XCOM®: Chimera Squad Reviews

Sometimes you only know how good you have it, when the good times end and the bad times begin.

Really a mixed feeling about this XCom. I would have liked to put "neutral", but in the end, I need to salute the couple of innovations which make the game worth trying for any XCom fan (like me). The Breach system is really a cool feature which makes the mission far more dynamic in my opinion. It should be kept in any future XCom. Besides, they manage to turn positive, something which could seem like a big flaw: only 11 characters, BUT fully unique with their own gameplay, all of them very different and fun to discover. So why mixed? Because the artistic direction is catastrophic, close to a mobile game. And the scenario is dull and just completely generic... My first campaign (Normal), while maxing everything, took me around 30h and it was overall enjoyable, despite some slightly repetitive missions at the very end. One big letdown is the glitched "Every Timeline" achievement which forces a minimum of 3 playthrough (if you are lucky)! In conclusion, I would recommend it to XCom addicts, in need for their dose. For new players, definitely try XCom 2: it is still the reference! And for achievement hunters, I guess "Every Timeline" should repell you enough not to make the step...

What you'd expect from a 2017-2024 era game. Lots of cringe gender identity politics; aliens are misunderstood racially marginalized minorities. The men are emasculated, incompetent and constantly need to be rescued and given a pep talk to. The women, of course, are highly intelligent, strong and independent Mary-sue leaders who can do no wrong. No-one on you team can die, probably designed so that players don't "accidentally" kill off the alphabet mafia. Dialogue feels like being stuck in a reddit echo chamber where everyone's feelings are more important than say, an alien invasion? I got this free in part of a bundle, I might just erase it from my account because I don't like being preached to.

I may only have 20 min, but I can already tell you that this game is not it. It totally loses the tension and cool-factor of the previous games, with the characters and drama feeling straight out of a bad kid's movie. There are a few neat new things, but none of them actually make the game significantly better: breaching gets old fast and the back and forth turns sacrifice the tactical spirit of XCOM in exchange for just shooting the guy who's gonna shoot next. But by far the most important downgrade is having to listen to the supposed special forces be goofy and stupid, it completely ruins the atmosphere that makes XCOM so good.

what if x com 2.....was soy? what if the aliens invaders integrated with humans because we need a poorly written racism allegory? what if we completely ignored the cliffhanger ending of xcom 2 hinting at underwater ancient aliens (or whatever the fuck)? What if in 5 years the horror death and genocide perpetrated by the aliens didnt lead to massive warfare and bad will between both groups? What if we skipped the interesting bits of earths society coming to terms with itself? What if the mutons and sectoids looked down syndrome giants and slender men respectively? What if instead of perma death squad mates you could customise you got the rejects from the concord cast? what if we ditched the art style of previous games to make some lame cartoon shit? I truly hope non of the artistic and narrative content from this game makes into any xcom 3. While some of the concepts it brings up could be interesting its all so poorly handled. this feels like xcom Netflix addition, preformative slop

i feel like you need more than 4 guys per squad with some of these story finales. The RNG sucks, you'll miss 80%+ often or you'll do random damage because armor makes zero sense in this game. its really buggy, enemies teleport all over the room during their turn. the breaching gets old really fast and screws you over sometimes because you have no idea what is going to be in the other side.

The game has a bug where waves of enemies that you need to kill to end the mission just don't spawn. Playing on ironman you can't reload your save so you cannot continue no matter what. In 7 hours this bug has happened twice to me.

Recommended with an asterisk that I recommend mods and modifying ini files to have a much better time. The best stop resisting arrest simulator, show them the meaning of police brutality! It's a very fun game, but of course, it has problems. The game is basically made using XCOM assets and mechanics while trying to be a different game, which leads to some units being significantly better than others. They did manage to make it into a different game, though. It's like XCOM lite+something else. The game loop is like a condensed regular XCOM experience with some new, some old, and some different mechanics, for example, the game being alternating turns where one of your units has a turn, followed by an enemy, and so on until everyone has had a turn changes the whole "deal with the biggest problem first using whatever you need then work your way down the list with what you have left" to "kill/incapacitate whoever is going next". Another thing is being wounded is significantly less impactful and there being a healer with a no cooldown heal means you can simply ignore being damaged to an extent since you can simply fix it mid-combat and face no repercussions after the mission is over unless the wound was grave and/or the unit went down. The game also uses 12 unique units, and if any of them die you lose the campaign, which is a massive leap in another direction from any other XCOM game. A very small tech tree as well that takes a while to work your way through regardless, so there's just more focus on units and their abilities. Terminal the healer is a bit too required without specific settings or equipment, for example, you can manage with regen weave but for that, you need to know to go after a specific faction first, or you can run the full heal between encounters setting. The writing is a bit goofy and some lines can get real repetitive mid-missions, but it didn't bother me too much since the game was so much less serious anyway. The voice acting is both good and bad in a way, I like the voice actors, the problem is that the voice actors that voice aliens don't sound like they're alien. The autosave system is nearly worthless - I had a terror mission where a car exploded killing the last civilian, the game kept 4 autosaves before that, 3 of them are just the car exploding immediately and I lose, the final one is the start of the mission, which I already have an in-built button for. The animations for a lot of stuff, for example running, are incredibly slow, to the point that I had to go into the ini settings to increase them by 70% and it still felt a bit slow at times, for example when I activate the full party heal that Terminal has I have to tab and do something else in the background because it takes such a long time.

Kindof a few years late for a review, but basically this is "What if Xcom 2 was way buggier, and full of awful obnoxious dialogue with marvel-tier bad writing." I like the Xcom games, and the idea of Xcom but cops in an alien hybrid city *would* be cool, if the game itself wasn't barely functional garbage. This was my 4th attempt to finally beat it and not bother with again, but after a couple crashes I'd say it's not worth even that. None of the characters were likable nor was the plot interesting enough to justify playing through all the bugs.

combat has a decent feeling, and yet its buggy at the same time, at the same time the art, lines and story itself are werd, the characters are supposed to be special forces but are extremely unprofessional and under funded, the story itself seems to suffer a lot too