TEAM SPIRIT
Your enemies want City 31 to burn—it’s up to you to put them down in XCOM CHIMERA SQUAD.
You join me in medias res as the members of my squad hang precariously from rappel lines at the windows of a warehouse. All this is because a resistance group has been conducting some troubling experiments on the premises, and it’s now time to shut them down.
Each breach point has pros and cons. I assign my human-alien hybrid Cherub to the most dangerous entrance. His massive shield should protect him from return fire. I assign my shotgun-wielding badass, Godmother, to a breach point that grants extra mobility, which should help her get close to the enemy. I assign my medic to the safest entrance, and my psychic alien warrior, Verge, to the last one. A big glowing button invites me to ‘BREACH’. Time to take a deep breath and see what happens.
XCOM: Chimera Squad is still classic XCOM. You gather resources and unlock technology on the strategic map, and then dive into turn-based tactical battles to secure objectives and beat down the resistance menace. The world has changed, though. The Advent war is over. Humans, aliens, and hybrids have reached an uneasy peace. In City 31 they live side by side, but there are still restless groups who want to continue the grudges of the Advent war. As such the Chimera Squad is a special forces unit designed to cripple those resistance movements and keep the peace.
SQUAD GOALS
There’s no world map here. The game focuses purely on City 31’s nine districts. You have to manage levels of unrest in each district to keep the city’s anarchy level low. If the city anarchy bar maxes out, it’s game over. To save the city, you need to investigate three resistance groups, one at a time. You take on missions, gather intel, research new gear, unmask each group’s leader, and then take them out in climactic final missions. Don’t be fooled by the smaller scale—this is still a very lengthy, chunky tactics game.
Missions are much shorter than XCOM fans will be familiar with, however. Some are just a few rooms packed with enemies. Significant missions are chains of three roomclears, each of which has a ‘breach’ phase in which you position your squad at different entrance points. And that’s why my squad members are all dangling off ropes outside of an old warehouse.
The breach phase is chaotic. One by one my four squaddies smash through their assigned window. Then time slows to a crawl. The camera shifts to an over-the-shoulder perspective as my primary breacher, Cherub, takes aim. The camera has a blurry fish-eye filter that makes it impossible to gauge the layout of the room, but I can switch focus between enemies and choose what I want to pick off. I tab between enemies, noting their classes. There’s a turret—that will deal damage to my squad over time, but it can wait. There are a couple of androids, easily killed but they can self-destruct and do significant area-of-effect damage.
Then I see a purifier. The purifier has to die. It’s just a man with a flamethrower, but area-of-effect attacks are massive when you’re fighting at room scale. The flames can linger and make traversal a bit of a nightmare. Also the initial spray can set off explosive barrels, creating a cascade of events that could end up with my entire squad aflame and covered in acid.
Instead of shooting, I order Cherub to hunker down. You don’t create your own characters in Chimera Squad. Each of the 11 available heroes have unique abilities. Each functions as a separate class. You’ll recognize some archetypes from XCOM 2: The gunslinger, the medic with a healing drone, the shotgun maniac. Then there are others like the muton Axiom, who hits people and sometimes goes berserk in the middle of a mission. Your agents can’t die either. If they go down in a mission, as long as you stabilize them, they turn up back at base safe and sound. There’s a chance they can gain a wound, which sabotages their stats until you rest them for a few missions. The system is far less punishing than XCOM 2. It’s easier to experiment when the stakes aren’t so high. You can risk slotting in new under-levelled agents to play with their abilities.
However this approach sacrifices one of XCOM’s greatest features: The ability to name your soldiers and bond with them over the course of a campaign. There are advantages though. Each character is voiced. The
Humans, aliens, and hybrids have reached an uneasy peace