In defense of XCOM: Chimera Squad

XCOM: Chimera Squad was announced less than two weeks before it was released, and then was sold for an introductory price of $10. You'd think that would garner it some goodwill—given how often people complain about games being hyped up years ahead of release, looking at you Elder Scrolls 6—but instead it seemed to give people just enough time to sharpen their knives.

Even mild reviews called it a "watered down" version of XCOM, while ours said its strategy layer "feels like fussy, abstract number crunching" that was "too much like admin." The strategy portion was its weakest element for sure, but then the harsher user reviews on Steam (where recent reviews give Chimera Squad a Mixed rating) accused it of being "Preachy, badly written SJW crap." That 2020 sure was a time.

Forget the losers screeching about SJWs in the Chimera Squad comments, though: Everyone else got it wrong too.

Look, the mainline XCOM games are great, but they have one thing that grinds my gears: the pod system, where hidden enemies lurk in clusters, activating when you cross an invisible line. Almost all my failures in XCOM happen because I try to flank someone, then step over lines that activate two pods in a single move—tripling the amount of enemies I'm facing. At that point, the mission's basically over. This encourages a tediously cautious playstyle, never flanking, always in overwatch. It's a mark of how much I like everything else about XCOM 2 that I still vote for it in our Top 100 every year in spite of this.

Chimera Squad has no pods. Every encounter is a small space, maybe a rooftop or a nightclub, and you can see every enemy from turn one. Instead of activating gangs of enemies who hang out like they're passing around a cigarette behind the bike shed, you kick down doors or leap through windows and go into a slow-motion breach turn.

I love the breach turn. You assign your squad to positions, maybe blowing a hole in a wall or leaping through a skylight, with different bonuses or penalties for each. They leap into action, the enemies look startled, and you snap off a single shot with each squaddie. You can target aggressive enemies, who shoot back if you don't drop them in this phase, or you can target alert enemies, who will take cover or activate buffs, or surprised enemies, who gawp at you and are easier to hit.

Every time it's a gamble. Can I take down this aggressive enemy in a single shotgun blast, or will I end up having to spend two shots I could have split to take down two weaker enemies before the fight even starts?

Most of the time when I activate a pod in XCOM 2 I roll my eyes at how artificial it feels. When I kick in a door in Chimera Squad it's a fuck-yeah moment every single time. Where XCOM 2 can feel drawn out, like it's making me walk from cover to cover just to tempt me into doing something risky, every encounter in Chimera Squad is so constrained it has all the tension of a knife fight in a public toilet.

At this scale, XCOM's "I go, you go" system of turns wouldn't work. Between the powerful abilities and gear you end up with and the limited number of enemies, it'd be too easy to wipe the floor in a single turn. Instead Chimera Squad has interleaved turns, at least one baddie activating between every hero. You breach and then prioritize enemies so you can delete them before they get a turn or stunning them to free up some room in the rolling series of deadlines you're dealing with.

Where the mainline Firaxis games feel like you're playing a board game, Chimera Squad is more like an RPG. Instead of random characters defined by their role, everyone is an individual with their own skill tree and backstory. And their own voice actor.

Reading the complaints about Chimera Squad's dialogue over the years have made me feel fully insane. As well as being "SJW crap" I've heard it called "millennial" and "hipster" and "Marvel-style" while it's being dismissed in the same way that every movie or videogame with back-and-forth banter between fast-talking characters is. I don't understand the idea that banter is a modern phenomenon that has only existed since The Avengers—the snappy patter of Chimera Squad is right out of a screwball comedy or hardboiled crime story. I swear, if you remade 1938's Bringing Up Baby shot-for-shot today people would complain it had "Buzzfeed-style millennial writing."

Chimera Squad is a mixture of humans and aliens who, freed from the mind-controlling ethereals at the end of XCOM 2, are now trying to make lives for themselves on Earth. If you were really sold on the idea that aliens will always be evil in XCOM games I guess this is a downer? But it makes possible the running gag about crossovers between alien and human cuisine, with characters talking about a "mextra-terrestrial" fusion restaurant and ads in the background for Big Crunch cereal with its milk-activated "larval nuggets". That's funny stuff. And the same people who were big mad about alien diversity were mad the medic has a "lesbian haircut" so their opinions shouldn't count for anything.

Frustratingly, Chimera Squad caught it both ways. Reactionaries were annoyed by the idea of aliens and humans living together like some kind of ultimate Benetton rainbow, and progressives dismissed it as copaganda. Thing is, Chimera Squad explicitly aren't cops. They're an anti-terrorist squad, less XCOPS and more Rainbow Sixcom, part of a Reclamation Agency founded after the revolution to prevent misuse of alien technology. The whole thing's so cartoonish any attempt to find deep meaning in its politics inevitably crumbles because the foundations are too light to bear it. It's just G. I. Joe, only Cobra is on your side and she's a snake lady called Torque.

(I have a separate rant about how G. I. Joe is progressive and anti-war actually, but I'll spare you that.)

If one of Chimera Squad's action-figure squadmates dies, it's game over. That's a marked contrast with regular XCOM, which is practically defined by the times you have to leave someone behind to complete an objective, or they bleed out before you get them to the extraction zone. On the other hand, once XCOM soldiers have been promoted a few times, they're so precious I'm always going to reload to save them unless it's an ironman run. If it is, the death spiral is real: you lose your best guys then limp along for a few missions with a team who aren't good enough until finally the Chosen put you out of your misery. If XCOM 2 just ended the run when I lost my top agents, it'd be doing me a mercy.

Like a lot of things about Chimera Squad, it's a difference that might be damning if this were XCOM 3. But it's not. It's an expandalone, a budget spin-off, and the perfect place to experiment with the formula. The fact it's so different is why I can replay it and replay XCOM 2, having a different kind of good time with each.

Meanwhile, XCOM 2 completely replaced Enemy Unknown in my affections. When I try to replay that I get nothing out of the experience except regret that I'm not playing XCOM 2 instead, which is the same game only better in every way. Chimera Squad doesn't replace XCOM 2. It compliments it like a well-paired dessert.

And at least it's not the free-to-play mobile game.