PC & console game reviews
A fun twist on XCOM’s proven recipe.
Set ten years after the events of XCOM 2, your titular team of supersoldiers in XCOM: Chimera Squad are no longer a blank slate of customisable avatars, but distinct characters made up of humans, hybrids, and aliens, all of whom come with their own pre-rendered traits, specialisations, and personalities.
Your mission isn’t to fend off an invasion or lead an underground resistance anymore, either, but to act as peacekeepers for City 31, a model metropolis for the uneasy post-war cohabitation between humankind and their former invaders. While there’s plenty of heavy political subtext that can be drawn from Chimera Squad’s story of former enemies living and fighting side by side, its 18 hour campaign belies XCOM’s sombre tone for something more resemblant of Saturday-morning cartoon, complete with comicbook style cutscenes and a sprightly, joke-a-minute script.
Chimera Squad interweaves the series’ more punitive systems not with the fate of your squad, but City 31 itself. Fail to balance your peacekeeping resources, or prioritise the most vulnerable districts against the ticking clock of Chimera Squad’s in-game calendar, and the entire city could descend into chaos. That structure, which allows you to tackle a number of traditional XCOM levels and smaller, quickfire encounters in your own order, ensured that both my successes and slip-ups still held permanent and tangible consequences, even if those consequences never felt quite as nail-biting as losing a handmade clone of my flatmate to a cocky stat gamble.
In better news, the addition of Alien and Hybrid units to your squad roster freshens up XCOM’s core gameplay loop significantly, not least thanks to the supernatural power afforded by these newly recruited extraterrestrial teammates. There are 11 agents to unlock and upgrade, each boasting unique powers and abilities that can radically shift the playing field in dramatic and unpredictable ways.
There’s a certain satisfaction to be had from getting the drop on foes at the start of each mission through the new breach mode, for instance, but its overused to the point of feeling more like a gimmicky crutch than an integral addition to the XCOM blueprint. Likewise, the shift to an interleaved turn system, which places units into a DnD-style queue based on initiative determined by the Breach system, narrows opportunities to play the long game with big picture team formation setups, instead focusing on more reactive, quickfire manoeuvres. tactics genre at large.