SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Despite suffering from poor writing, technical flaws and an overall lack of coherency, Chimera Squad succeeds at bringing a few fresh ideas to the table.
Announced as a surprise just a few weeks ago, Firaxis billed XCOM: Chimera Squad as a standalone spinoff game. Still, it’s more prototype than true spinoff, a test bed for gathering player feedback on untested game mechanics and ideas. And there are a lot of them. Put simply, they are this game’s saving grace, but also the reason it falls short of greatness. Though it’s a worthy entry in this franchise, it only works when this mass of new ideas click together to produce the kind of spectacle you’d come to expect from an XCOM game. Other times however, it’s a hodgepodge of new mechanics and concepts that don’t quite come together to form a cohesive or particularly compelling whole.
Set five years after the events of XCOM 2, in which humanity won its resistance war against the alien Elders and their puppet regime, humans and the now-sentient aliens left behind coexist under a shaky peace. The beacon of hope in this brave new world is City 31, a bustling metropolis where human and alien alike have come together to rebuild society. But in the shadows, disparate groups seek to spread chaos. When the city’s mayor is brutally assassinated, XCOM deploys a squad of specialists: Chimera Squad, to crush any threat to the peace.
There’s a lot of new ideas, but all the good ones are confined to the combat missions. Since you’re roleplaying as the SWAT team of the future, every mission kicks off with Breach mode where your squad forces their way into the map through different entry points. You can kick down doors, blow holes in walls and rappel down the sides of buildings and smash your way through windows action-movie style. Each breach point has tactical advantages and drawbacks: busting your way in through a window might surprise some of the enemies waiting on the other side so they don’t shoot at you, but your chosen agent might do less damage from being in a poor position. It’s a new and complex layer of strategy that involves choosing which agents go where, which order they attack in and which targets to prioritise. Do you pick off weaker targets straight away to bring numbers down or focus fire on a particularly tough enemy to remove their dangerous abilities from play early on? It gives you the chance to hit first and hit hard.
Following that is the game’s most significant change. Rather than traditional turns, all the units on the field are placed in initiative order and the game alternates between player and AI. Later combat encounters become incredibly complex, with the enemy AI using their numbers advantage to play more than one of their units in sequence. It forces a monumental shift in how the game plays. It’s about giving and taking damage rather than dishing it all out on your team’s turn. It also reduces save-scumming since the autosave system means you can’t just reload again and again to make sure your team does maximum damage. You have to consider how you position your characters and what abilities to use, but also about when you fire and at what targets. It’s like chess with laser guns, grenades and psychic powers.
Each character has a set role in combat, with a mix of old and new abilities that can be surprisingly effective when used right. Of course, come up with a flawed strategy and you’ll end up suffering for it. The addition of alien characters is great, since it gives the room to invent some pretty creative strategies based on species-specific abilities. I was particularly fond of using Torque the Viper’s ability to pull enemies in from across the map and wrap them in a bone-crushing embrace, removing them from play. However, Chimera Squad begins to lose the plot here, both figuratively and literally. The game has preset characters that can’t be customised: a departure from previous games where you could make your own soldiers. These preset characters work fine in combat, but aren’t all that compelling outside it. The voice-acting is only so-so and none of them are particularly charming or even that memorable.
This causes problems. Previous games let the player craft a unique story that belonged to them by virtue of custom characters and stories of their heroism and sacrifice as a result of the player’s decisions. The narrative was a skeleton, and your characters and strategy were the flesh and blood. Chimera Squad takes it all away, replacing it with an unoriginal story that reads like mediocre fan fiction. There’s almost no real lore to flesh out this brave new world, and the breezy, relatively upbeat tone it takes is at odds with the grim events of XCOM 2, which are only five years past. Your preset characters are two-dimensional at best; the story doesn’t call for them to change or develop, and there’s little point in trying to push a more concrete story without that foundation.
There’s a bit of tension lost due to the removal of permadeath. If your characters bleed out, you’re prompted to reload your save or restart the mission from scratch. Taking damage doesn’t have much of an effect. In XCOM 2, taking even superficial damage can put a soldier out of action for some time. In Chimera Squad, your agents don’t have to rest; the worst that might happen is that they get scars, which reduce various stats like mobility or HP, but you can heal those in a couple in-game days while another agent picks up the slack.
You’re left to try and save the city from total anarchy, but you’d have to play badly for a long time to fail. City 31 is split into various districts, each with an Unrest meter that rises when you don’t respond to missions in that area. Once a meter maxes out, it adds one bar a day to the City Anarchy meter. Get too many bars and it’s game over, but I never found myself getting more than a little worried about it. There’s some out-of-combat strategy like researching new tech, training your agents and buying field teams for districts to get later returns in intel, credits and alien Elerium. Trouble is, this external strategy layer is little more than dull busywork. Unlocking a new tech or buying new equipment never feels like a significant event, whereas in previous games, every tech you researched unlocked something new and useful. Upgrading and managing your field teams isn’t half as exciting as busting through windows and blasting anarchists.
In some cases, Chimera Squad even carries the wrong things forward. The game is as buggy as its predecessors. I saw my characters glitch out on terrain, and aim their weapons in a completely different direction to the selected target amongst others. The game also has a bit of a tendency to crash straight to the desktop at random. My computer is old, but it’s still more than capable of running this game, so I guess it’s not just me. At least the game’s new turn system means it autosaves frequently, so you never lose more than a couple minutes of progress tops.
It’s still a pretty fun game, but one that feels like prep work for XCOM 3. There’s some good ideas and concepts here, but Firaxis hasn’t quite managed to get them all to work together; a sad irony for a game about a squad of bona fide two-dimensional badasses. The developers haven’t come right out and said that this is a clever tool to do tests and gain player feedback, nor would they have to. It’s priced accordingly, and based on that, you do actually get a little more than what you pay for.
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