An experimental spin off of the XCOM series, Chimera Squad definitely lives up to its name. Small scale tactical battles in a counter terrorist themed version of the core XCOM 2 game. But with a few key changes to keep things interesting.
The setting is City 31, Earth, post the liberation of the planet from Advent as depicted in XCOM 2.
It’s a game about what happens after the war. You’re managing a team from the Reclamation Agency. Chimera Squad are a counter terrorism force that grew out of XCOM after the world was liberated from the Elders and humanity had to get along with all the new Sectoids and Mutons and Hybrids.
Chimera Squad’s unique benefit is that it’s comprised of members from each of those species.
The agency’s job is pulling all the dangerous Advent war tech out of the hands of those who’d do harm to the citizens of City 31.
City 31 is split into 9 regions. Each region has missions that can generate. Choose not to deal with a mission in a particular area that day and it can start developing unrest. Develop enough unrest and the city itself will generate anarchy. Lose the city, lose the game. That’s the overall strategy level for Chimera Squad, with squad focussed combat as the mission level.
Even then Missions on the map aren’t always an actual playable tactical encounter, sometimes just choosing where to put resources for a given day.
But who seeks to destabilise City 31?
There are three opposing factions, of which one is picked at the start to focus on.
- The Progeny (Earthen Psionic Advocates)
- Gray Phoenix (Muton Alien folks who just want to go home)
- Sacred Coil (Ex Advent Religious Anti XCOM Zealots for hybrids)
The overarching plot of the game is the investigation of each of these factions after the assassination of the mayor of City 31. This means learning about a faction, then revealing their Operations, then conducting a takedown of the faction before their plans come to fruition.
You can tell the game has been designed around replayability. After beating a faction takedown mission, the remaining factions develop additional threats and abilities as you haven’t stopped them. It’s a well done narrative way of scaling up your opponents as the game continues, and means the later game will change depending on your choices.
The progression and advancement of your squad is even more of a focus than previous games in the series.
The Chimera Squad are fixed characters. There’s no full customisation of models, though you choose the order to unlock them and they can have specialised skills developed as they level.
Each squad member has voiceover with banter and chat, both on mission and in the home base. Including in game callouts when certain actions are taken depending on squad mates, which was a nice touch that helped endear them to me.
They’re all varied in visual design,and narratively are actual characters with previous existing relationships. It’s also nice that there’s a couple references to named characters from prior XCOM games.
They’re all also survivors of the invasion, a nearly twenty year occupation and then the war of liberation (the events of XCOM 2) and then the five years of rebuilding earth since.
And they were all on opposing sides. Some for XCOM, some for Advent, some for unaffiliated resistance groups. As a result almost all the stories are winter bleak. Orphans, war criminals and renegades.
For example,Torque. An ice queen Advent viper (Snake Lady) who joined XCOM after the war to “train” them as it still let her fight XCOM forces and she really enjoyed that.
Except she actually quite likes Director Jane Kelly of the Reclamation Agency (I see what you did there Firaxis) and follows Kelly’s request to join Chimera Squad as a favour.
That’s legitimately great characterisation, not just coming from a bio but from combat barks and the occasional visual novel styled cutscene or audio conversation between missions.
Mechanically too, each character is varied and brings something new to the table. I was very fond of Blueblood, whose ability to ignore cover with a pistol and shoot multiple times a turn was incredibly helpful to clear up stragglers. I paired him with Cherub who had the ability to put a one time use shield on a friend. When that shield broke, Cherub got a point up on his riot shield charge ability.
Between the two of them, they became a hyperaggressive assault team on their own, clearing rooms.
Working out these synergies and strategies is probably the best part of the game. A focussed pool of characters and skills that have many ways of being linked and used on missions.
Those actual missions are changed and broken up now from XCOM 2. No more being dropped into a wide battlefield and searching for the objective. Instead, there’s the Breach Phase and the Clear Phase for each of potentially multiple encounters on a mission.
Breaching may be my favourite part. First, select the breach location. Each mission briefing will discuss possible insertion points, then it’s up to the player to outfit the squad accordingly. Walls need breaching charges. Sealed doors need keycards. Vents need special upgrades for armour that lets troops slip in undetected.
Then it’s assigning the right squad member to each breaching site. Buffs and debuffs can get applied here, each of your units gets a turn to shoot, or can rush to cover. Or if they’ve leveled up enough, use special abilities or gadgets as they breach. The order is important as you go in and the whole breach phase completely nails the tacticool feeling it’s going for. Every enemy slows their animations, your team each get a moment of action in the frozen time. Then the world slams back to full speed as any aggressive enemies launch a counter attack.
