I got to play X-Com Chimera Squad! Here's what I thought...

Which is the bigger number; five or one?

I've had a trying day; ideas come few and far between as we speed ever closer to that really personally important blog I want to write, (It's tomorrow, BTW) the blog I wrote for next Friday won't upload with it's images for some reason (But this blog was written today. My schedule is weird, don't ask) and I just cut my small toe almost in half, and obviously there are no hospitals open so I'm having to hobble around everywhere like I'm drunk. (Luckily, that's a cut down the middle and not the alternative, otherwise I would probably kick down their door and demand someone help. With the other foot, obviously.) but all this means that I've gone through a full rebound to Fallout 76 literally one day after writing that I- well you'll see the blog next Friday. Also I've got a new game to kill some time with, and so that's what I'm going to be talking about today.

To pull the curtains back on this ramshackle operation a bit, I spend the weekends writing blogs that come out the same day but the weekday blogs are usually a week delayed. (Unless I set a special priority) As such, even though that 'X-Com: Chimera Squad' blog dropped two days ago, I've actually spent the whole last week pining for this game which you can bet I bought the second it was announced. (I need to stop impulse buying, this is becoming a problem.) But as such I was able to finally access the game early yesterday alongside everyone else on release day. (Well, almost alongside everyone else. Damn streamers and their priority downloads...) So I'm going to take a laid back blog for today whilst I talk about my initial reaction to Chimera Squad and why I think it's the X-Com that everyone should be playing right now.

Due to no preloading (thanks, Firaxis) I had a good few hours of downloading to waste combing through information on how this Chimera Squad works in it's metagame; so I cannot speak for how effective the tutorial system for the game is, but personally I didn't get overwhelmed with all the new systems on display. Chimera Squad severely pans back the scale of the other X-Com revival games from global coverage to a more intimate city management system, and with that comes a different feel to the scale of the issues. However there is still that framework which places pressure on the player to preform with tactical cohesion in their selection of mission, although not with a 'Hard time limit' like X-Com 2 worked with. (Which is honestly one of my biggest problems with that fantastic sequel.)

As the invisible leader of elite spin-off from the X-Com initiative with an interest in promoting alien/human relations, it's up to the player to track down the assassins of city 31's mayor whilst keeping the city from unravelling at the seams. The 31PD find themselves under constant assault from the gangs of the street and everytime these gangs attack, that district stacks up on 'unrest' to a total of 5. (Or more, if you select that extra in the settings when you start your campaign) Once these districts fill up on unrest, every day from then on will count towards the city anarchy until that caps out and the whole place falls into disarray, ending the campaign in failure. Therefore it behoves you to pay attention to the mission you're picking and the extra tools at your disposal to keep things relatively normal across the board. Personally I really like this approach to the metagame as it puts the burden of control in the hands of the player rather than some unseen forces ticking in the background, so when things start to go to hell you always feel like you have the power to bring things back around, rather than feeling like you've run out of time and are merely beating around the bush until a full campaign failure.

Facing down the discordant forces of City 31 is a matter of getting a hand over the three factions that oppose you and their talents that you'll need to counter. You have the Progeny, who are mostly made up of human psionics who hate the fact that the invaders have now become friends and want to establish themselves as a master race; The Gray Phoenix, who are a selection of alien scavengers with superior tech capabilities and a monopoly over the black tech market; And Sacred Coil who have a blend of humans and aliens working as part of them, although their preview images showcases a Chryssalid, so I feel like they're probably going to have a particularly brutal slant to their approach. Chimera Squad will have to investigate these folk one-by-one which essentially means launching full-blown offences on the gangs who threaten to tear the city apart.

To this end the player has at their disposal a rather unique team, as instead of having a squad full of X-Com rookies, they have instead a group of heroic pre-made characters with their own unique abilities and stats to them. These agents hail from a variety of different backgrounds and species, symbolising the united image of City 31, and that diversity proves to be their greatest strength in battle. Cherub carries a shield alongside him and can impart a damage-negation effect upon anybody nearby, Terminal lugs around her healing drone which is capable of remote access and hacking when needed, Godmother lugs around a big-ass shotgun, so on and so forth. This diversity creates quite a unique 'everyone is special' kind of mechanic to X-Com, but does so at the cost of some of the intimacy that we shared with these folk in past games. But this new 'hero' mechanic does amplify the diversity between each character, so I'll not ride Firaxis too hard for this.

The actual gameplay sections also differ from traditional X-Com in that they are more homogenised and streamlined. Each mission starts with a preliminary 'Breach Round' in which Chimera Squad gets to pick their insertion points with a variety of advantages and disadvantages to each spot. You can choose to split up your team or keep them together as you burst into the room and attempt to pull off as much initial damage as possible. From there you'll find your turns cut-up into a timeline and split between the enemy and yourself, making the actual acts of flanking and eliminating hostiles (Something which is inherent to X-Com) much more dynamic as players can put themselves in the firing line of one hostile under the assumption that another unit will neutralise them before their turn comes to fruition. This also opens up a new dimension of tactile play as the player has tools to mess with the timeline and group up their squad or delay the enemy. There's an almost D&D level of tactile dynamism to this mechanic and it honestly completely switches up the gameplay in an particularly unexpected way.

Of course, at the end of the day I've only had the chance to play for a little bit (I cut my toe open, so that sort of put a dampener on my 'gaming' time.) but I'm already sold on the fact that I'll pull at least one full playthrough. The speed of each mission makes this one of the most accessible X-Com experiences of all time and the lack of consequence for being injured (even being knocked down isn't seriously bad) means that this is a very new-comer friendly X-Com game. I still don't think this will replace X-Com 2 as my favourite of the series, but one of the beautiful things about this franchise is that no new game is meant to replace the old ones, they're just supposed to accompany them. Once more, for £10 you'd be silly not to pick this game up before it goes out of sale in May, but even then it's a steal. Definitely give this game a shot.