XCOM®: Chimera Squad

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...

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

Love it, a simple way to play XCOM, just for whenever u r tired of complexity

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.

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.

Way late to the party, just wanted to help anyone in my shoes - if you missed this its because its worth missing. I could go into the myriad ways in which this falls flat but safe to say pretty much all of them.

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

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.

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

Takes everything good that was done for x-com EU and x-com 2 and ruins it. The marvel movie of the franchise.

Really fun new take on XCOM! I played through both of the original XCOMs back in the 90s as well as the modern ones. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is probably my favourite of the entire franchise (even if it is arguably way too long). I say this to contextualise my relationship with the series, a series I dearly love - even as my gaming sensibilities have shifted in adulthood to be more focused on cute cozy farming life sims where I can date cuties. Chimera Squad is so much fun. It takes the changes they made from the original series - like smaller units and pacier missions - and distilled it further into a super intense tactical game with quick battles. I'm a grown lady with pets and a job to look after, so having missions I could finish while I have breakfast was a big plus for me. The little character chats between missions and encounters was a bit one-note and didn't go as deep as I'd have liked, but they were plenty charming and I really enjoyed the art direction for them. The character portraits and the cut-scenes are clearly a cost-cutting measure so they could smash together a game without years of development and funding, but they really work for me. I'd love for more high-end, polished games to chill out and simplify their presentation like this. I haven't played their Marvel game Midnight Suns yet, but this game definitely feels kind of like a proof of concept and audition for the purpose of securing that gig. For me, Chimera Squad has been an effective advert for Midnight Suns, so there's that! All in all: Thoroughly enjoyed and absolutely see myself playing again!

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.

This game is not a spinoff. It has a complete story, funny dialogue, and combat that is familiar if you've played the previous entries. The main difference between this and xcom enemy unknown/xcom 2 is the breaching. it's not as bad as other comments make it out to be. Basically, you have a special turn to setup your team to storm into the room and get some shots off before normal gameplay resumes. You can use various items and abilities to give your team the best chance in the room they're about to run into. Another big difference is that instead of various classes of soldiers, you get named characters with special dialogue, and to offset the limited number of soldiers you get, your soldiers can't die. They can bleed out though, so you have to stabilize them or you'll fail the mission. If they get wounded really bad, there's a chance that they can get a scar and get some random debuff but you can put them in training to get rid of the scar debuff and upgrade their normal stats. They all gain experience and level up pretty much the same as in the xcom enemy unknown, but they all have specific skill trees. Summary: this game is the official sequel to xcom 2 and it's worth what it costs PS: torque is a really good unit

Yes this is not X COM really liked the first 2, it tries hard to give you a different take, but my first 2 or 3 missions I found myself targeting alien civilians by mistake . I do not like the breach mechanic as you cannot select your positioning. It feels strategy light. It is at best okay, graphic are okay, game play is okay, cartoon cut scene are okay, OKAY if you get it cheap give it a go but expect okay.

Gameplay is pretty fun. It has neither the challenge or depth or Xcom 2, but it's got some different mechanics and abilities to differentiate itself well enough. All units have individual turns instead of an enemy turn and a player turn, and you can use a lot of the abilities the aliens were using on you in other xcom games. The story and plot is pretty lacking, but that's pretty par for the course of an Xcom game. It's not really why you play this kind of game. The atmosphere is a lot lighter than anything else in the series, whether that's a positive or negative is up to you. So pretty much, buy this game if you want to play Xcom, but have played the other entries too many times.

A buggy boring game which had some interesting ideas but failed to really expand on them in a meaningful way

Chimera Squad is a interesting change to the regular XCOM gameplay loop, It almost feels a bit like it's made for mobile [More on that later] which is not a bad thing by itself, but do understand when playing it if you rush a mission it can literally last 2-3 minutes before returning to the planning screen. This can be nice if you've not got a lot of free time and want a short and sweet gaming session. But the short combat does have its own faults. The introduction of actual characters rather then making your own troops was a interesting choice, one i do not entirely agree with due to the poor writing of some characters, but plenty of them are still well written and interesting enough that it does peek my attention at times! The Alien redesigns are however plain counteractive to the story, the story is about getting along and living together despite differences, yet they decided to overtly change the aliens to be more human like to make them relatable. Not only are the designs ugly but it takes away from the values of the story itself. Lore wise it's a mixture of fun and a mess, for those unaware Grey-Phoenix originates from the XCOM Mobile title XCOM-Legends. If you have spare-time for short bursts of gaming and want to enjoy a new side of XCOM give it a try! but beware that I'd consider the game more of a continuation of XCOM-Legends then that of XCOM-2.