From there, the clear phase. This is pretty standard XCOM. An isometric gridbased tactical map where each unit gets two actions a turn, with the turn ending if they shoot. (Special abilities obviously mess with this a bit)
The main changes to the formula are much smaller arenas of only one or two rooms and the new unit activation order. Instead of XCOM and Advent Turns, now each unit gets put into a turn order each round. So you can have several opponents act between your agents moves.
It’s a follow on from the interruptions to the turn order that the chosen units got in XCOM 2, just codified for everyone this time.
Alternate activations changes up the game significantly for those familiar with XCOM. Not being able to activate the full suite of squad abilities without retaliation is a real curve ball.
Chimera Squad becomes about queueing up your abilities. The psionic is up first, with enemy 1 up second so let’s stun that enemy for a round. That buys the medic time to get out from the now stunned enemy’s overwatch and get to the wounded assault trooper to heal them.
The loop becomes assessing a whole round worth of potential enemy/player interactions and then hoping luck goes your way.
I kind of like it. It definitely suits the smaller scale maps better, and encourages uses of the squad skill synchronisation from earlier much more. Making sure you’re considering the needs of everyone each round because they could be knocked out before being activated is tricky stuff. Coming from the previous games in the franchise, it took a little while to realise certain free activations were basically designed to combo into powerful abilities. But when that started to click, the whole game opened up.
This evolution of the formula does highlight one existing series flaw even further though.
Its invariably frustrating we don’t have an undo last action button. There are still way too many opportunities for a misclick to throw off a whole turn. Especially in this smaller scale. Getting a placement wrong for a character in these tiny arenas can mean near instant death. There’s always the option to restart a mission, and a welcome ability to go back to the last breach, but not having an action reset still stings.
On death actually, Chimera Squad does away with Permadeath for the members of the squad. Instead, the mission will end as a failure if you can’t stabilise any squad member who goes down. No carrying on without them.
This can have a few moments of frustration when activation order leaves you with only one unit left on the field, and they happen to go down to bad RNG or the aforementioned misclick.
It makes sense, considering the narrative tone and how important the smaller scale squad is. It’s just another example of the mechanics changing to match the new tone, yet throwing up new problems with the gameplay.
The setting change is sort of tied into the mechanics, and it’s not unwelcome to show the aftermath of the previous games. Narratively it’s very interesting. Mechanically it doesn’t quite line up.
The main problem is that the game is built from the bones of a combat/destruction focussed squad game, and wants to put on the clothes of a peacekeeping/counter terrorism force. Dressing up soldiers in police uniforms doesn’t actually translate that well. Just like real life.
It’s a game where you have the option to “non-lethally” subdue your opponents.
It’s encouraged. Explicitly. Subduing an opponent grants a 20% chance to grant 20 bonus intel resources per mission.
Two problems. One, it stacks so once you’ve taken down six or seven enemies in a mission, the justification to keep doing so falls away. Two, large health bars for large aliens carried over from XCOM gameplay into Chimaera Squad mean that, especially early on, the plan is shooting the bad guys almost to death, then getting whoever is closest to beat them over the head to clear the last 2-3 points of health.
Or, use gadgets. Pay 200 credits to outfit your entire squad with tranq rounds. This means opponents will always be knocked unconscious instead of killed. Hope you didn’t want to spend that hard earned money or the gear slot on each character on other upgrades!
Or your team can use a special grenade to turn off all guns in an area though, or stun with a flashbang. Except even then you still have to shoot people till they’re weak enough to subdue. Or they recover and rearm on their turn.
There’s no option to force surrender, just point blank blasting till you use the butt of a rifle or tranq bullets.
It’s frustrating. Subuing is an idea that narratively is important to the game. But the mechanical implementation doesn’t go far enough and it undermines itself by making it a compromise. You have to choose to hurt your effectiveness, especially in the early game.
In theory you’re a counter insurgency force protecting the people. Mostly what you do is crack skulls or shoot bad guys. There’s enough interesting stuff in the world and mechanics that this discrepancy doesn’t stop the game being entertaining or challenging. It just sticks out if you happen to think about it too much. Or at all.
Overall the whole game feels like an evolution of the VIP, escape or stealth missions from XCOM 2. The focus on small scale fights, tight arenas and story driven combat. The change in activations causes a complete shift in how the gameplay works that’s refreshing. It means the game is far more than just a selection of XCOM 2 challenge maps in an expansion pack.
Instead, as the name suggests, this experimental title combines lots of different elements for a hybrid experience.
Mostly the good parts are the lion’s share of the game. Tight strategising and challenging management of squad abilities. Sometimes it’s the more snakily subtle narrative tricks of exploring the post XCOM 2 world or the character stories and interplay between squad members.
Every so often it’s a braying goat irritating you as the game punishes you for misclicks or when the counter terrorist set dressing doesn’t quite gel.
With a recommended price of £16.99 for a substantial spin off, XCOM Chimera Squad is worth a look.