During the breach phase the player can
choose which of the enemy to target during "turn zero", bearing in mind that
the baddies marked in red will open fire immediately at the start of the
engagement, which makes them high-priority targets:
In this shot Torque is guaranteed to land a hit on the surprised Faceless - but in
practice the Faceless isn't going to be a threat for a few turns. Would it be
better to shoot at the aggressive enemy marked in red? Can the team kill
that enemy during the breach phase, or not? If not, perhaps Torque could
use her poison spit to degrade that unit's aim.
The breach phase is a neat idea that works well. It's completely new for the
XCOM series and adds a tactical dimension to the deployment phase that doesn't
overcomplicate things. It's analogous to the bits of
UFO: Enemy Unknown where the squad deployed from the Skyranger, minus instant squad wipes from Cyberdiscs.
Patchwork here has it easy - none of the baddies are going
to attack her immediately, so she might as well just target the weakest,
easiest-to-hit enemy unit.
Despite the lighter tone
Chimera Squad is still a
tough action game. The player is encouraged to capture enemies in order to
interrogate them for intel, but the squad can shoot, poison, incinerate,
mindflay, blow up,
melt with acid, kick the baddies to death and no-one minds. XCOM can even stun them so that they're on their knees and
then execute them in cold blood. The contrast between the team banter and
their actions is slightly jarring. It doesn't detract from the
gameplay, and at no point was I tempted to grab the game's box and smash it to
bits, but the storyline would be more engaging if the tone was more
consistent.
Another thing. In
XCOM 2 the player had the option of starting the game
with a single premade soldier, a sword-wielding ranger called Jane Kelly:
She had a walk-on part in XCOM's war, although her role was
expanded slightly in War of the Chosen. In Chimera Squad however
she is a main character, the director of the squad, armed with a cup of
coffee:
Rarely has a character gone from background extra to lead in such a short time. The odd thing is that she can die in XCOM 2 - she's just a regular soldier, no less vulnerable than anybody else - which raises the question of whether XCOM 2 itself was a mind-controlled hallucination.
The cutscenes use a flip-book style that doesn't quite work. It almost works.
Instead of animating faces the cutscenes simply flip from one image to another
one - Jane Kelly goes from mildly concerned to annoyed a lot - but
there are too few frames and the differences are too great, so it looks odd. It almost works. There's a little bit of CGI animation
for the character models and a couple of very short CGI cutscenes but on the
whole the storyline is told in flip-book form.
Did I mention that Chimera Squad's formal job is to recover abandoned ADVENT
technology? In practice the squad ends up being used a SWAT team. As per the
earlier games there's a strategic element. It plays out on the City 31
map:
You'd think after twenty years of alien occupation the people of Earth would
want to give their cities names, not numbers, but perhaps in this universe
Half-Life 2 doesn't exist. Did you know that there's a place
called Mhoon Landing? It's in Mississippi, which is two-two-two.
Mississippi. Two-two-two. That's unusual. Philippines is one-two and millennium and accommodate are both two-two, but Mississippi is two-two-two.
Mhoon landing is just a patch of grass at the
bend of a river, but perhaps when the plague has abated I will visit it just
to say I have landed on the mhoon.
The player has the option of embedding field teams
that earn a bit of cash/intel/elerium, which is used to build equipment
upgrades, and there are a mixture of missions and "situations",
which are similar to the scan-for-a-bonus sites from XCOM 2. Each
district of the city has a certain level of disorder - The Fringe, above,
isn't doing great - and if too much of the city descends into chaos the
overall anarchy meter fills up. I have to say that this was never an issue
during my playthrough; the anarchy meter fills up very slowly.
The earlier XCOM games involved a lot of research into alien technology, but
Chimera Squad replaces that with a combination of agent training and special operations, which involve sending a surplus agent to raise funds /
work on intel / get hold of some sandwiches and drinks etc. Compared to the spy
missions of Enemy Within this element is perfunctory, but there is a certain
amount of thought involved in deciding whether to treat an agent's wounds or
alternatively send them to the workshop to quietly build stuff while someone else gets trained up.
