XCOM: Chimera Squad - humans and aliens team up

[eXalted]

Still XPiratez >>>>>>>> nuXCOM

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

So...are all Vipers chicks or something?
Like, did the Ethereals just clone the women, because they are degenerates?

Actually they are, I mean all female, I dunno if the elders are degenerates. The Alien Hunters DLC goes into detail about it and one of the big bads you hunt down is a male viper created by the crazy German scientist from the first game.

Oh right I forgot about the Viper King.
I guess its like a lion sort of thing where you have one male and he has a huge harem of females.
You'd still think you'd encounter more than one though.

 

[lightbane]

The excuse was that by making them females, they wouldn't reproduce out of control, as the Viper King demonstrates in his DLC, since he shows up with company.
Funnily enough the sneks were male in the previous NU-COM...
Not that they would fool anyone as "infiltrator units" due their weird looks.

 

[Morgoth]

 

[Ghulgothas]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun picked a real winner as their icon.

 

[eXalted]

Apparently it never even reaches the complexity of XCOM2.

I'm going back to Long War 2 (without WotC).

 

[Tweed]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun picked a real winner as their icon.

They added playable gorillas to the game too?

 

[Mazisky]

IGN italy:

"repetitive, bad narrative, limited tactics"

"In a Xcom family photo, Chimera Squad is the forgotten cousin on the background"

"lacking a proper campaign, this game doesn't even have a reason to exists"

lol

 

[Infinitron]

Snake gf is here:



Also soundtrack:

 

[Infinitron]

Firaxis gameplay stream:

 

[Theodora]

That breach mechanic looks sweet.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/xcom-chimera-squad-review/

XCOM: CHIMERA SQUAD REVIEW
Your enemies want City 31 to burn. It's up to Chimera Squad to put them down.

My squad hangs precariously from rappel lines at the windows of a warehouse. A resistance group has been conducting troubling experiments on the premises, and it's time to shut them down.

Each breach point has pros and cons. I assign my human-alien hybrid Cherub to the most dangerous entrance. His massive shield should protect him from return fire. I assign my shotgun-wielding badass Godmother to a breach point that grants extra mobility, which should help her get close to the enemy. I assign my medic to the safest entrance, and my psychic alien warrior Verge to the last one. A big inviting button invites me to 'BREACH'. Time to take a deep breath and see what happens.

XCOM: Chimera Squad is still classic XCOM. You gather resources and unlock technology on the strategic map, and then dive into turn-based tactical battles to secure objectives and beat down the resistance menace. The world has changed, though. The Advent war is over. Humans, aliens, and hybrids have reached an uneasy peace. In City 31 they live side by side, but there are still restless groups who want to continue the grudges of the Advent war. Chimera Squad is a special forces unit designed to cripple those resistance movements and keep the peace.

There's no world map here. The game focuses purely on City 31's nine districts. You have to manage levels of unrest in each district to keep the city's anarchy level low. If the city anarchy bar maxes out, it's game over. To save the city you need to investigate three resistance groups, one at a time. You take on missions, gather intel, research new gear, unmask each group's leader, and then take them out in climactic final missions. Don't be fooled by the smaller scale; this is still a lengthy, chunky tactics game.

Missions are much shorter than XCOM fans will be familiar with, however. Some are just a few rooms packed with enemies. Significant missions are chains of three room-clears, each of which has a 'breach' phase in which you position your squad at different entrance points. That's why my squad members are dangling off ropes outside an old warehouse.

The breach phase is chaotic. One by one my four squaddies smash through their assigned window. Then time slows to a crawl. The camera shifts to an over-the-shoulder perspective as my primary breacher, Cherub, takes aim. The camera has a blurry fish-eye filter that makes it impossible to gauge the layout of the room, but I can switch focus between enemies and choose what I want to pick off. I tab between enemies, noting their classes. There's a turret—that will deal reliable damage to my squad over time, but it can wait. There are a couple of androids, easily killed but they can self-destruct and do significant area-of-effect damage.

