XCOM®: Chimera Squad

Game kinda got a lot of hate, but honestly it's a solid game. It's nothing like XCOM, this is much smaller in scope and deeper in story. Gameplay is fun and presentation is solid. Worth a buy to me, it stands well on it's own. I think the downvotes mostly come from people wanting this to be XCOM 3, and it's definitely not that.

Just play XCOM 2.

Chimera Squad is like its namesake, a mix of several creatures. You have XCom 2, which provides the base, a slice of Fire Emblem, and a little bit of something new. XCom 2 is one of the best PC games of the 2010s, so of course it's a solid base. However, if you've played that game basically every enemy type, weapon, and asset will be familiar. There are even some janky corners where they've shoehorned in a bit of XCom UX rather than come up with their own. The basic troop activation mechanic of XCom is reimagined into an initiative timeline, where enemies and heroes alternate. The core skill in the game is manipulating this timeline in different ways. On the Fire Emblem front, having individual characters works pretty well. They all fill a distinct niche, and have a limited amount of skill choices to adapt them to your style and squad. The characters that are truly new - a tank who can lend his shields and a psychic who can swap around the battlefield - are genuinely very interesting, particularly when they interact with the timeline mechanics. Sadly, the writing is mostly terrible. The characters feel very generic, and are annoyingly upbeat in an MCU kind of way. The sn…

Essentially XCOM SWAT. Great squad based tactics game. If you enjoyed XCOM pick it up! Game ran completely stable for me, didn't encounter any crashes or game breaking bugs. There's some weird glitches when enemies move around but it the game never broke because of this, just looks weird.

Summary of the review: Positive overall take: the game is enjoyable, though quite short. The agents each have distinct personalities that can be amusing. The Breach mechanic is a highlight, but the fixed squad size of only 4 is a major downside. There are occasional glitches (for example with character movement). best part is that Jane Kelly from the tutorial in Xcom 2 is in the game the Director

A fun and fresh take on the XCOM formula. I played it around launch and ran into quite a few issues, though a lot of them may have been fixed by now. The economy and progression also felt a little unbalanced at times, but overall it’s a smaller, more experimental XCOM experience that I enjoyed. Definitely worth trying if you’re an XCOM fan and want something a bit different.