Battle Brothers successor Menace gets Fall 2025 release window

A target for the Early Access launch has been found

Overhype Studios / Hooded Horse

Menace, the spiritual successor to Battle Brothers, is targeting Fall 2025 for its Early Access release on PC, developer Overhype Studios confirmed in its first dev diary on the game.

“We have been developing the game for a really long time with the first prototype dating back as far as 2018, that is 6 years now. Over the years we moved from a 2D perspective and our own engine to full 3D and Unity while also building the team up to 10 people,” the studio explained. “Growing a team that much while moving to a whole new technology and developing a huge game at the same time is a massive challenge and might help to understand why development takes so long. We are now in a state where we feel comfortable with finally announcing a release date window for the Early Access: Fall of 2025.”

Overhype reiterated that the Early Access model was essential to the success of its previous title, Battle Brothers, making it a no-brainer to go with it again for Menace – a point the leading developers already emphasized towards us when we interviewed them at Gamescom 2024.

In general, you’ll find many of the points the developers have talked to us about over the last two years – we were lucky enough to chat with them in 2023 as well – reiterated in the diary, such as some of Menace’s chief inspirations being Warhammer 40,000, Jagged Alliance, Dawn of War, and XCOM. 

“With Battle Brothers we wanted to model medieval small unit combat as close to reality as we could, including morale, fatigue, armor, weapon types and so on,” the developers wrote. “With Menace we aim to do something similar but this time with modern combat. Elements like concealment, detection, suppression, violence of action, flanking and more should model real life firearms combat as closely as possible.”

They added: “In both worlds fantasy elements allow us to go way beyond a historical or contemporary combat simulator. Adding supernatural creatures, magic or advanced technology allows us to break up the restrictions of reality and introduce ever changing new challenges, surprises and possibilities both for the player and the enemies.”

If you need any more reason to get excited for this one, publisher Hooded Horse – the people behind gems like Against the Storm and Manor Lords – are attached to this project. We’ll hopefully hear a lot more about Menace over the coming months, as Overhype wants to make its dev diaries on Menace a weekly occurrence.