Then I see a purifier. The purifier has to die. It's just a man with a flamethrower, but area-of-effect attacks are massive when you're fighting at room scale. The flames can linger and make traversal a nightmare. Also the initial spray can set off explosive barrels, creating a cascade of events that could end up with my entire squad aflame and covered in acid.

Instead of shooting, I order Cherub to hunker down. You don't create your own characters in Chimera Squad. Each of the 11 available heroes have unique abilities. Each functions as a separate class. You'll recognise some archetypes from XCOM 2—the gunslinger, the medic with a healing drone, the shotgun maniac. Then there are others like the muton Axiom, who hits people and sometimes goes berserk in the middle of a mission.

This approach sacrifices one of XCOM's greatest features: the ability to name your soldiers and bond with them over the course of a campaign. There are advantages though. Each character is voiced. The story is told through cartoon vignettes that efficiently lay out the stakes and do a good job of describing the new world order with humour and character—one off the cuff description explains that City 31's inhabitants fry and eat the terrifying Chryssalids as though they're lobsters. There's tension too. Some of the hybrids on your team may have fought on the alien side in the Advent war against the humans. The events of XCOM 2 loom over City 31 throughout.

Cherub's hunker down ability is amazing. He draws all enemy fire and takes it harmlessly on his shield, sparing his teammates from the threat of return fire. Next up is my most powerful guy, the psionic Verge. Instead of shooting he uses his mind to lift the purifier out of cover. Suspended in midair, he's an easy target for my other two teammates, who execute him before the battle even starts.

I found the breach phase irritating at first. I'm used to having a lot more battlefield awareness in XCOM, but Chimera Squad deliberately sends you in blind. It's a very different dynamic to XCOM 2. That game is about advancing efficiently and positioning properly across large maps. You manage odds and control the situation as much as possible. Chimera Squad throws a scenario at you and shouts "catch!".

The breach phase is about eliminating important enemies. Once that's over your squad automatically moves to cover and a traditional XCOM fight ensues. They take cover intelligently, most of the time, but it's another point where the game takes tactical choice away from you. Once I learned to shrug and go with the flow of the game I started to like it a lot more, but you're always a victim of circumstance in Chimera Squad.

Things picked up when my heroes started to level up and their unique talents came online. There are some delicious combos to unlock. My medic has an incredible ability to give a teammate a free action. This is fantastic paired with Verge, who can draw enemies into a psychic web, one by one, and then zap them all with his brain for guaranteed damage. In XCOM's world of percentage chances, that sort of en masse two-to-three points of chip damage is gold. Beautifully, he can brain-zap everyone, and then the medic can throw him a free action so he can brain-zap everyone again. These are XCOM Chimera's best moments, when you engineer team combos and wipe out a whole room in just a few turns.

I like the heroes a lot, but there's not much experimentation space in XCOM, especially when fights are just a few rooms long. I wish the heroes had some of those powerful unique skills unlocked already so I could switch them around and play with combos right away. The game removes XCOM 2's health pool race at least, which demanded that you level up armour and weapons to keep up with enemies' ever expanding health bars. That's great in XCOM 2, but keeping health pools and damage output stable leaves you free to swap in inexperienced heroes without too much loss of power.

The strategy layer of the game is surprisingly involved too. There's no base building, but you still need to research technology, buy gadgets, and gather three resources: elerium, intel, and dollars. I miss the cool visual armour and weapon upgrades of traditional XCOM. Without them the strategy layer feels like fussy, abstract number crunching. You can (and really should) deploy field teams to the city's districts. These function a bit like XCOM's satellites. They keep unrest down and feed you resources so you can buy rad flashbangs for your squad. Separately, you can deploy squad members to work on spec ops, which sounds exciting, but it's just another way to hoover up resources. Without base building and XCOM 2's lavish presentation, it all feels too much like admin.

