April 27th, 2020
I’ve been wanted to get back into XCOM for a while now, though the time commitment and my distaste for fighting the Chosen has made that more of a challenge than I would like. Fortunately there’s been a surprise XCOM release in the form of Chimera Squad, which provides a slightly different XCOM experience at a budget price (said price being $20 normally or $10 until May 1st, 2020). I’ve only been able to get through ten hours due to reasons that will become clear in this review, but I figured I’d throw together an impressions piece because I’ve had several people ask me how I feel about the new game.
Here’s the basic premise: after leading humanity’s triumphant resurgence in XCOM 2, we’ve jumped ahead several years to find Earth in a tenuous state of ceasefire. Aliens and humans living together, mass hysteria. The cornerstone of this experiment of commingled living is City 31, a large formally ADVENT city that now contains all manner of species living side by side. In a mix of public relations and “best of the best” decision making, XCOM has created Chimera Squad, so named because it’s a unit of humans and aliens working together like a group of operators. Your job in the game is to use these operators to breach into sensitive areas and secure high value targets for the sake of keeping the city from going up in flames.
There’s a lot to unpack here with the premise, but the short version is that it’s all together disappointing in both its presentation and its execution. To start with, we completely missed out on the war? I can’t imagine we’ll be going backwards in XCOM 3 to see the cliffhanger ending from 2 through to its conclusion, so there goes any chance to “finish the fight.” But whatever, closure is for losers, I guess. But we have an opportunity here to see a world embroiled with tension, particularly when you read the backstory on your squad (we’ll get to that) and discover that half of your alien squad members are war criminals. But instead of being an ongoing point of tension it’s all played for laughs, outside of one older member of your team who occasionally has terse exchanges with the aliens. The dialogue that really threw me was when the Viper member of your team referred to Canadians as “the maple flavored ones.” Ha ha, funny joke but this character literally has no remorse for her role in the war and even in her bio says she joined up to “keep fighting humans,” but let’s just keep being okay with that.
In fact almost all of the dialogue is quippy jokey nonsense. Everything about the Sectoid is jokes about reading minds, everything the medic says is a garbage tier humor, and it all flies in the face of the tone XCOM has set in the past. Instead of having soldiers cautiously moving forward in the face of the unknown we have “colorful ragtag jokesters kicking down doors and making fun of the guy in their ear that looks like a character from a modern Ubisoft game.” This makes any moments of actual seriousness clash even harder with the tone, where a surprise ambush leads directly into jokes about “getting down” for cover in a room with a dance floor.
But hell, I was willing to ignore all that if the gameplay held up, and it certainly does for a while. Chimera Squad‘s gameplay formula is much quicker than your traditional XCOM, trading exploring maps for breaching and clearing self contained rooms. Most combat encounters end with your squad not needing to reload, especially considering how frequently you can use your incredibly powerful abilities. The Viper character can permanently lock down most enemy characters, the Sectoid can stun or otherwise psionicly manipulate multiple enemies in a turn, and your demolitions guy can fire off multiple explosives AND attack, just to name a few of the insane abilities at your disposal.
To top it all off, your characters CAN’T DIE or be put on the bench due to severe injury like you would find in previous XCOM titles. Sure, a character can be dropped to zero HP but if they aren’t stabilized its simply game over and when you’re back at base they can be immediately put back in the field, albeit with a slight stat decrease. Kneel before the power of a scripted story with main characters and their backstory, ye XCOM faithful. But due to the close quarters, powerful abilities, and fast pace of Chimera Squad death is almost never a threat outside of the early game (at least as far as I got). Your medic character can literally heal anyone for four HP every turn, for god’s sake, and I probably would have had even less injuries if I’d realized that sooner.
Chimera Squad‘s other big idea, outside of alien allies and shorter encounters, is a revamp of the combat system. Previous XCOM titles had turn-based combat with a focus on teams, much like Fire Emblem, where all the units on your side go and then all the units on your opponent’s side goes, repeat until one side is dead. Chimera Squad replaces this familiar formula with something similar to Dungeons and Dragons mixed with Banner Saga, with units going in a “fixed” order that at the start of combat breaks down to an “every other” routine. The catch is that you can manipulate the turn order in a number of ways, from attacks that “scare” enemies further into the queue to a special once-per-mission ability that can move any character’s turn to immediately after the current unit’s turn. Killing enemies also removes them from the queue without changing the turn order, so if you manage to take out enough baddies you can have several of your units go in a row, which can lead to some powerful combos indeed.
I’m not sure how to feel about this new system, which is unfortunate because I’m pretty sure Chimera Squad is a testing ground for XCOM 3. It creates a lot of different layers to the strategy thanks to introducing questions like “should I start doing chip damage to the powerful guy that’s going next or should I take out the weak guy that’s going in three turns?” but it also creates a lot of frustration when its your four man squad (there isn’t a way to get more than four) against eight to ten terrorists. Suddenly you have one turn for every two or three your opponent has, and it can quickly get overwhelming unless you’re able to immediately execute any and all weaker enemies in the queue to give you some breathing room. This clashes heavily with something like Banner Saga, which took the idea of a few vs many in turn-based combat and made it interesting, to the point where one unit could beat an army of ten if you played it properly. Chimera Squad in comparison just feels unnecessarily daunting and sometimes there’s even a hint of “supposed to lose” when three enemies move in a row to do something you only had one move to try to stop.
While we’re on the subject of “supposed to lose,” the mission design is still clinging to the groundwork laid by the previous games despite the fact that the power structure is all wrong. XCOM 2 in particular had a big focus on “do the thing and run for your lives” because you were an underground terrorist organization fighting an overwhelming force, but such missions feel out of place in a game like Chimera Squad where you’re literally law enforcement. However 40% of missions have “get the thing and then run before you’re overwhelmed” as the grand finale of their design, and it makes absolutely zero sense. How powerful are the organizations in this city that they have the manpower to chase away what is essentially the SAS? What resources do this “loose band of psionics” have that they can send waves upon waves of soldiers crashing upon this squad of alien operators?
But I was still willing to muscle through all of this. The clumsy mission design, the complete lack of tension because none of your characters can actually die, the stupid decisions made with the research and base management that I won’t even go into. It was all water under the bridge until we got to the glitch that broke my game. There were the usual kinda weird glitches in Chimera Squad at first: characters floating six feet off the ground, running through closed doors, aiming in the completely wrong direction but still hitting the target, etc. So far so XCOM, as long as the floating characters still register as being behind cover, what do I care? Then after a mission about two thirds of the way through my second investigation (the game is split into “investigations”) I had just unlocked the final tier of armor and was feeling pretty good about myself…when I discovered that my Viper unit, my favorite and most useful unit on the squad (her voice acting aside) could no longer use gear.
Not only could she not use gear but it appeared that all the gear I had given her and had been associated with her simply disappeared. Suddenly there were no machine guns for anyone, and her breaching equipment and weapon attachments were gone too. I tried reloading off of several saves and then hoping beyond hope that maybe it was just a menu error I sent her on a mission and discovered that nope, she simply had no gear. Why this is even an option for characters is beyond me, but with that I quit the game and I won’t be going back to it. I’m not going to invest ten plus hours into this again just to get kneecapped because a one became a zero in the code and suddenly my best unit is unplayable.
So that’s Chimera Squad. If you’re looking for bite-sized, low-pressure XCOM action with revamped mechanics and a cheap price tag you might have fun with it. Just don’t be surprised if your hard work is ruined by some moronic glitch.
