The strategy layer of the game is
surprisingly involved too. There’s no
base building, but you still need to
research tech, buy gadgets and gather
resources: Elerium, intel, and dollars.
I miss the visual armor and weapon
upgrades of traditional XCOM.
Without them the strategy layer feels
like fussy, abstract number crunching.
You can (and really should) deploy
field teams to the city’s districts.
These function a bit like XCOM’s
satellites. They keep unrest down and
feed you resources so you can buy
rad flashbangs for your squad.
Separately, you can deploy squad
members to work on spec ops, which
sounds exciting, but it’s
just another way to
hoover up resources.
Without base building
and XCOM 2 ’s lavish
presentation, it all feels
too much like admin.
It’s still a really
involved tactics game,
though. It’s a curious
XCOM experiment with a neat
setting that I’d like to explore more.
It’s fantastic value, too. This isn’t
budget XCOM exactly—it’s an
attempt to rework the series’ rules
into a snappier experience. There’s a
version of Chimera Squad I can
imagine that’s even more, but I still
felt the familiar feelings of elation
when a combo came off, and
annoyance when that 90 percent shot
missed. If anything, it’s convinced me
to start yet another XCOM 2
campaign, and that’s no bad thing.72
XCOM Chimera Squad is
a fine superhero SWAT
team tactics game
smothered by a little too
much admin.VERDICTYo u c a n
manipulate the
turn order to
gang up on an
enemyUNREST FOR THE WICKED How to keep City 31 calm in times of crisis
1
The chevrons next
to each district
represent unrest.
Districts are color
coded too. Angler’s
Point is just about to
boil over.2
You can assign
different types of
field teams to each
district. Security
teams reduce unrest
every Friday, for
some reason.3
Operations are
easy resource
grabs. You don’t even
need to fight to pick
up this extra elerium.4
Purple missions
will further the
story and help you to
close in on each
resistance group.
24 31story is told through cartoon
vignettes that efficiently lay out the
stakes and do a good job of
describing the new world order with
humor and character—one off the
cuff description explains that City
31’s inhabitants fry and eat the
terrifying Chryssalids as though
they’re lobsters. There’s tension too.
Some of the aliens and hybrids on
your team may have fought on the
enemy side in the Advent war against
the humans. The events of XCOM 2
loom over City 31 throughout.
Cherub’s hunker down ability is
amazing. He draws all enemy fire
and takes it harmlessly on his shield,
sparing his teammates from the
threat of return fire. Next up is my
most powerful guy, the psionic Verge.
Instead of shooting, he uses his mind
to lift the purifier out of cover.
Suspended in midair, the purifier is
an easy target for my other two
teammates, who execute him before
the battle even starts.
LIFE’S A BREACH
I found the breach phase irritating at
first. I’m used to having a lot more
battlefield awareness in XCOM, but
Chimera Squad deliberately sends
you in blind. It’s a very different
dynamic to XCOM 2. That game is
about advancing efficiently and
positioning properly across large
maps. You manage odds and control
the situation as much as possible.
Chimera Squad throws a scenario at
you and shouts “catch!”.
The breach system is much more
nuanced than it appears, but the
game does a poor job of teaching you
the intricacies. For example, the
second agent assigned to a breach
point can use breach gear like
flashbangs, but not the first. You can
also change the order in which your
agents breach—if you want a
particular hero to go first in the
battle, you can engineer that in the
breach phase. Instead of moving your
whole team in a turn, agent and
enemy actions are interleaved in a
turn tracker at the top right of the
screen. You can manipulate the turn
order using agent abilities to gang up
on an enemy you really want dead.
The breach phase is about
eliminating important enemies.
Once that’s over your squad
automatically moves to cover and
a traditional XCOM fight ensues.
They take cover intelligently,
most of the time, but it’s
another point where the game
takes tactical choice away from you.
Once I learned to shrug and go with
the flow of the game I started to like
it a lot more, but you’re always going
to be a victim of circumstance in
Chimera Squad.
Things picked up when my
heroes started to level up and their
unique talents came to the fore.
There are some delicious combos to
unlock. My medic has an incredible
ability to give a teammate a free
action. This is fantastic paired with
Verge, who can draw enemies into a
psychic web, one by one, and then
zap them all with his brain for
guaranteed damage. In XCOM’s
world of percentage
chances, that sort of en
masse two-to-three
points of chip damage
is gold. Beautifully, he
can brain-zap everyone,
and then the medic can
throw him a free action
so he can brain-zap
everyone again. These
are Chimera Sqaud’s best moments,
when you engineer clever team
combos and wipe out a whole room
in just a few turns.
I like the heroes a lot, but there’s
not much experimentation space
here, especially when fights are just a
few rooms long. I wish the heroes
had some of those powerful unique
skills unlocked already so I could
switch them around and play with
combos right away. The game
removes XCOM 2 ’s health pool race
at least, which demanded that you
level up armor and weapons to keep
up with enemies’ expanding health
bars. That’s great in XCOM 2 , but
keeping health pools and damage
output stable leaves you free to
swap in inexperienced heroes
without much loss of power.REVIEW