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XCOM: Chimera Squad Review - Breaching Simplicity Through Strategy
There's a speed to XCOM: Chimera Squad which the series has been slowly building towards throughout both main installments of the modern-day rebooted XCOM franchise, but reaching it means the game must sacrifice some important elements which made it popular to begin with. No longer can players spend literal hours inching their squad forward step by step across a map, and the death of a main character now forces a game over instead of just being thought of as another casualty of war, but once players grow accustomed to these changes XCOM: Chimera Squad still offers the tactical options and science fiction tropes fans of the franchise are looking for.
In the first few minutes after starting up XCOM: Chimera Squad, returning series players will likely feel both rushed and a little confused, but give the game some time and it's easy to fall into the familiar rhythm of base upgrades, statistics and resource management, and tactical turn-based battles players are used to. The biggest immediate difference is the presentation, with most of the game's plot being delivered though 2D animated images and comic book style character pop-ups as opposed to the more realistic animations of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, but this becomes less jarring as time goes on, thanks in part to the detailed 3D environments and character models which look just as good, if not better, than they did in XCOM 2. There's also some new research options, a new, smaller-scale story, and the ability to create a uniquely diverse squad of human, alien, and robot soldiers.
It's XCOM: Chimera Squad's focus on these soldiers which makes the game stand out so much, both metaphorically and mechanically speaking, from its predecessors. Most XCOM games (for the purposes of clarity, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is not being included in this list, as it took the series in a different direction entirely) focus on the battle between human and alien forces from a detached position, with the player acting as a commander sending their best troops into the field to deal with problems all over the world. Mistakes often happen, lives are often lost, and the player must simply hire new officer recruits and train them up quickly if they hope to have a chance at defeating their enemy. The operatives of XCOM: Chimera Squad, however, are much less disposable.
These aren't random soldiers who are only given a name, identity, and a personality by the player's imagination, but actual characters with thoughts, feelings, and, most importantly, an impact on the game's plot. Unlike previous XCOM games, these aren't replaceable grunts for the XCOM project to simply throw at the enemy, and the player can't leave them to die and move on just because they don't want to take the chance of turning around to heal them while trying to escape a battle of overwhelming odds. These are characters with complicated pasts, histories which intertwine and influence how they interact with each other, and if one of them succumbs to death in combat XCOM: Chimera Squad will force the player to either restart the level, restart the current encounter, or load a previous save.
Previous XCOM games saw players entering a level in a dropship and then scouring the level for alien activity at their own pace. They could move tile by tile, putting every team member into Overwatch Mode after each step to ensure nothing would surprise them, and they could also run blindly into the fog of war hoping to discover the enemy's location quickly. In pretty much every encounter sequence in XCOM: Chimera Squad, this decision is made automatically. Upon entering a mission area, players are then asked to "breach" the enemy encampment in whatever way happens to be possible at the time, be it by jumping through a window, hacking a security panel, or just by lining up the entire team and having them all go through the same small side door.
This method of beginning every encounter with the player's whole team usually getting the drop on the enemies is definitely a big shift from the way many people approached combat in games like XCOM, but this procedure still contains a degree of strategy and the potential for stealth, especially as new items, soldiers, and abilities get unlocked. The Chimera Squad is made up of human, alien, and android characters working together, and each ones have different abilities which can be utilized in interesting and potentially lethal ways. Psionic characters like Verge, for instance, can call forth their telepathic powers to turn enemies against each other or paralyze them in place, and the snake-like Viper character Torque can slither through vents silently during breaches and surprise enemies on the other side.
While the other XCOM games tended to focus on the current state of the entire world, dealing with problems and fighting enemies on a global scale, XCOM: Chimera Squad instead zooms in and tasks players with controlling just one city in particular. Instead of an airship which flies team members to their different encounters, Chimera Squad has what basically amounts to a SWAT van, and despite occasional help from the city's chief of police the team is pretty much on their own. There's no underground hideout, just a garage with a break room and a couple of meeting areas. However, despite this reduced scale, the amount of strategy and base mechanics needed to keep a player's XCOM unit functioning properly hasn't gone anywhere, and the reduced infrastructure goes a long wait towards making players feel like a member of a group of struggling underdogs.
Researching new technologies, buying items on the alien black market, and training up soldiers between and during missions are all things players will need to once again give proper attention to if they want their XCOM: Chimera Squad team members to make it out alive. Thankfully (at least on a Normal difficulty setting) the game feels slightly more forgiving during combat encounter dice rolls than previous entries in the franchise, and the amount of freedom given to players to decide what to focus their resources and attention on next can be almost overwhelming, but in that good way which inspires users to come back again on a different playthrough and see what they could have done differently.
XCOM: Chimera Squad gives off a sort of Far Cry: Blood Dragon feel upon first glance, but the longer a player stays invested the more the game begins to feel like classic XCOM, despite all of the changes and tweaks. Battles go by faster, and there are many more instances of players simply having to accomplish a task and then run for their lives as wave after wave of never-ending enemies descend upon them than franchise fans may be used to, but all of the thought, all of the world-building, and all of the strategy which made the main franchise entries so popular is very clearly alive and well in this game. Especially considering XCOM: Chimera Squad's remarkably cheap price, it's a worthy addition for any turn-based strategy fan's collection.
XCOM: Chimera Squad releases on PC April 24th, 2020.