With every passing year I come to realise that Hazel O'Connor was a warning from the future.
The game divides into three separate mission strands that the player can complete in
any order. One bunch of baddies are fans of ADVENT and thus use lots of
technology; another bunch specialises in psionics; the third group are aliens who want to go home. They're the easiest of the three to deal with. In the
other XCOM games the player could stall indefinitely until the final mission, but in Chimera Squad each investigation is divided into essentially ten
rounds before an unavoidable final battle. Some mission rewards advance the clock faster, but in my
experience it's actually a better idea to delay the ending as much as possible, so
that the agents have time to build up their skills.
Each faction has a final battle, which plays out slightly differently depending on whether the player tackled them first or not. The idea is that they're all progressing their plans at the same time, so the last faction has a more complicated final battle. Again the idea of multiple enemy factions working in parallel is a clever one that works well and could easily be expanded for XCOM 3.
It does however raise one of the game's problems. The three factions aren't created
equal. The first time I played the game I dealt with the alien mutants
first, then the ADVENT faction, then the psionics, and the game was entertaining albeit not very difficult. On the second playthrough I attacked the former ADVENT people first and ran against a brick wall in the final battle, because the difficulty level shot up. For a game aimed at casual players Chimera Squad has a tendency to box the player in to almost unwinnable situations, and in that case I had to wind back a few missions before tackling the final battle again.
For example, one of the squad's agents is particularly good against robots, and if she is on the team the former ADVENT people are a pushover; conversely the poison-spitting snake lady is almost useless because robots aren't affected by poison. The psionic soldiers aren't much use against the psionic faction because their units are immune to mental effects. The player has the option of periodically recruiting new units, but without foreknowledge it's easy to end up with a duff squad.
Let's go back to the gameplay. Each mission begins with a breaching phase, but the actual battle plays out a lot like XCOM 2 albeit at a faster pace. The biggest innovation is the turn system. With one exception the earlier XCOM games had a system whereby the player moved XCOM's units, then the enemy moved their troops, then back to the player etc. Chimera Squad is still turn-based, but the turns are now interleaved so that XCOM's first unit has a go, then the enemy's first unit, then XCOM's second unit etc, as in the following screenshot:
Cast your eyes to the right. Bane #1 is having his turn; on the next turn I will get to move my robot (sadly one of my team has bought the farm), then Bane #2 has a go, although luckily for me he has been stunned, so the game will skip over him.
After that Patchwork will get to weave her healing magic, then the enemy has two turns because I'm outnumbered - but as you can see the enemy unit after Patchwork has also been stunned, which buys me a bit of time. The interleaved system is both good and bad. On the positive side it adds a new tactical element. The player now has to factor in not just the expected threat level of the enemy, but also its position on the timeline. Wiping out a high-threat enemy that's far down the timeline doesn't help if the next baddy has the power to instantly kill one of XCOM's soldiers, in which case the player would be better off dealing with the immediate threat instead.
I'm in two minds about the interleaved turn system. It sometimes feels unfair. Imagine you have just breached into a new room. Your first unit gets to move immediately, but your fourth unit can't move for six turns, during which time the enemy can fire at them three times while they can only suck it up.
In practice the AI has a habit of spreading its fire among your soldiers, but one unit in particular - Zephyr, who charges at the enemy with her fists flying - often ends up starting the match in an exposed position, which is unfortunate because the AI generally targets the player's most vulnerable unit, which tends to be her. More than once I had a soldier injured during the breach phase, then knocked out a couple of turns later before they had a chance to move or fight back.
It feels unfair, but on the other hand the traditional turn-based system is also unfair, in different ways; delayed artillery attacks in particular never work because the squad can just move out of the way. XCOM is also infamous for turns in which the entire squad is crippled because one soldier was killed which caused a second soldier to panic who then ran in front of enemy overwatch and was killed thus causing a third soldier to panic and hunker down and then the enemy shot the fourth soldier etc.
Perhaps it would be best to say that Chimera Squad is no more unfair than the other XCOM games. Not fair, but no more unfair. Differently fair.
