Jingwei under Field Marshal Zama.
• Keystone Army: The Rogue Army's Achilles' Heel is the fact that they rely on HQ units to keep their troops under control, so if the player is able to eliminate them early on, that vastly increases the chances of breaking the army's morale and routing them from the field.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Jean has poor stats, which are hampered even further by poor growth potential. However, her starting perk decreases her Supply cost, which becomes pretty useful once you accumulate lots of Supply-intensive gear.
  • Carda's stats are pretty poor, but her growth potential is the highest out of all the characters available. As well, her starting perk gives her a bonus that stacks higher the longer she's on mission.
  • Lim is an average squad leader, but he has good growth potential and his unique perk makes promotions cheaper for him, allowing you to build him into a powerful marine sooner than everybody else.
• Kill It with Fire: Both infantry squads and vehicles can be equipped with flamethrowers. Flamethrowers can leave an area on fire which can deal damage. The xenos employ attacks that technically work like flamethrowers, but actually shoot Hollywood Acid.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: One of the possible random names for your squaddies is "Dated Ref".
• Ludicrous Gibs: The game doesn't shy away from demonstrating the effects of high-powered weapons on organic bodies. Blasting an infantry squad with explosive munitions like autocannon shells will scatter limbs and mangled bodies all over the nearby area, whilst lasers will reduce them to a pile of scorched gore.
• Majorly Awesome: The player character is referred to as Major, and was the highest ranking officer left alive after the command staff was killed in the Dis-Straightening incident. If you succeed, you'll step up and accomplish a task originally expected of a Brigadier General with a full-scale expeditionary force with a hodgepodge of marines and locals equipped with whatever equipment they could scavenge up.
• Mechanical Abomination: The titular MENACE is a horrific amalgamation of human corpses and scavenged machine parts fused into shambling, rotting cyborgs. It suddenly appeared out of nowhere and began assimilating anything and anyone it could get its claws on without any of the established factions in the Wayback registering its presence until it was too late. The MENACE also displays a remarkable degree of cunning and understanding of the human psyche, making it all the more dangerous. As of the current Early Access state of the game, no one knows what its ultimate goals are, assuming that it's motivated by more than just a simple Assimilation Plot.
• MegaCorp: The Zayn-Beecher Corporation is an otherwise middling TCR conglomerate which has become one of the most powerful companies in the Wayback, exploiting the frontier's lawnessness to bolster its bottom line and consolidate more power for itself.
• Mêlée à Trois: Following the first MENACE encounter, not only do MENACE operations begin cropping up, they'll start invading other faction operations, as well. These marauding MENACE units are few in number but will attack all sides. This can work for and against you, depending on the mission objectives. In search-and-destroy missions, MENACE can clear out some opposition, which will count towards your objectives, as well as divert enemy attention away from your squads. On the other hand, this can deprive you of precious gear to sell on the black market and can outright derail your mission rating if they involve secondary objects like maintaining infrastructure or killing few enemies, so it isn't always ideal to sit back and let them fight it out.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • The Rogue Army's Heavy Tank is slow and ponderous, but heavily armed and even more heavily armored.
  • MENACE soldier constructs can't move very far each turn, but they have good armor, tons of health, a Healing Factor, and a ridiculous level of firepower.
• Mini-Mecha: Bipedal walkers are available in multiple tech tiers, but they all belong solidly in the Real Robot Genre. The basic model is little more than an up-armored dumpster on legs, with a BFG crudely bolted to the left side. Walkers enjoy advantages in mobility and sight range, but are generally less durable and carry less firepower than regular vehicles.
• Mission Control: Zigzagged, most likely due to the game's Early Access state. Although you do have an adjutant aboard your ship who briefs you on story events and unique missions, she currently has nothing to say about the procedurally generated operations that make up 90% of the game's content.
• Morale Mechanic: Units with depleted morale will move away from combat. Squad leaders' voicelines and responses likewise change depending on their morale and how many of their squaddies are still alive.
• Morton's Fork: The random events that pop up after every completed operation often have no positive outcome no matter which option you pick. All you can do is try them all out (the game helpfully autosaves right before the event starts) and pick the least detrimental result.
