XCOM: Chimera Squad (2020)

Chimera squad feels like what it is - a smaller-budget spinoff of the XCOM series. I pllayed through the campaign, and it does the tactical meat of XCOM, with a simplified strategy layer and fewer things to do. I liked the characterization of individual agents and tactical game, but disliked how some things were not well-explained, like the effects of unrest, or how exactly breaching (the main new gameplay element) works. In addition, there are multiple bugs, including one that nearly killed my Iron-man campaign in its second mission, if not for console commands found online.

If not for the bugs (which have not been fixed in the 5 years this game has been out), I'd have given it 5 stars, since I love the XCOM gameplay.

I think there's a lot to like here and some improvements on the turn-by-turn combat of XCOM 2 but ultimately this game suffers by not being XCOM 3, which I think is the game we all wanted instead of this.

What this game does really well is committing to a concept and exploring the ideas that branch off of that and does a good job at world building and setting up an environment that I would be interesting to see more of in an XCOM 3 if it ever comes.

Overall if you love modern XCOM specifically because of the combat and story, you'll like this game. If you love it for the strategic layer, managing resources and a small army, etc then I don't think this one will scratch the itch for you, at least in my opinion.

3.5 / 5 Stars

Xcom special forces! Fun squaddies who have amusing interactions and personalities, for the most part.

Must admit on my first playthrough I chose sacred coil first up and gave up after failing to beat the final mission after about 30 attempts. After 6 months had another playthrough and managed to luck in a win by heavily focussing on just 4 characters. After which the rest of the missions were much more manageable and I could experiment with the other characters more. Drops my rating from a 4 to a 3.5,

Still, I had fun and had 60 hours of enjoyment - so well worth the money..

Good filler until the next full fledged X-Com is released.

At first I felt that it was an interesting XCOM 2 spinoff. Events take place after XCOM 2. Humanity won, and now humans, aliens and hybrids all live in the same megapolis. The game is slightly more story driven than the original XCOM.

Our squad is basically a SWAT team. So much more emphasis on close combat, and even on capturing enemies alive.

Game mechanics are mostly focused around breaching. Different points of entry, each granting different bonuses, like extra damage for the first turn.

And we have aliens of all kinds in our squad, which is always fun.

All characters are unique, and loosing one means Game Over. I got woman-snake as my first hire, not because she’s efficient, but because she’s fun to listen to.

Endless reinforcements quickly become annoying, but on the flipside, most battles take just a few turns to complete.

You get to choose in which order to tackle the three acts. But if you choose Sacret Coil first, there’s a huge difficulty spike. First two fights are easy. But the boss attacks four times, inflicts status, and you also need to beat Gatekeeper, one of the toughtest enemies from XCOM 2. It all came down to luck, when Axiom, my melee brute, knocked down one of the bigger enemies on the first turn. Then Verge was able to “berserk” enemy flamethrower. And the boss simply got stuck on the ladder. Still, it was a very frustrating fight.

The situation with equipment is pretty sad. There is Regular Assault Rifle, Enhanced Assault Rifle and Mastercrafted Assault Rifle (lulwat?). And I’m not even sure those are different in terms of looks. The only bright side is that after completing Act I you start getting some missions with unique weapons available. Those not only look unique, but also have unique abilities.

Progeny arc is much easier. At least you don’t have to fight a boss and another super-tough enemy in the same encounter.

A slight disappointment is that you cannot get all of the agents in a single run. I ended up not picking Zephyr and Claymore, and never got to see them in action. Godmother’s “Untouchable” skill (which existed in XCOM 2 as well) is fantastic. Once she neutralizes an enemy, she gets invulnerability until the end of the turn. But other enemies don’t know it, and still shoot at her, wasting their ammo. Another awesome skill is Blueblood’s “Faceoff”.

Story is a big letdown. So the entire game we try to “investigate” three different gangs in order to figure out which gang assassinated the mayor. But in the end – none of them. It all was the “evil mercenaries” plot, albeit we hardly heard about them the entire game. And the way we discover that plot is through mercenaries storming the city council in broad daylight. Because… why not?!

Overall, I felt like the game became repetetive far too quickly. Which is a shame.

I love XCOM 2 especially with the War of the Chosen add-on. The game is fantastically complex and nuanced with hundreds of hours of potential gameplay. If it were not for the extraordinary levels of “XCOM jank” specifically in vanilla XCOM 2, it would easily be in my top 10 games of all time. My expectations for XCOM: Chimera Squad were wildly unrealistic. I wanted the game to capture the same highs I experienced in XCOM 2 for the first time again. I’m sad to report that XCOM: Chimera Squad is not as good as XCOM 2. But the game makes enough meaningful differences to the formula to be worth playing through at least once.