Absolute trash, not even mods can save it.

[h1] Summary [/h1] I think that Chimera Squad gets a hard press. It's a flawed game, but still has good music, and interesting story, and a very different take on art-style and combat, which, as someone whose played the original UFO Defense, XCOM 1, EW, XCOM 2 and WOTC, was not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's an enjoyable game, just not a 'blow your mind' kind of game. [h1] Mechanics & Lore [/h1] Don't get me wrong, it's not as good as the other games, which I would maintain are some of the best turn based strategy games on the market, but the 'breach' mechanic that stops combat is interesting, it's fun being able to play as aliens (which only really would happen via mind control shenanigans in other games), and every character has their own personality, and issues. I don't think City 31 as a concept is that far fetched - the Elder's did mind control and subjugate every race as they came to Earth, and the plotline does make it clear that 'living together', is a bit difficult. I think what lets the game down the most is the limited voice acting lines and direction, and the lack of variety in combat. If you want to have personable characters, especially in combat systems, you need more variety in lines. You don't need that in StarCraft, for example, because you're listening for audio confirmation that the marine is selected, and that they're shooting. But if you're going to have each other comment on moves, bad plays, wounding, etc, you need more than 5-10 lines per character for a 20 hour game. Especially as most people will stick to the squad they made. [h1] A Small Note on Enemies [/h1] Secondly, I think they should've added more enemies. Each faction do have their own unique units, and there are some 'standard' henchmen for everyone, but quite a few are just repastes from XCOM 2. Cool ones, which are paced out well, which keep you on your toes, but its not that new. [hr][/hr] If you're looking for a fantastic game from the developers of XCOM, then this might not be it - consider modding the other titles. If you're looking for a different take on the formula, with comic book art style, then I think you would enjoy the game for what it is.

It's nowhere as deep as the previous entries, but there's still enough fun there to carry you through a playthrough.

I got zero complaints about XCOM Chimera Squad, (and that says a lot, because I like to complain) so instead I'm going to go ahead and address OTHER user's complaints: 1) Alleged bugs: Well, I played through an entire campaign on Ironman and NEVER ran into a SINGLE game breaking bug, and am well into my second Impossible Difficulty run and STILL haven't run into any bugs, so I've got no clue what all these people complaining about bugs are talking about - sounds like a hardware issue to me. 2) Too easy because of new initiative mechanic (all you have to do is shoot the next guy in the turn order): I guarantee the people who made this complaint were playing on Story difficulty (easy baby difficulty), because that's the only way you're going to have any way of even remotely being able to reliably one-shot enemies before their turn, except maybe in the VERY early stages of the game when you're fighting the weakest possible enemy types. Hell, even on Story Difficulty, elite enemies like Ronins, Sorcerers, and Praetoreans physically have too much HP for you to one-shot even with crits and fully-upgraded weapons, and the initiative mechanic means you aren't free to have all of your agents focus fire a single target during a single turn without serious abuse of initiative-shuffling special abilities and single-use items. 3) Bad writing, characters are too goofy: ...Compared to what? Have you PLAYED the other XCOM games? Enemy Unknown had extremely bare-bones writing and only 3 characters with any real dialogue. XCOM 2 was better, but not by much. Both had serious pacing problems where absolutely nothing would happen for huge swaths of time. Chimera Squad's story is not only extremely well paced, (there's no scanning involved, the strategic map is turned based with story missions on fixed timers), and has branching story lines depending on what order you take on the enemy factions that adds to replay value (there's even an achievement for doing every version of every faction takedown mission across multiple playthroughs) Also I'd like to point out that THE only two truly goofy characters in the cast happen to be a war orphan with a death wish, and an ADVENT Hybrid clone who is quite literally 5-years-old. Anyway, TL:DR, I genuinely love the game, and I'm mostly just ranting because I'm legitimately mad that this game is sitting at "Mixed" reviews instead of Very Positive.

its a different Xcom game. not True Xcom game think this game went the wrong way for Xcom. only played For the story/lore of the xcom universe

until xcom3 is here

ok

v gud.