XCOM: Chimera Squad

I love XCOM 2 especially with the War of the Chosen add-on. The game is fantastically complex and nuanced with hundreds of hours of potential gameplay. If it were not for the extraordinary levels of “XCOM jank” specifically in vanilla XCOM 2, it would easily be in my top 10 games of all time. My expectations for XCOM: Chimera Squad were wildly unrealistic. I wanted the game to capture the same highs I experienced in XCOM 2 for the first time again. I’m sad to report that XCOM: Chimera Squad is not as good as XCOM 2. But the game makes enough meaningful differences to the formula to be worth playing through at least once.

XCOM: Chimera Squad despite lacking a numeral at the end is a direct sequel to the events of XCOM 2. After liberating humanity from the alien masters, the remaining aliens, hybrids and humans decide to live together on Earth. XCOM is no more but some of the remaining officers decided to stick around to form a combined human and alien SWAT team known as the Chimera Squad. Chimera Squad is summoned to City 31 after the kidnapping and assasination of the mayor. Without any steady leadership in the city, chaos erupts. Fringe organizations begin to rob banks, kidnap VIPs and the like. Your role as the commander of the Chimera Squad is to figure out who is behind the assasination of the mayor and to make sure the city doesn’t fall into anarchy.

At first glance, XCOM: Chimera Squad is almost unrecognizable as an XCOM game. The game has this comic book-like aesthetic with cartoony character portraits and still action cutscenes. There are no longer randomly generated soldiers but named officers with unique abilities. Like an RPG, the game has soldiers that have the tank, DPS and healer equivalents. Each officer is also voiced with a wide variety of accents and personalities. It was weird seeing aliens speak fluent English at first but by the end of the game I grew to love the sassy viper Torque or the Australian hybrid monk Zephyr. I definitely had a chuckle or two between the inter-species squad interactions after every completed mission.

The scope of the game is narrow due to the fact that you are not saving humanity from possible extinction but are managing crime within a single city. The encounters play out in short 5-20 minute chunks rather than the up to an hour long affairs in the other XCOM games. Chimera Squad cuts through the unnecessary filler in previous XCOM games: no more slowly creeping up and going into overwatch, and no more turns just to reload everyone’s guns. There is also the breaching and interlaced turns. At the beginning of every encounter, you can command your squad to breach at certain locations. For example breaching through the wall you can surprise the enemy while busting through the door can let you draw fire from the enemies. It’s a neat mechanic that makes starting each encounter more interesting. The second big change are the interlaced turns between your squad and the enemies. The interlaced turns help balance firefights and gives your 4-man squad a fighting chance without completely being overwhelmed. Overall, I enjoyed the quicker pace in Chimera Squad and appreciated how quickly I was able to progress through the game.

Chimera Squad has fatal flaws that eventually got more noticeable the longer I played. The first major issue I have is that there is no perma-death in this game. Due to every character being completely unique, if any officer is killed in combat it is an automatic defeat, at this point the game forces you to reload an earlier save. I think the beauty of XCOM is all about learning from your mistakes, even if it means losing your top soldiers (And yes, I’m also in the camp that you should never save-scum in XCOM). There is an off chance that a character could be downed and is bleeding out. In this case that soldier can be rescued and in their place a replacement Android is used in the next encounter. The problem I have with this mechanic is that the Androids are worthless in combat unless you dedicate resources to upgrade them and don’t gain experience unlike your soldiers. It is worthwhile to reload an earlier save with your soldier still alive because they are so much more effective in combat than the Androids. Chimera Squad sets itself up as a game that’s meant to be save-scummed whether you like it or not.

Vanilla XCOM2 was notorious for its’ jank and thankfully Chimera Squad is not as buggy but there were a few bugs that frustrated me. The first bug is that the game aggressively auto-saves to the point where it is impossible to beat missions that you have failed. I got stuck on a mission because I failed to stop a boss in time. When I reloaded the latest auto-save, it would start on the enemy’s turn who caused me to lose the mission in the first place. Reloading past auto-saves didn’t help either because they gave me too few soldiers to command and was not enough for me to stop the boss. I had to replay the entire encounter of roughly 20 mins in order to win this mission. The irony is that auto-saving is designed so that you don’t lose much progress in a game, but in Chimera Squad you are better off manually saving. The other annoying bug is with the game’s UI, there are times where the character portrait on the bottom left would not appear so I had no idea how much ammo my soldier had remaining. The bugs with Chimera Squad are tolerable, but the main problem I have with this game is how it glorifies police work specifically the SWAT tactics.

In Chimera Squad, your team busts through doors, plants explosives to breach through walls and rappel down buildings to break through windows. Once you begin the encounter there are often innocent civilians also present. While it is obvious not to harm the civilians, it is extremely easy for them to be caught in the crossfire in the ensuing firefights with the enemy. Civilians that are killed in action raise the chance of increasing the city’s anarchy level. The whole reason I bring this up is that XCOM: Chimera Squad was released a little over a month after the Breonna Taylor shooting.

For those who are unaware, Breonna Taylor was an innocent civilian that was shot and killed by officers raiding an apartment. The offending officers were found not guilty. The parallels between the firefights in Chimera Squad and the Breonna Taylor shooting are frighteningly similar, especially the fact where you have your squad bust down a door, can get innocent civilians killed and the officer that killed that civilian is left unpunished. I am completely aware that XCOM: Chimera Squad is a video game and is a depiction of a fictional universe, but morally I could not stomach with how much the game glorifies police violence. In this game, civilians are just another unfortunate casualty and it is jarring that no one in the game really addresses the matter.

Chimera Squad makes both good and bad changes to XCOM. The concise and speedy encounters are great because it trims the bloated combat mechanics in the old games to get to the heart of the firefights. I appreciated how Firaxis finally tried to deliver a story and characters with some actual personality compared to the overly serious nature of the prior games. BUT I simply could not get over the fact that the game tries too hard to encourage you to save-scum by removing permadeath and introduces an auto-save feature that hurts more than it helps. While it is not Firaxis’ fault, a game about an elite SWAT squad is not going to go well when overall support for the police in the United States is at an all-time low. Chimera Squad has definite potential and I would wholly appreciate it if some of the gameplay mechanics do get introduced in later sequels, but it is a game with the wrong setting released at the wrong time.