XCOM: Chimera Squad Review

May 2

May 2 XCOM: Chimera Squad Review

There are a number of things in my life that I’d like to enjoy but am unable to thanks to some shortcoming of mine. I love a game of Chinese Checkers with friends, but am always coming in last thanks to my limited capacity for planning. Similarly, I loved playing piano but was never very good at it because I don’t have the discipline for daily practice. Somewhat lesser than these more worthy pursuits is the XCOM game series. I love the XCOM series because of its wonderful gameplay and excellent character design, but I struggle to beat them because I’m consistently outsmarted by the game’s more tactically talented enemies. Fortunately for me, last week developer Firaxis released XCOM: Chimera Squad, which promised a more fun, and kind, gameplay experience.

XCOM: Chimera Squad is either the third or fourth game in the rebooted XCOM series, depending on how much you respect The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, the story so far is this: In XCOM: Enemy Unknown aliens invaded Earth, the XCOM global military project was established to combat them, but they failed. In XCOM 2, the alien invaders are the new rulers of Earth but are eventually defeated by human rebels. XCOM: Chimera Squad is set years after XCOM 2, in City 31, the first post-invasion city where humanity attempts to live alongside the multitude of aliens brought to Earth during the invasion as they have nowhere to go with their leaders killed and spaceships captured. Players control the titular Chimera Squad, a militarized peacekeeping unit composed of both humans and aliens, trying to maintain order in City 31 and nurture the tenuous, blooming alliance between Earthlings and their new extraterrestrial neighbors. The game is divided between the HQ and Encounters. At the HQ, players manage the equipment, abilities, and activities of squad members, while Encounters are the violent confrontations between Chimera Squad and the various instigators and terrorists plaguing city 31.

XCOM: Chimera Squad makes a lot of changes to the standards of the series and those changes are the things I like the most about Chimera Squad. The most notable change is that the members of Chimera Squad are no longer the bland blank slates of the previous XCOM games. Instead, each of the members of Chimera Squad are fully-formed people with their own histories, beliefs, desires, and quirks that are revealed in character dossiers and dialogue, which made me feel far more connected to them than I ever felt to the empty drones I commanded in previous games. Anytime I heard the alien berserker and human demolitions expert swapping stories of their mothers or the alien psychic teasing the human marksman, I cared about the squad so I had more fun commanding them in encounters. Along those same lines, if a member of Chimera Squad is ever reduced to zero health and then spends three turns bleeding out, the character dies. In previous XCOM games, the game would proceed as normal and the fallen soldier’s name would be added to an “in memoriam” list. But in Chimera Squad, the game immediately presents the player with a Game Over screen upon squad member death. As far as I can tell, this is done for two reasons: One, because the game spends plenty of time and effort making players connect emotionally with their squad members and don’t want to throw that away, and two, to keep players from suffering through a lengthy, doomed campaign. I especially appreciate the latter reason, as one of my biggest problems with previous XCOM games was that I could spend 20-40 hours playing through a campaign only to realize I had suffered enough losses earlier in the game that victory was impossible.

The last noteworthy change that I really appreciated is the new interleaved turn style in encounters. In previous XCOM games, all of a players units would activate, then all of the enemy units would respond. This lead to a flattening of combat tactics, as players could reliably win simply by maximizing damage output, ensuring there were no enemies left to counterattack on their turn. In XCOM: Chimera Squad, one or more enemy turns are placed between the turns of Chimera Squad members, which means players have to spend more time considering agent safety, including repositioning or using health-increasing items. I like this new way of handling encounters, because it made me feel more comfortable experimenting with new play styles and squad compositions to find something that both succeeded and felt fun to play.

Under all of these terrific features are a frustrating amount of technical flaws that do their best to mar the experience of playing XCOM: Chimera Squad. Probably the biggest issue is a UI that is persistently glitching in one way or another. In my 27 hours with the game, I lost count of how many times the game would fail to give me accurate listings of enemies I could target with abilities, usually by overlaying previous target readouts over top of the currently available ones. As you might guess, these errors made it very difficult to decide what my best option could be, as I was too busy trying to determine what was actually possible. On top of the often unreadable interface, there were a number of times where the game would ignore or misinterpret inputs of mine. There were no fewer than five times I lost a mission because some glitch or technical problem caused a squad member to go somewhere or do something I didn’t intend. The cherry on top of this terrible technological sundae is that fact that XCOM: Chimera Squad has a habit of crashing fairly often. I don’t know how much this has to do with my own personal PC setup, but I know no other game crashes on me three times in one day.

I think at the end of the day, it’s more likely than not that the developers of XCOM: Chimera Squad will address the bugs and glitches and since that’s the only real problem with the game, I think it is absolutely worth the full $20. Even if you’ve never played an XCOM game before, I urge you to check out XCOM: Chimera Squad.