Shouldn't there be an animation of my soldiers leaping out of the APC?
With that out of the way, is the game any good? Yes, although I have reservations. It was made on a small budget with resources from XCOM 2, and there are lots of rough edges. The camera clips through things. Bodies clip through things. Squadmates who aren't present on a mission comment on the action in a way that feels like a mistake. As in the screenshot above, some of the animations are unfinished. The final battle is just one fight among many; it's not especially clever or difficult. The shading is oddly flat. There's an unintuitive system whereby agents can use grenades during the breach phase, but only if they're in certain positions in the line.
And there are some nitpicks. Why can't the player deploy other agents to replace fallen comrades instead of robots? It makes sense that there are no snipers, but what happened to the swords? They would be incredibly useful. The squad's only melee units use their fists instead.
Some missions require that the player evacuate the squad from a certain door while endless reinforcements flood into the room. Not a million miles from the gameplay in Shen's Last Gift, one of the downloadable mission packs for XCOM 2. The interleaved turn system makes it surprisingly difficult to get the squad to the exit intact, because the change in force ratios as the squad evacuates mean that the last unit has to soak up several hits. And yet if that unit goes down the player still wins the match, which feels odd. Do the baddies stabilise the fallen XCOM soldier and then run off? Are the regular police waiting just outside the room to rush in and arrest everybody? Hmm?
Some maps are so cramped that it's extremely difficult to move beyond the starting location, at which point the round degenerates into a dull exchange of gunfire. Furthermore some of the maps have a habit of putting baddies right next to the squad, in a flanking position; it feels as if the maps were designed for a smaller team and were not modified to account for the extra units. Incidentally the maps are preset, as with EU, rather than procedurally generated. Eventually you'll see all of them several times.
The music is generally good. The main theme is a sci-fi take on 1970s cop shows with hints of Miami Vice and a dash of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. However some of the battle music feels like an ersatz copy of XCOM 2, as if the composer wasn't comfortable with pounding action music. None of it is bad, but the previous two games set a very high bar.
The plot operates on the same level as an episode of Scooby-Doo, with boo-hiss villains and no moral ambiguity, albeit that in Scooby-Doo the ghosts always turned out to be a person wearing a mask whereas in the XCOM universe there are actual ghosts, albeit that they're psionically-resurrected zombies, and of course XCOM has giant snakes so why not a giant dog. Why not a giant dog.
Scooby would be a melee character; Shaggy would have the power of mental vagueness, and wasn't it subversive that the mainstream, white-bread main characters - Fred and Daphne - were not only the least interesting characters in the show, but in-universe were also the least interesting characters, bearing in mind they were always overshadowed by I'll start again.
It's Dr Vahlen from Enemy Unknown. She would probably be upset at my wanton use of explosives.
...but as with the earlier games the characters have charisma, particularly the new-look Jane Kelly. Out of the cast of agents I liked the relentlessly optimistic Cherub, the quietly gleeful Patchwork, and the acerbic Zephyr, who has an awesome special ability that lets her attack multiple enemies at once, potentially rooting them on the spot and stunning them, albeit that as mentioned earlier it leaves her open to counter-attack. Her standard punch can be followed up by parry, a special ability that no-sells the next attack against her unless it's explosive or poisonous.
Zephyr does however highlight the problem that some characters are objectively harder to use effectively than others, and without individual character tutorials you have no way of knowing how to use them well until you've put them through the wringer a couple of times.
But still. Chimera Squad is an enjoyable take on XCOM that feels like a testbed for ideas that may or may not be used in XCOM 3. It was originally released at £15 or so, cut in half in sales, and it took me twenty-one hours to finish my first playthrough so I feel I got my money's worth. You can't deploy all of the characters first time, and the flow of play is slightly different depending on the order in which you attack each faction, so the game encourages you to play it a couple of times.
Sadly it doesn't have War of the Chosen's daily Challenge Mode, so once you finish with it you'll probably never play it again. Multiplayer? No. DLC? No. Its own cryptocurrency? No. Action figures? No. Fashion range? No.
Anagram of Acquired Hams? Yes.