• The Neidermeyer: Field Marshal Zama had callous attitudes towards his soldiers and officers. This is hinted with Sachin Singh—a former military commander in his army—whose traits often give insights to Zama's doctrines that prefer large manpower with little regard to casualties. His badly managed rule earned the hatred of everyone in the Wayback system, which also didn't help with the lingering pirate raids and bug infestations. Furthermore, despite a new threat emerging from deserters from his army, who had proven themselves to be more dangerous than pirates without Zama's incompetence holding them down, the TCR Expedition Force would gain favor with locals by dealing with them.
• No Hero Discount: Even though you're ostensibly in the Wayback to help the local factions, none of them will grant you access to their tech without you performing a few missions to earn their trust. The Black Market likewise won't lower prices just because you're here to help. This gets more egregious when the MENACE appear, as despite the Impetus being the only bulwark against the alien force, the locals still won't budge on extracting every ounce of value they can out of you first.
• Non-Entity General: Zigzagged. The player is stated to hold the rank of major, and the fact that your units call you "sir" means he's most likely a guy, but that's all the character development he gets. He never appears in person, much less participates in battles himself (although one of the random mutators implies he leads from the ground instead of his ship in orbit).
• Non-Malicious Monster: Although the Xenos faction poses a considerable threat to the human presence in the Wayback, they don't attack out of malice. They're simply the dominant native lifeform that lashes out against anyone that trespasses on their territory.
• Not Completely Useless: Pipe guns. A cheap gun used by pirates this gun is so bad that it can't even penetrate cloth armor at any range, and is, honestly, so bad that you're better off using the emergency carbine. But it costs even less supply than the emergency Carbine - which makes it useful for equipping a soldier with even more gear.
• Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: Although most weapons avert this because their models are based on real-life guns, the more advanced late-game guns generally follow this design philosophy.
• Outside-Context Problem: The titular MENACE throws the Wayback into disarray, though it's not enough to actually make the various factions stop being at each others' throats. If anything, this only further solidifies the TCR's need to get everything under control, and fast.
• Pardon My Klingon: Renu Rewa tends to refer to the enemies as "Kut-ta". Whatever it means, it's probably an insult.
  • 'Kutta' means 'dog' in Hindi, Urdu and Punjab, with how she also refers to MENACE units as asuras or rakshasas, it is likely connected.
• Permadeath: Squad leaders can be killed permanently if not saved by other squad leaders or medevacs.
• Pinned Down: An important part of gameplay is suppression, which is added to a squad when shots land near them, they're directly shot at, or a member is killed. The first level will cause them to lose a few Action Points and deploy (as in, crouch), which makes them harder to hit, but makes it impossible for them to move without standing up. The second level will achieve full suppression by making the unit go prone, becoming very hard to hit, but only being able to crawl over a couple of tiles on their turn.
• Plasma Cannon: Infantry squads and vehicles alike can equip plasma guns, which work quite well against anything, but especially against armored units. Good luck finding any, though. They're easily the rarest weapons in the game, and exceedingly expensive to purchase and equip.
• Plot Armor: Squad leaders only take damage when the rest of their squad is neutralized. Even when they run out of health, they're guaranteed to survive if another squad leader stabilizes them in a few rounds, whereas the regular grunts instead survive based on random chance. It goes doubly so if a squad leader takes the Die Hard perk (if available), it will lead to them becoming much tougher when all their squaddies are down.
• Portal Network: Inhabited star systems in human-controlled space appear to be connected through a network of jump gates that starships can use for FTL travel. Not much has been revealed about it so far, other than the facts that any local government can apparently block passage through its gate(s) at will, and that even travel through an open gate can go horribly wrong, as shown by the Impetus suffering a "dis-straightening event" upon exiting the Wayback gateway.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Most of the more powerful heavy weapons have the "inaccurate" tag, which means Exactly What It Says on the Tin, but nothing exemplifies it better than the pirates' truck-mounted rocket organ. Its rocket barrage covers a huge area, but the warheads have a tiny blast radius, so anything less than a direct hit is unlikely to do any damage at all. If it does manage to hit an infantry squad against all odds, that squad is pretty much dead, though. Its main use isn't direct damage anyway but suppression, and it's very, very good at that.