It's still an involving tactics game though. It's a curious XCOM experiment with a neat setting that I'd like to explore more. It's fantastic value, too. This isn't budget XCOM exactly, it's an attempt to rework the series' rules into a snappier experience. There's a version of Chimera Squad I can imagine that's even more elegant and streamlined, but I still felt the familiar feelings of elation when a combo comes off, and annoyance when that 90 percent shot misses. If anything, it's convinced me to start yet another XCOM 2 campaign, and that's no bad thing.

THE VERDICT
72

XCOM: CHIMERA SQUAD
A fine superhero SWAT team tactics game smothered by a little too much admin.

 

[eXalted]

No one on the Codex likes the direction of this game.

Will everyone here buy it and secretly enjoy it (including me)?

Yes.

 

[Theodora]

No one on the Codex likes the direction of this game.

Will everyone here buy it and secretly enjoy it (including me)?

Yes.

That's what's annoying.

Especially the people using it as a canvas for their culture wars nonsense.

 

[ArchAngel]

No one on the Codex likes the direction of this game.

Will everyone here buy it and secretly enjoy it (including me)?

Yes.

I am certainly going to try it, but not buy it. After Firaxis fucked us over with Xcom 2 expansion I said I would never again give them my monies.

 

[Mazisky]

I think that the breach thing will be included in Xcom 3 only for specific interior missions.

 

[Mazisky]

This is golden.

A large part of the SJW community praised the "alien diversity" inclusion in Chimera Squad and insulted all those who just wanted fighting aliens, using Torque, the snake lady as icon of this diversity.

It turns out that she is racist towards aliens and xenophobe because she was born on earth.

 

[Empary]

This is golden.

A large part of the SJW community praised the "alien diversity" inclusion in Chimera Squad and insulted all those who just wanted fighting aliens, using Torque, the snake lady as icon of this diversity.

It turns out that she is racist towards aliens and xenophobe because she was born on earth.

BRUH moment

 

[Silly Germans]

Are there plans for a GOG release ?

 

[ArchAngel]

Firaxis gameplay stream:

This looked fun enough for one playthrough. It will not be a Xcom game to remember for all times but seems fun enough.

 

[eXalted]

Can't wait for the friendly Chryssalid team member in the DLC.

 

[Yosharian]

This is golden.

A large part of the SJW community praised the "alien diversity" inclusion in Chimera Squad and insulted all those who just wanted fighting aliens, using Torque, the snake lady as icon of this diversity.

It turns out that she is racist towards aliens and xenophobe because she was born on earth.

Fucking gold

 

[Morgoth]

On the upside, Alien diversity is better than nigger diversity.

So, anyone playing this? Any thoughts?

 

[Mazisky]

On the upside, Alien diversity is better than nigger diversity.

So, anyone playing this? Any thoughts?

The game is really fun. However, it is pretty limited and lack a lot of stuff that makes xcom cool.

-Maps are really small. It's like playing Xcom 2 where all enemies are into a single building and you start just in front of the main door.

-The breach system is cool, I think it will be part of some specific missions in X3, but the entire game with it feels somehow wrong.

-The characters and writing are the worst I've seen in years, the same level as the advertising you see in crap chinese mobile games. Wotc is Oscar Wilde compared, which says all since writing is the weakest part of Nuxcoms.

-The Cop mood is cool honestly, but it just does not feel Xcom.

-No customization and no permadeath means you're forced to play with shitty characters.

-Actually I like the soundtrack, the Geoscape music has always been great in every single Xcom game, old and new. This is no exception.

-Graphics is the same as Xcom 2, nice but same glitches.

-Strategy layer is barebones


It is clearly inferior to any Xcom, but I have to say that the content in it is more than worth its low price.

Taken by its own without seeing the Xcom name it is pretty good.

 

[Spectacle]

The writing in this game is really lame. There's not a shred of alien thought patterns, not even any difference in accent. If not for the portraits you'd have no idea that half of the characters are supposed to be non-human.