XCOM: Chimera Squad (2020)

This was interesting to play after already spending a lot of time with Midnight Suns, as it's very much an experimental half-step between that game and the first two XCOMs. The core movement and cover systems are classic XCOM, but you can clearly see them trialing out a bunch of stuff that went on to feature in Midnight Suns: named heroes with flashier abilities, a condensed encounter structure that cuts out the tedious crawl forward between fights, a simplified strategic layer, an injury system to replace permadeath, combat items that don't cost action points, etc. A bunch of the heroes even play like prototype versions of characters from Midnight Suns!

But while it's a neat evolutionary curio and plenty of fun to play in its own right, I had a hard time shaking the feeling that Midnight Suns does just about everything better. The heroes in that game have way more personality and roughly twice as many abilities, keeping the combat from becoming stale like it did by the end of Chimera Squad. I was ready to move on by the final few missions, but I still really admire the creative spirit of this oddball XCOM, and I hope the team behind it gets more chances to experiment.

Just finished it and totally loved it. God, I find hard to believe the price of such a quality game was only 10 bucks.

It introduces quite a few changes from previous releases that make it a simpler game, but many of them are interesting proposals that have pleasantly surprised me. It's also shorter than some of the other games in the saga, but it still took me over 20 hours to finish it.

So, yeah, XCOM lovers, i think you should definitely go and play it.

As a person who's sunk about 500 combined hours into the XCOM franchise, I picked up Chimera Squad day one and played two missions at 2AM until tiredness forced me to stop. Initial impressions:

• I didn't expect them to directly nerf overwatch and especially not nerf grenades

• I expected budget and yet it's got the same amount of voice acting as a mainline XCOM title so far, which surprised me; as expected there's a lot (a LOT) of reused assets from XCOM 2, and the comic book-styled dialogue sprites look even cheaper than I expected. I honestly think just text boxes with the little gif of their mouth opening and closing like Enemy Unknown and 2 would look less aggressively cheap, it reminds me of those itch.io VNs made in over the course of two months with some vaguely evocative title and a $5.99 price tag on a seemingly-permanent 40% off discount.

• I'm only two missions in so my opinions on the mechanics are VERY subject to change, but I think its formula of firefights separated by breaching is a nice way to resolve overwatch creep, the entirely unnatural pod system, and to keep the pace going. I don't know if I'd want this for XCOM 3, but it doesn't become repetitive here I'd love to see a spinoff using XCOM 3 assets with this flow again.

i see this getting hype right now on twitter but at a cursory (and possibly wrong) glance it doesn't really sway me. like, not at all. it looks like the same game dumbed down a bit in terms of having episodic tactical encounters with predefined hero characters. Why, the last few iterations reeked of casual tabletitis and this one even more so.

I like xcom and i'd dare say that turn based tactics is my all time favorite genre. But there are too many of these games and they are losing the edge in satisfaction of experimenting with unkown variables in conjunction with building a team. This has always been the unique component of XCOM. I hope we dont see a future where XCOM becomes a thing where you don't build your squad as you see fit but you are just handed super hero agents built off like MOBA or battle royal like hero character templates. They could like, you know just make a TBT Marvel game if they wanna go that route! I'm sure it would be very popular lol