• Private Military Contractors: Several squad leaders (Yazhov, Vamplew, Wetteroth and Greifinger) are essentially guns for hire, with Vamplew in particular having been part of a mercenary company he had set up.
• Put on a Bus: At the start of the game, you only have access to the TCR squad leaders and can only pick up to four to start with. The remaining ones are subsequently sent out on "community outreach" and don't take part in any missions. The only way to encounter them again is if the hiring dossier you purchase happens to be theirs.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Although your starting characters are all marines, you may recruit locals with dubious qualifications into your military force, such as a terrorist (wanted by the government you're working for, to make it worse) and the daughter of a powerful CEO who became a pirate.
• Ramming Always Works: Vehicles have a run-over attack. Pilots can also gain a perk which enhances the effect of said run-over attack making them more fatal.
• Random Number God: Literally everything in this game is governed by random chance. Will my squad hit the enemy? Will it get hit in return? Will the enemy drop any loot after the battle? If so, will it be useful to me? Will the black market have anything useful on offer that I can trade for the useless loot? Which squad leader will I get if I buy a dossier? Will the guy/gal have any of the abilities that I'm looking for? And so on and so forth. The one thing in this game that is certain is that nothing at all is certain.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Promoting a character will give them another perk slot and access to higher-level perks.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Weirdly enough, the TCR military seems to treat becoming an armored vehicle commander as this. If for whatever reason you can't be placed in any other combat role owing to disability or age, but are still capable of fighting, you end up in a tank. The three TCR representative vehicle pilots are a double leg amputee and possible alcoholic who is well past his retirement age (albeit one who is implied to have been a tanker to begin with), a former combat air pilot who became colorblind, and a physically and mentally scarred former infantryman with PTSD-derived anger issues. This is further contrasted by the non-TCR pilots, who are both able-bodied and mentally stable young adults with no obvious physical issues or mental disorders.
• Red Shirt: Squaddies, who you assign to squad leaders. They're completely interchangeable, have no voice lines, aren't mourned if they die, and their sole functions are to multiply the effects of primary weapons, use a special weapon (if you give one to the squad), and take bullets for the squad leader (as they can be hit only if the rest of their squad is killed). The sole non-sentimental reason you have to preserve them is that your pool of squaddies is limited.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: Pirate weapons are largely collections of kludged-together bits and bobs and spare firearms parts, or just plain repurposed junk, and the ballistic ones act accordingly, usually by way of being wildly inaccurate at anything short of kissing range. Pirate chainguns, their version of a squad automatic machine gun, have a trait which can randomly cause them to jam, with the likelihood increasing the more you fire it in a turn.
• RPG Elements: Squad leaders have various stats that govern their combat effectiveness in terms of their shooting accuracy, movement range, morale, survivability and so on. Every time they perform a certain action, there's a small chance that the corresponding stat improves a bit, depending on their growth potential, so the more they shoot and hit enemies for instance, the more accurate they get over time. And on top of all that, you've got each squad leader's semi-unique perk tree that can further distinguish their role on the battlefield.
• Scavenger World: It's explicitly stated that the Wayback's economy has regressed to a barter system, and although at least one of the available planets is run by a MegaCorp, there doesn't appear to be a lot of manufacturing going on. As for the player, the only mint equipment you'll ever get to see is the default combat fatigues and rifles your squads start out with. Everything else is either black market merchandise or battlefield salvage. This makes the Rogue Army by far the most popular enemy to fight because although they're certainly dangerous, the vast majority of your equipment will be sourced from what they leave behind on the battlefield.
• Schizo Tech: The TCR expeditionary force can gain access to highly-advanced weaponry (including laser guns and plasma weapons) and sci-fi armor, but most of these are hard to come by in the Wayback early on without scavenging or buying off the black market. As a result, your squads' equipment can wind up being a strange mishmash of futuristic and modern-day technology, while the semiauto carbines and duty fatigues available from the get-go wouldn't be out of place in a Cold War-era proxy conflict.
