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.

X-Com: Chimera Squad

What a surprise!

Here I was thinking it wouldn't be my birthday for a couple of weeks yet there pops up Firaxis, out of the blue and with a brand new X-Com game to get me all excited. I can honestly say this is one that caught me completely by surprise and saved me from another potential downer blog (you know how much I hate to write those) because now I get to gush about another franchise I'm head-over-heels for. (And for once I won't be kowtowing for Capcom. Good thing too, my knees were starting to chafe.) On the eve of Gears of War's newest attempt to diversify with their 'Tactics' (A game which hopes to copy much of the 'turn based tactical' framework that X-Com built), they'll have to contend with the surprise drop of this X-Com universe title which seeks to undermine them in all the major ways.

Now of course this isn't a straight up sequel to X-Com 2 but a side story, but unlike the canonically dubious events of 'The Bureau', I think that 'Chimera Squad' is set to detail the next steps of the franchise and that does have me quite excited. For those who haven't had the pleasure I'm about to lightly spoil the ending of X-Com 2. (The games aren't really about the developer made-story anyway, but I feel it's best to share that upfront.) Basically, at the end of X-Com 2 the commander uses their avatar link to confront the ADVENT Elders, whom at this point have been revealed to be tyrannical alien overlords who have enslaved countless alien races over the cosmos to serve in their army. The Commander manages to sever their neural network, essentially breaking the psychic control those Elders had over their forces, allowing the human resistance to force a surrender out of them. The closing shot of the game features the aliens in retreat, the humans taking back earth and a final eerie shot on a glowing crevice at the bottom of the ocean, lightly hinting at a new threat closer than we think...

Obviously that's a cliff hanger that'll have to wait (It's probably just teasing a remake of 'Terror from the Deep' anyway) as this title actually takes place in a post ADVENT controlled world wherein the pieces of society are being picked up and put back together. This time, however, there are entire menagerie worth of stranded alien species with no more psychic link to their overmasters looking for a place to call home. Obviously, with humans being as dumb as we are, we've accepted them into our home although that does not come without caveats; which in this case means making a lot of concerted efforts to bridge cultural gaps, join the right hands together and help the populace get over the fact that we're now supposed to be 'buddy buddy' with the same aliens who nuked all of our cities and enslaved us for years. (So there's going to be a few growing pains, clearly.)

In this effort there has been the founding of City 31; a model city which is created in the hopes of showcasing how humans and aliens can live together side-by-side without being at each others throats. This means that this is a politically pivotal city, and that it's under everyone's best interests that this city works flawlessly and doesn't descend into chaos within the first week. In comes Chimera Squad, a sort of future police force comprised of officers both human and alien who are trying their best to keep the city safe for the good of it's citizens and broader human-alien relations. (How very wholesome.) As players, we'll be tasked with guiding this force and picking their fights for a comparatively lower stakes campaign that still promises to be just as fun to shift through.

One of the aspects about the X-Com franchise that I truly love is the way how each game has a different approach to the metagame, (as well as the moment-to-moment) that ensures that even as each game vastly improves, it never invalidates one's desire to play the older entries. 'Enemy Unknown' had a greater focus on reacting to the aliens, making for a balancing game wherein the players could hold off the collapse of the world government practically indefinitely with the right tactical forethought and RNG. 'X-Com 2' changed that up with a complete switch to the power dynamic so that players would have to be the ones on the offensive. Suddenly the game was about racing a clock and pushing for ground before you ran out of time, making for an entirely fresh gameplay experience. Chimera Squad looks like it's going to lean more toward the initial game's model but with some changes; players will have to manage the city districts from descending into chaos whilst, I assume, unravelling the guiding hands behind this developing crime wave.

All that being said, at it's heart it would seem that 'X-Com: Chimera Squad' is the exact same game that we know and love with it's tactical planning and RNG based shooting, only with some new additions. One such addition is this new 'SWAT-Style' breech mode which allows players to set up their squad around the different entry points into a location for a surprise hit. It adds that extra layer of planning into the equation and allows for games to kick off in that flanking formation which makes X-Com so fun. There also appears to be quite a slew of new weaponry to discover and research and I'd imagine such development projects are going to take a vastly different approach to how we last saw them realised in previous X-Coms. (Something tells me that performing autopsies on the City 31 citizens might not be on the table anymore.)

There are some decisions which are bound to be somewhat contentious, however, and for me I think that'll be the idea of making ever single character in the campaign (As far as we know) a fixed character. This allows for some more story and character-based development, as well as permitting for unique powers for each ally, but it takes away some of that classic X-Com individuality. No longer will you find yourself naming soldiers after friends before watching them perish before your very eyes, as they'll all have their names and personality pre-set, effectively cutting off one of the franchise's most endearing qualities. However, given the community that's sprung up around X-Com, I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising individuals aren't already cooking up a quick mod to patch that particular feature back in.

But what's that last cherry on top of the cake? The one thing that'll knock my socks off and let me know that I have to pick this game up? How about the fact that it's coming out on April 24th and is debuting for $10 at launch! On May it's going back up to 20, but even then that seems like an absolute steal for what is being promised to be a 20 hour game. (And that's not even taking into account the huge-replayablity value inherent with this genre of game.) So if you've never pulled the trigger on the excellent X-Com franchise before there is literally nothing stopping you from doing so this time around. 10 bucks for an X-Com game? That really can't be beat and I just cannot wait to get a glimpse into this brand new world that Firaxis are building. (And heck, I only have to wait a few days to do so!)