XCOM: Chimera Squad
Developer Firaxis Publisher 2K Format PC Release Out now
PC
Being named after a mythical, mixed-up beast feels apt for XCOM: Chimera Squad; Firaxis has rearranged XCOM’s turn-based tactical blueprint with a twist in the tail, said tail being the series’ traditional timeline. In classic XCOM, fights can be lost in the space of one turn while you watch in dismay, unable to influence the battle once you’ve committed to your actions. Chimera Squad’s subversion of this is interleaved turns – individual units and enemies each swap turn order. The timeline is displayed in your HUD, as well as above enemies’ heads, so you can adapt tactics on the fly, for example priority-targeting the next stacked enemy before they can get a shot off. You can also use abilities to change the order of the timeline, and while this prescience makes encounters easier than traditional XCOM, it also makes them much more dynamic.
This is not so much a total reinvention as a crowdpleasing remix, then – a dextrous spin on a classic game that tweaks its proposition in inventive, yet brilliantly obvious, ways. Rather than customisable grunts, squads are picked from a roster of 11 fully-drawn characters, each with a backstory, unique abilities and skill trees. The squad has a scripted role in the relatively grounded story, set several years after the events of XCOM 2, with aliens, humans and hybrids all attempting to co-exist in the wake of the war. The game’s setting of City 31 is an uneasy utopia for diverse cohabitation, and paramilitary police force Chimera Squad is tasked with keeping order in the city’s districts and dealing with the three criminal factions seeking to undermine the fragile peace.
This gives us the first XCOM in which teams can be built with aliens as well as humans, adding psionic powers and species-specific abilities to the ballistic arsenal. The alien Verge’s psionics can incapacitate and expose enemies; Torque is a Viper, a cobra-faced alien who can pull enemies toward her with her tongue; human-alien hybrid Cherub’s Phalanx ability draws enemy fire to his shield. These exotic combatants fight alongside typical human damage-dealers such as squad leader Godmother, and Terminal, a tech-savvy medic whose drone gives her the ability to heal team members in the field. These distinct roles and disparate ability sets make team balancing feel significant to mission success, and how you use each unit in combat requires tactical, though not overly finicky, consideration.
Missions – which roll out day by in-game day – are snappier than in previous XCOMs, and involve storming buildings and compounds, going room-byroom in close-quarters battles, with additional objectives such as rescuing hostages, arresting criminals (you can now non-lethally subdue) or defusing bombs. Chimera Squad introduces a breaching sequence at the start of each encounter, in which you assign units at a location’s entry points. Using charges to blast through a wall or rappelling in through a window adds surprise bonuses to your breach actions. Upon breaching, there’s a free group turn in which you can either fire on targets, use an ability such as cover rush to gain defensive buffs or employ flashbangs and other breach items. The order in which squad members are stacked for the breach dictates turn order and where in the room they take cover, which is meant to give you a starting advantage. However, since Chimera Squad has all the tech except, strangely, heat-source recognition or any other means of divining enemies’ positions, you’re going in blind. This means it can be pot luck where your units end up. Once breach action points are spent, you have no control over where everyone takes cover. It’s a big flaw in a game where positioning of units is critical, though there are thrills to be had in wrenching back order from chaos.
The unit-by-unit turn order radically changes the way XCOM rounds play out, in a way that makes all choices feel life or death. Labels above enemies’ heads reveal whether they are surprised, alert or aggressive, dictating how quickly they react. Once you learn to read the turn order effectively, battles become tense and reactive, as you weigh up whether to break cover to try to take out the next enemy in the turn order, or focus fire on Sorcerers capable of incapacitating your weapons with their psionic blasts, costing you valuable turns. Do you return fire, or hunker down for defensive bonuses in the next round? How long have you got to stabilise that downed squad member before they bleed out? Sustaining too much damage during an encounter results in units receiving scars, causing lost accuracy, slower movement, or panic in the ranks. Managing your squad and assigning these units to training or desk jobs back at HQ for a day or two will, fortunately, magically heal their PTSD.
City 31’s districts need constant attention – lose control and the city falls to anarchy, and it’s all too easy to neglect this as you bounce from mission to mission. To manage these districts, you assign field teams which can lower or freeze levels of unrest while generating cash, intel and resources. Next to Chimera Squad’s missions, the strategic management of City 31 often feels like systems-based drudgery, though we learn its importance the hard way. Around ten hours in, we find ourselves on the brink of catastrophe thanks to our early neglect of unrest levels, and almost fail the campaign as a result of the city’s descent into chaos. These deeper strategic layers underpin the story and give more meaning to the endless cycle of breaches and battles.
Still, we suspect Chimera Squad might not be to the taste of genre purists, having sacrificed perhaps a little too much of the player’s control over strategic outcomes in favour of reactive encounters. In some ways, it’s XCOM for those who prefer action games – a hybrid that isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers, even if the resulting beast loses a little of its identity.
This is not so much a total reinvention as a crowd-pleasing remix – a dextrous spin on a classic game