  • The Pirate faction is the most extreme example of this in the game. The standard infantry units tend to wear little more than rags or repurposed work clothes and wield weapons made of spare parts that are held together with tape, rope, and sheer hope, with the Pirate Outcasts wielding guns made out of pipes. Their veteran units however have access to jetpack-equipped repurposed space suits and directed energy EMP weapons. Their version of an anti-tank vehicle is a pickup truck with sheet metal for armor sporting a powerful laser cannon on a remote operated turret pried off of the hull of a starship.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: A fully demoralized unit will try to flee towards the closest map edge. Should they actually get there before their morale is restored, they will leave the level and will not return.
• Sentenced to Down Under: Multiple loading screen quotes make reference to criminal barges being sent to the Wayback, it being used as a dumping ground has likely contributed to the rather lawless state of the system.
• Shout-Out:
  • The perks are loaded with references, such as J.G. Wetteroth's "THIS is a knife!", a shoutout to the famous scene in Crocodile Dundee, or Tek's "Get Motherfucked" featuring the iconic image of Rambo hip-firing an M60. The absolute peak example however is the perk "Die Hard", with artwork referencing the Doom Marine and the flavor text being "I didn't hear no bell".
  • Most frontier settlements have power loaders from Alien standing around as non-interactable set pieces. The art style and atmosphere in general draws a lot of inspiration from Alien.
  • Terran Congressional Republic’s name is a reference to Martian Congressional Republic in The Expanse.
  • The MENACE units themselves seem to draw heavy inspiration from the monsters in the film Virus.
• Shows Damage: Vehicles and the larger xenos clades look progressively more beat up the more damage they take, with pockmarks and bullet holes showing all over their hull/bodies. The former may also start burning when heavily damaged.
• Shout-Out: One event in Menace involves purchasing entertainment from a local Wayback merchant, who also has old pop culture. Due to the illegible labels on analog tapes in a distant future when Hayflick lack common culture awareness of pop culture of our time, it only takes an out-of-universe perspective to know the reference behind her pickings of "The Wheel Of...", "The Price Is", and :Le'Beaver".
• Single-Biome Planet: Of the three worlds currently available in Early Access, one is a frozen iceball, one is all desert, and one is apparently covered in nothing but lush coniferous forests. Time will tell if future updates will introduce some more variety.
• Space Marine: At the beginning of the game your entire expeditionary unit is made up of TCR (Terran Congressional Republic) Marines. Although as the game goes on you can recruit other combatants such as pirates and mercenaries.
• Space Pirates: The pirates plaguing the Wayback, though in practice they're more akin to Ruthless Modern Pirates with jetpacks. By and large, they are trigger-happy sadists and opportunistic scavengers seeking to milk the system for all its worth, and aren't above killing the very people they're trying to extort (or each other for that matter).
• Stripped to the Bone: If a human gets killed by a laser or plasma weapon, all that remains of them is a scorched skeleton. Amusingly, if you have a medbay installed aboard your ship, squaddies killed this way can still end up surviving the battle like any other downed squaddie.
• Subsystem Damage: Vehicles taking health damage can result in a slew of different effects, like fires breaking out, damaged motive systems reducing movement range, or damaged weapons being harder or even impossible to fire.
• Survivor Guilt: Squad leaders who lose every squaddie under their watch at the end of a mission wind up being shaken, resulting in a penalty that affects their discipline.
• Take Cover!: As usual for this game genre, infantry should seek cover wherever they can. If a squad that isn't wearing very heavy armor is caught out in the open, they're as good as dead. Cover makes units harder to hit without impairing their ability to shoot back, massively improving their survivability. It can even break line of sight with the enemy if the unit is forced to go prone, making follow-up shots harder, if not impossible.
• Taking You with Me: In the intro cinematic, the last surviving pirate opts for blowing up the entire facility they're defending from the TCR over leaving it for the enemy to take.
