Done with apocalypses, the new game from XCOM creator Julian Gollop is a bright, Brutal Legend-style action-strategy inspired by Pikmin and Clash Royale

Julian Gollop's next game does not look like a Julian Gollop game. The man forever fated to be referred to as 'XCOM creator Julian Gollop' in headlines is making a game with no RNG, no turns, and no apocalyptic bleakness. Chip ‘n Clawz vs The Brainioids is as perky as its name suggests, and its blend of Fortnite's artstyle with a better-executed take on the action-strategy gameplay of Brutal Legend makes it a hard-left turn in Snapshot Games' catalogue, which up to now has consisted of the dark fantasy Chaos Reborn, and XCOM-by-another-name Phoenix Point.

None of which is news to Gollop, of course. He knows this is outré for him and his studio, and he expects that long-time fans might find it a little hard to get into Chip 'n Clawz. When I ask him what he thinks will resonate with his most hardcore followers, he pauses. "Maybe only the humour?" he says with a chuckle. "Obviously it ain't turn-based, that's for sure, so I think that people who stick with turn-based games will struggle a little bit."

Which, as a fan of both original and nu-XCOM, filled me with no small amount of trepidation, but having spent some time with Chip 'n Clawz in both singleplayer and co-op mode, there is something here. I don't love the tone, or the aesthetic, and I suspect long-time Gollop-heads will bounce right off, but the game does have a fun kind of frenetic, D-Day feel to it as you marshal your own motley forces and stomp about the frontline. There's an audience for Chip 'n Clawz, it just might not be people like me.

Boom bash pow

Gollop namechecks "old-style comics" and 1996's Mars Attacks as key inspirations for Chip 'n Clawz' look and feel, and boy are they both very clear. Earth is recovering from an alien invasion (you can take the man out of XCOM…) that it fended off at a heavy cost, and it's the job of heroes Chip 'n Clawz—a veteran of the invasion and his perky robotic partner—to roam about the planet in their mobile HQ mopping up the remnants of the Brainioids' armada.

You can play either Chip or Clawz, with a co-op partner taking on the other role if you have one. They play similarly but not identically. Clawz is a heavy-hitter with a hammer and slow-firing but damaging ranged attack while Chip's melee and ranged are both faster but less damaging. Chip can whack your troops to make them faster while Clawz can heal them. In terms of upgrades, Clawz can get access to a rocket suit that lets her float and fly about the map, while Chip has what is, in essence, a landspeeder from Star Wars.

Regardless of who you play, what you're doing level-to-level is much the same. Chip 'n Clawz' moment-to-moment is a mix of on-the-ground whacking (that'd be the action) and basebuilding/troop management (the strategy). That means you're constantly zipping back and forth between third-person combat and an overhead tactical map which feels consciously, deliberately limited. In the strategy view, you're limited to placing rally points for your different types of troops—gunners go here, melee units go here, artillery here—and that's basically it. The goal is for you to spend more time in the thick of things, leading from the front and skipping about levels to spy new enemy spawn points and gather collectibles, than plotting out grand offensives in the war room.

But that doesn't mean you're not meant to think. "Even though the command [system] we put in the game is fairly simple," says Gollop, "You do have to think about it. In some cases, okay, you've got four rally beacons to place, but in many cases you kind of have to decide not to place a rally beacon."

Plus, not all the strategy is confined to that tactical view. There's still some of that good old RTS stuff in amidst the third-person bashing. In terms of gathering resources and troops, Chip 'n Clawz will be familiar to anyone who ever touched a Command and Conquer game. You enter the map, find a resource node, slap down a harvesting hub before moving on to putting down the buildings that will continuously spit out your troops (up to a limit; you can't just steamroll the enemy with a practically infinite army). You're still thinking about some of that RTS stuff: how to defend your harvesters, where to place buildings and defences so as to make them useful but not open to attack. It's just happening at the same time as you're whacking aliens with your hammer.

Mission critical

Most of the missions I played were about securing beachheads: build a base, attack an enemy outpost, dismantle the old base and build a new one on your enemies' ashes, rinse and repeat. It culminates in a showdown against a level's Brainioid HQ, essentially a bossfight (with healthbars and all) against a stationary platform bristling with turrets and spitting out troops.

But there are other mission varieties. Gollop showed off a later level that was almost MOBA-ish in its design as he navigated defending his HQ against separate, symmetrical lanes of enemy attack. In a co-op mission where both Gollop and I played, the game became straight-up tower defence. We had to defend our HQ and—as a side-objective—two comms towers against wave after wave of attack that increased in ferocity, complexity, and number, only succeeding (sans comms towers) by the skin of our teeth.

There's also a PvP mode—one player is Chip/Clawz, the other the Brainioids—but I didn't get to see that.

There is some genuinely taut pacing in all this, a pleasing rhythm of push and pull that will have you feeling like you're steamrolling foes one minute and—as they get new reinforcements from new avenues of attack—drowning the next.

And yet it is so much simpler a thing, as a package, than pretty much anything else with Gollop's name on it, and I can't shake the feeling (because it's accurate, I think) that Snapshot is pivoting to a new audience entirely. I truly had fun with Chip 'n Clawz, but I struggle to imagine someone who fell in love with original XCOM, or Chaos Reborn, or Phoenix Point falling for this.

But perhaps someone else will, and talking to Gollop, who namechecks influences like Pikmin and other Nintendo strategy games, it feels like he and Snapshot are going for a broader, more casual, more family-friendly audience. When I ask if some part of the game's development was inspired by wanting a game he could play with his own kids, Gollop says "There was for sure, yeah."

Clawz on a chalkboard

Ultimately, a new direction for Snapshot and Gollop is no bad thing. Neither Chaos Reborn nor Phoenix Point set the world on fire, and Gollop isn't legally bound to continue making 'stuff like XCOM' until he retires—he even says it was "a bit liberating" to not have to grapple with implementing RNG in a game for once, as much as he "[loves] rolling dice."

And although it's a more casual thing than his previous games, like I say, I did have fun with the looser crash-bang-wallop of Chip 'n Clawz' gameplay. What actually concerns me about it, from the few missions I've seen, is the tone.

Chip and Clawz are chatty. They banter and joke all throughout missions, constantly nattering about the setting, its history, how icky they find their brain-in-a-jar foes, that kind of thing. Perhaps I'm just miserable, but I found it grating. Clawz in particular has a squeaky, high-pitched, kids'-TV voice that felt at times like an assault on my eardrums, and the gags the pair make are bland, sometimes cloying, and they exit the brain just as soon as they enter it. The artstyle, with all its obvious inspiration from Fortnite (and Clash Royale, which Gollop directly credits as another influence in our chat) doesn't help make the game feel more memorable either.

Even as a fan of crunchier, more chaotically RNG-driven strategy, it's honestly this stuff rather than the more casual nature of Chip 'n Clawz vs The Brainioids that makes me hesitant to play again. But who knows? Maybe this kind of bright, more easily pick-up-and-play kind of thing will find a new, bigger audience. I just don't think it will be the audience Julian Gollop games have had before.

If you want to try the game for yourself, it'll be playable during Steam Next Fest, between February 24 and March 3.