XCOM is one of the great strategy game franchises. Both the original series and the revival are all about saving the world from an alien menace while balancing your troops, budget, and facilities. The combat system is tremendous, turn-based, where your squad inches across the maps wiping out alien scum left and right. True masochists like me will add mods like The Long War, where everything is even more intense and there’s even more fighting and micromanagement.
XCOM: Chimera Squad
Developer: Firaxis Games
Price: $20
Platform: PC
The downside: That’s kind of a lot to deal with. If you have a job, kids, or a worldwide pandemic outside, it can be tough to muster up enthusiasm for spending 4 hours each night grinding your troops across a city block. What if you could have XCOM…but maybe a little less of it?
XCOM Chimera Squad is XCOM but manageable. You only have a handful of troops to manage, the battles are over relatively quickly, and there’s less micromanagement overall. You can do well in an hour or two and feel accomplished, rather than getting an hour into an intense city battle and then having your entire squad wiped out.
Storywise, the setup is that humanity won and drove out the aliens at the end of XCOM 2. But the world has changed. Some aliens and alien-human hybrids stayed behind. Some enemies are now friends. And some dudes just want to bang sexy snake ladies in peace. And that’s okay!
Chimera Squad turns the XCOM force into, basically, the FBI. You’re who the local cops call in when things go awry or they need more resources. The battlefield this time around isn’t the entire world or a continent, it’s a city where aliens, humans, hybrids, and snake-bangers live in peace. Not everyone wants to keep it that way, so there’s terrorist organizations, crimes, assassinations, and plots.
Since this is now a multi…cultural? Alienal? Society, your squad is a range of nationalities and…alien types? Don’t call me out on Twitter and ruin my posting cred, I don’t know the proper word for a diverse group of aliens. XCOM tended to be about stealing alien technology and abilities. Chimera Squad works them in as part of the group, so not only do you have machine guns and sniper rifles, you have mind control and psychic powers. The core tactical gameplay is still the same but diversified. You may use your mind controller to stun an enemy while your lady-with-a-shotgun blasts them. You may use your snake lady to drag an enemy close, then use your alien dude to clobber them for interrogation later.
Rather than building and customizing your own force, Chimera Squad gives you a handful of troops with abilities that interlock and play well together, then leaves it to you to figure out how to use them. Since the Squad is now The Cops, missions also proceed like police raids rather than military operations. Most begin with a Breach phase where your team kicks in a door, smashes through a window or otherwise makes an entrance. What’s great is each entrance has advantages and drawbacks, and those also hook into your team synergies. Everyone entering through the door might get a bonus to their aimed shot, while everyone barreling in through the window might risk taking damage but stun nearby enemies.
The basic moment by moment is planning: Do you stay in high cover and try to keep their heads down? Burst in for a melee strike? Risk leaving someone in the open for a high-percentage kill shot? POP QUIZ! WHAT DO YOU DO, HOTSHOT?
Each encounter has a handful of enemies and each mission has about 3 encounters, plus maybe a boss fight. Chimera Squad does a lot with this simple formula: there’s the basic “storm in and kill or capture everyone” missions, but there’s also smash-and-grabs where your squad needs to get something, then escape, hostage rescues, intelligence gathering, and your usual cop missions.
Back at HQ, instead of trying to manage a planet, you’re trying to help out a city. However, just like in Big Boy XCOM, there are usually more missions than you can handle, so you have to decide what’s important. You can only respond to one thing per day, so what’s it gonna be, kid? There are also Critical Missions which must be done every day. There are noncombat Situations that don’t involve the dude from Jersey Shore but do involve helping out the locals. And then there’s the whole “terrorist organizations trying to ruin everything for everyone” thing. To handle these, you do Investigations to learn about a faction, followed by Operations to mess with their plans, and then comes the Takedown: GOING AFTER THE BIG KAHUNA.
The base and team management feel familiar: research technologies, buy gear, customize your team, train them, and dress them up in bright pink armor. And, again, just like in Big Boy XCOM, there’s seldom enough people to do everything, so you are constantly making decisions and weighing tradeoffs: train your agent to deal with that missing leg (oops) or put them on research duty? Do you want better armor or better weapons? Do you want androids that can sub in for agents when your agents get taken out? WHAT DO YOU DO? WHAT DO YOU DOOOOOOO?
On the back end, there are tons of things to tweak: You can play on difficulties ranging from story mode to impossible mode. There’s Ironman mode and hardcore mode and extended city anarchy mode. There are options to let your team heal between encounters or not. There’s even a built-in mod manager. It’s not as sexy as, like, a cutting edge new graphics engine or whatever, but clearly, they’ve figured out what XCOM fans want to tweak, which is literally everything.
It may have a reduced scope, but it’s still XCOM. You can still miss with a 100% chance to hit. You still never have enough assets to do everything you want. The demands from your higher-ups are near-impossible. Time grinds onward and the city may explode at any minute.
It rules.
The Final Word
It’s XCOM but less intimidating and overwhelming.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