• Tank Goodness:
  • The Rogue Army will occasionally deploy their Heavy Tanks against you. These massive slabs of steel are slow and ponderous, but they can take and dish out one hell of a lot of damage. If you're exceedingly lucky, you might be able to salvage one for your own use from the battlefield.
  • In addition to the heavy tank, the Rogue Army is scheduled to receive an actual battle tank in one of the next game updates. Both it and the heavy tank will be salvageable for player use.
  • Equipping the IFV with a heavy turret turns it into a pretty powerful medium tank, despite the contradictory label. The long-barreled cannon in particular makes it an extremely capable armor killer capable of one-shotting pretty much anything that isn't a Heavy Tank.
• Tanks, but No Tanks: As mentioned above, the Infantry Fighting Vehicle is called a medium tank in its item description, which is a contradiction in itself; it can be either one or the other. In this case it depends on how you outfit it. Mounting a heavy weapon removes the personnel transport capacity and thus turns it into a tank, especially when equipped with a short- or long-barreled cannon, although it never loses the IFV label. Medium and light guns on the other hand turn it into an actual IFV.
  • Also mentioned above, the "Heavy Tank" is actually a casemate self-propelled gun with no turret, equipped with a short-barreled and heavy howitzer designed primarily to break through fortifications, more akin in design and doctrine to a WW2-era self-propelled assault gun than a traditional heavy tank design.
• Tele-Frag: Lacking any official explanation of what exactly a "dis-straightening accident" is, the fact that it nearly destroyed a space warship while it was exiting a Portal Network suggests it's broadly similar to a telefrag.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Everywhere. Even your initial marine squad leaders don't seem to like each other all that much. Once you start recruiting mercenaries, pirates, wanted terrorists and other assorted scum to bolster your ranks, half of the unit banter will turn into vicious insults. It's exemplified even further by the resource you spend to recruit new leaders being called Authority - you literally have to pull rank on your troops to make them cooperate with people they would normally shoot on sight, and your standing with them takes a big hit every time you do so^note 30 Authority per new squad leader out of a maximum of 100; you need to ace at least two entire operations to rebuild that lost trust. Having low Authority increases the probability of negative events happening aboard the ship between operations, making interpersonal conflicts even more likely.
• Timed Mission: Although you can technically take as long as you want to complete any given mission, almost every mission has optional turn limits that mustn't be exceeded if you don't want to miss out on crucial resources like Authority and OCI Components, not to mention higher-level loot. Depending on a number of unpredictable factors during mission generation, these limits can range from "trivial" to "literally impossible".
• Totally Not a Criminal Front: The criminal syndicate running Dice of the Gods maintains a legal facade on the titular planet, involving tourism and gambling.
• Translation Convention: Some weapons' and vehicles' descriptions directly contradict either their artwork or their stated function on the battlefield in English, but this makes more sense if you're aware of the German behind it.
  • The CTMP 45 is a submachine gun inspired by the Heckler & Koch UMP, but its flavor text calls it a machine pistol, which is a calque of the German word Maschinenpistole, literally "machine pistol" or "machine gun firing pistol ammunition" that is alternately translated as "submachine gun". It's what the "MP" in "UMP" stands for.
  • The SR31 sniper rifle is described as a bolt-action rifle while its artwork shows a lever-action rifle with a box magazine. The non-technical German word for any manual-action firearm is Repetiergewehr, literally "repeating (long) gun".
  • The examples above under Tanks, but No Tanks are a consequence of the full German word translated as "tank", Panzerkampfwagen, is more literally "Armored Fighting Vehicle", a much broader term, and is often shortened to just Panzer. For example, the term most directly translated as "Infantry Fighting Vehicle" is Schützenpanzer, literally "Armor for shooters (Infantry)", or "infantry tank".
• The Triads and the Tongs: The Backbone, a powerful military-industrial power player in the Wayback, has strong shades of the Triads of old, further reinforced by its very Chinese leadership.
• Ungrateful Bastard: None of the Wayback factions trust the TCR, but are more than happy to accept their help to get rid of their local problems. However, don't expect them to show any actual gratitude to the TCR other than the most basic formality.