XCOM: Chimera Squad despite lacking a numeral at the end is a direct sequel to the events of XCOM 2. After liberating humanity from the alien masters, the remaining aliens, hybrids and humans decide to live together on Earth. XCOM is no more but some of the remaining officers decided to stick around to form a combined human and alien SWAT team known as the Chimera Squad. Chimera Squad is summoned to City 31 after the kidnapping and assasination of the mayor. Without any steady leadership in the city, chaos erupts. Fringe organizations begin to rob banks, kidnap VIPs and the like. Your role as the commander of the Chimera Squad is to figure out who is behind the assasination of the mayor and to make sure the city doesn’t fall into anarchy.

At first glance, XCOM: Chimera Squad is almost unrecognizable as an XCOM game. The game has this comic book-like aesthetic with cartoony character portraits and still action cutscenes. There are no longer randomly generated soldiers but named officers with unique abilities. Like an RPG, the game has soldiers that have the tank, DPS and healer equivalents. Each officer is also voiced with a wide variety of accents and personalities. It was weird seeing aliens speak fluent English at first but by the end of the game I grew to love the sassy viper Torque or the Australian hybrid monk Zephyr. I definitely had a chuckle or two between the inter-species squad interactions after every completed mission.

The scope of the game is narrow due to the fact that you are not saving humanity from possible extinction but are managing crime within a single city. The encounters play out in short 5-20 minute chunks rather than the up to an hour long affairs in the other XCOM games. Chimera Squad cuts through the unnecessary filler in previous XCOM games: no more slowly creeping up and going into overwatch, and no more turns just to reload everyone’s guns. There is also the breaching and interlaced turns. At the beginning of every encounter, you can command your squad to breach at certain locations. For example breaching through the wall you can surprise the enemy while busting through the door can let you draw fire from the enemies. It’s a neat mechanic that makes starting each encounter more interesting. The second big change are the interlaced turns between your squad and the enemies. The interlaced turns help balance firefights and gives your 4-man squad a fighting chance without completely being overwhelmed. Overall, I enjoyed the quicker pace in Chimera Squad and appreciated how quickly I was able to progress through the game. Chimera Squad has fatal flaws that eventually got more noticeable the longer I played. The first major issue I have is that there is no perma-death in this game. Due to every character being completely unique, if any officer is killed in combat it is an automatic defeat, at this point the game forces you to reload an earlier save. I think the beauty of XCOM is all about learning from your mistakes, even if it means losing your top soldiers (And yes, I’m also in the camp that you should never save-scum in XCOM). There is an off chance that a character could be downed and is bleeding out. In this case that soldier can be rescued and in their place a replacement Android is used in the next encounter. The problem I have with this mechanic is that the Androids are worthless in combat unless you dedicate resources to upgrade them and don’t gain experience unlike your soldiers. It is worthwhile to reload an earlier save with your soldier still alive because they are so much more effective in combat than the Androids. Chimera Squad sets itself up as a game that’s meant to be save-scummed whether you like it or not.

Vanilla XCOM2 was notorious for its’ jank and thankfully Chimera Squad is not as buggy but there were a few bugs that frustrated me. The first bug is that the game aggressively auto-saves to the point where it is impossible to beat missions that you have failed. I got stuck on a mission because I failed to stop a boss in time. When I reloaded the latest auto-save, it would start on the enemy’s turn who caused me to lose the mission in the first place. Reloading past auto-saves didn’t help either because they gave me too few soldiers to command and was not enough for me to stop the boss. I had to replay the entire encounter of roughly 20 mins in order to win this mission. The irony is that auto-saving is designed so that you don’t lose much progress in a game, but in Chimera Squad you are better off manually saving. The other annoying bug is with the game’s UI, there are times where the character portrait on the bottom left would not appear so I had no idea how much ammo my soldier had remaining. The bugs with Chimera Squad are tolerable, but the main problem I have with this game is how it glorifies police work specifically the SWAT tactics.

In Chimera Squad, your team busts through doors, plants explosives to breach through walls and rappel down buildings to break through windows. Once you begin the encounter there are often innocent civilians also present. While it is obvious not to harm the civilians, it is extremely easy for them to be caught in the crossfire in the ensuing firefights with the enemy. Civilians that are killed in action raise the chance of increasing the city’s anarchy level. The whole reason I bring this up is that XCOM: Chimera Squad was released a little over a month after the Breonna Taylor shooting.

