XCOM®: Chimera Squad

Buggy and worst of all boring

Cringe.

Quite ok, but a bit "dumbed down" XCOM game. Instead of longer missions this one has 1-3 encounters long set-ups. You have set amount of heroes to choose from and train. The story is nothing special but the tactical encounters are fun. You can grab this and play couple of missions and come back later, no need to invest a lot of time in one play. There are some bugs in animation, but nothing game breaking.

I think it's worth stating that this is not XCOM3. If you are expecting base building and a randomly generated set of soldiers where permadeath is a thing and you can get yourself into a game-over situation by failing too many missions... it's not that kind of game. The difficulty options are flexible meaning you can make this as easy or as hard as you like. This is more of a tactical A-Team where you have a squad of 8 soldiers each with a vastly distinctive skillset. You have healer, tank, DPS, melee-orientated, psionic, fast, heavy characters. With certain perks you can lean towards a certain desire and putting the right equipment on a soldier is important. Research is important. You gain more Elerium by doing certain missions which gives you the funds to carry down a tech tree. The tech tree starts simple but bigger projects start taking more time but will give you huge benefits upon completition. Intel lets you manage fireteams across the parts of City 31 where they can assist you in reducing the region heat and helping out in various ways. You can get your squad members to take training missions either to boost their skills or remove debuff scars. Side missions are a way for…

XCOM: Chimera Squad is a classic XCOM style strategy game with a few large deviations from the formula. Firstly, it's a smaller game - something that the pricetag also reflects thankfully. The biggest change however is that you no longer name and customize your characters. There's 14 set "Agents" in the pool to choose from. The positive side of that is that each of the Agents has a personality and a story baked in - you get banter at the base and mid-mission as well as bits and pieces of their backstories. The negative is that if you don't jive with the writing it's gonna suck to not be able to get as invested in the squad. On the gameplay side the distinct characters also bring with them distinct, albeit paired down, skill trees. Most of them are fairly interesting, but it means you can never run two medics for example. Another weird decision that was made was gating the truly powerful (last promotion unlocks in XCOM2, etc.) behind gear. You can do missions to get "Epic" level weapons that each come with a showstopping ability attached. Missions are now broken up into "encounters", with each encounter starting with a breach - line up, kick the door in, get a chance to take o…

It's a good game, but a bad XCOM. The game has great ideas and is definitely fun to play, but if you are used to main-series XCOM its just...mid. It lacks the things that makes XCOM great, namely permadeath and character customisation. The story itself is actually not that bad, even tho not as good as other XCOMs. The weirdest part about the game is the dialogue tho, it switches from interesting and cool/well written banter and convos, to overly cringe parts. I don't really know what to make of it. 7/10 if you rate it as a standalone, 5/10 if you rate it as an XCOM game I do still recommend getting it, if it is on sale.