• Used Future: With the Wayback being halfway between a third-world country and a failed state, its infrastructure and technology is heavily weathered and worn down from neglect and constant exposure to hostile environments. The TCR's assets, though much better maintained, still look well-used.
• Veteran Unit: Squad leaders can be promoted and gain more perks, making them more combat effective. The pirates can also field veteran scavengers.
• The War of Earthly Aggression: The TCR has been waging many campaigns with the end goal of bringing humanity under one banner, of which the expedition to Wayback is the most recent. Given that these campaigns are referred to as "reunification wars", it's implied that humanity was already unified at some point, with the "Era of Estrangement" mentioned in the backstory being when this changed. Several veteran marines took part in these campaigns, while the war against Mars was stated to be such a bitter affair that Mars is still denied access to terraforming technology. Wayback itself is a complicated example. Officially, the Planetary Jingwei already answers to the TCR in some capacity but has been isolated for so long from the rest of the Republic that it effectively functions as its own polity (for a given definition of "functions") and is extremely reluctant to accept a possible full integration into the TCR. Officially, the Impetus was sent to help restore order to the system after the situation became untenable, but it's an Open Secret that the TCR is making overtures to annex the system fully. Given the sheer lawlessness of the system and corruption of the planetary Jingwei, and the fact that the TCR seems open to negotiations with the local factions, it may be for the best.
• What the Romans Have Done for Us: Quite a few people are extremely opposed to the TCR and their barely-disguised plans to annex the Wayback and will respond accordingly to your prescience there. Even the Planetary Jingwei, who are nominally part of the TCR, seem to greatly resent the presence of the military proper in the Wayback, to the point where it eventually causes several units to go rogue. That said, the TCR is genuinely interested in improving the situation in the Wayback, which is currently in a state of anarchy and divided up among marauders, warlords, criminal syndicates, and Megacorporations, with the Jingwei barely even able to call itself a government anymore. Even stranded, crippled, and cut off from support, the Impetus does a better job of addressing the myriad issues plaguing the system than any of the local factions. Given that the TCR seems to be a genuinely democratic, if expansionist, state, and open to negotiations with the locals before resorting to actual coercive force, proper integration may be the best way forward for the Wayback. It doesn't help that the most vocal opponents of the TCR, the Rogue Army, are shown to be little more than violent thugs no better than the Jinwei loyalists (possibly worse in fact), to the point where either taking casualties gains popular support among the public.
• Worf Had the Flu: TCRN Impetus suffers from a "Dis-straightening" accident in the beginning of the game, leading to it being damaged, with most of the modules destroyed. Through completing missions and gathering OCI components, TCRN Impetus can be restored to full operational capacity.
• We ARE Struggling Together: None of the factions have any love for each other, and each one of them make it clear they are looking to be the sole power of the Wayback. Not even the arrival of the MENACE is enough to convince them to set their differences aside.
• We Have Reserves: Sachin Singh plays this straight. His personal perk grants higher accuracy and discipline for bigger squads and one of his 4th tier perks allows him to replace all downed squaddies with fresh ones from the ship once per mission. The Planetary Jingwei (which Sachin Singh was originally from) also follows this doctrine in general.
  • Based on the units fielded by the Rogue Army, they likely also adhere to their old doctrine, as they often field a good number of Rogue Army Conscripts.
• With This Herring: After the incident that cripples the TCRN Impetus upon reaching the Wayback, all that's left in the TCR expeditionary force's arsenal is a single rocket launcher, a light transport vehicle, and all the semiauto carbines and duty fatigues you could ask for.
• Wretched Hive: The Wayback itself is a nigh-anarchic frontier region whose nominal authority, the Planetary Jingwei, barely has any control over, no matter how many men it throws into the meat grinder.
• You Are in Command Now: You (the player character) are a major in the TCR Marines. At the beginning of the game a disaster befalls your ship, leaving you as the highest-ranking officer who is still alive.
• Your Mom: The Taunt perk tooltip states that the TCR Marines Combat Manual (Trooper Edition) itself suggests insulting the target´s mother, then their dead relatives, then their "genitalia", and then their mother again "because she is just that big".