For those who are unaware, Breonna Taylor was an innocent civilian that was shot and killed by officers raiding an apartment. The offending officers were found not guilty. The parallels between the firefights in Chimera Squad and the Breonna Taylor shooting are frighteningly similar, especially the fact where you have your squad bust down a door, can get innocent civilians killed and the officer that killed that civilian is left unpunished. I am completely aware that XCOM: Chimera Squad is a video game and is a depiction of a fictional universe, but morally I could not stomach with how much the game glorifies police violence. In this game, civilians are just another unfortunate casualty and it is jarring that no one in the game really addresses the matter.

Chimera Squad makes both good and bad changes to XCOM. The concise and speedy encounters are great because it trims the bloated combat mechanics in the old games to get to the heart of the firefights. I appreciated how Firaxis finally tried to deliver a story and characters with some actual personality compared to the overly serious nature of the prior games. BUT I simply could not get over the fact that the game tries too hard to encourage you to save-scum by removing permadeath and introduces an auto-save feature that hurts more than it helps. While it is not Firaxis’ fault, a game about an elite SWAT squad is not going to go well when overall support for the police in the United States is at an all-time low. Chimera Squad has definite potential and I would wholly appreciate it if some of the gameplay mechanics do get introduced in later sequels, but it is a game with the wrong setting released at the wrong time.

The idea of an XCOM game that is smaller in scope, from a gameplay standpoint, from a narrative standpoint, and from a character standpoint sounds great. Having the opportunity to examine the lives of people affected by The Invasion is fantastic, especially in a post-liberated world. There could be so many questions about how individuals from either side of the conflict are coping with having to live alongside their enemies; ways that life is better, ways that it's strained, there's a lot of potential there. And framing this narrative around a police squad investigating shady factions operating below society? Tremendous. When XCOM: Cimera Squad was announced, I was prepared for a light-hearted, but possibly thoughtful and emotional narrative with charming characters that really delves into the day to day world of XCOM. What I got was... Not exactly that.

The story of Chimera squad is centered around the assassination of a well loved and forward-thinking mayor and the mystery surrounding that assassination. The squad has leads on three potential factions that could be behind the assassination, and investigate each in turn; one for each Act of the game. Not a bad setup, but the "investigations" really feel like a string of loosely (if at all) connected cases that are explained with one or two lines of hastily delivered exposition and wrapped up with a single encounter. Even the climactic "Takedown" missions feel underwhelming; they're usually the first time you meet the faction heads, and the only interaction you have with them is some buckshot to the face. The investigations feel like they have no narrative weight, and are instead used to give you a purple box on the map to chase until the game is done. Narratively, I'd consider the way the investigations play out to be the game's greatest disappointment

Well... Except for the characters themselves. Chimera Squad does away with custom characters to instead focus on fixed characters with unique builds, personalities and backstories. Again, this is a fantastic idea with lots of potential. In XCOM: EU and XCOM 2, the established characters (Bradford, Tygan, Shen, etc) had some great personality and interactions; sure they were a little one-dimensional, but they weren't the focus of the game. In Chimera Squad, these unique agents are the focus, and they really don't have enough to show for it. They come close, with the occasional amusing or insightful conversation, but for the most part, they fall flat.

The gameplay of Chimera Squad is a bit more substantial than the story though. In concept, it seems to aim to streamline the general XCOM experience, trading a convoluted GeoScape for a simpler CityScape, Alpha Strikes for Breaches, and facility management for an assembler. In general, these changes serve the game very well, simplifying and smoothing out some of the more crunchy strategic and tactical decisions to keep the game moving. I don't think I'd want to see a full-sized XCOM game play out this way, but for a shorter spin-off? It works pretty great.

Tactical combat itself is a little different than XCOM veterans may be used to, with interleaved turned orders and smaller squads. The game has a habit of putting you up against a pretty huge amount of enemies; it makes taking damage difficult to avoid. However, in Chimera Squad, agents tend to have more health and surviveability options, and taking damage isn't quite as much of a liability, so, as a player, getting used to taking a few punches will go a long way in the tactical combat.

It might feel like I've spent the preceding five paragraphs dunking on this game, so how is it that I can still recommend it? It's all a matter of scope; comparing Chimera Squad to XCOM 2 isn't exactly a fair comparison. Chimera Squad is not a $60, 100+ hour game; it's $10 on sale and about 20 hours long. Chimera Squad does not ask for a huge investment from the player, and it offers them the ability to live in XCOM's world a little longer. Looking at the credits for this game, it really didn't involve a huge number of people. Clearly a lot of heart went into this game, and while it may not fully deliver on its vision, it's still a fun time. If you like XCOM as a series, and you'd like to have a bit more of it with some interesting twists, it's worth giving a shot.

Oh and anybody complaining about SJWs in this game or whatever is an absolute baby lmao