Chimera Squad Analysis: Shrike Intro


Shrike is the only overfaction not tied up in the Investigation mechanic: instead, Shrike units can be potentially mixed in with an Investigation's regular forces in most 'generic' missions.

You also actually fight exclusively Shrike forces in the Tutorial, which makes sense for a number of reasons, and I'd originally assumed I'd cover Shrike first due to their nature as a set of enemies that can be encountered at almost every stage of the game, but I ultimately decided to place them last for a few different reasons. The biggest reason is simply that Shrike forces are actually rarer than my earliest runs lead me to expect; they can't show up in any of an Investigation's 'plot missions', and they're generally uncommon even in 'generic' missions, both in the sense that 'generic' missions with no Shrike forces generally outnumber missions Shrike forces do show up in, and in the sense that Shrike forces tend to be outnumbered heavily by an Investigation's own forces in the missions they do actually show up in. There's some other factors to why I placed them last, but I'll talk about those as they come up.

For now, their symbol!

On a basic level, the Shrike symbol is obviously a stylized skull, with clear eyes, a nose-hole, a forehead area, and noticeable mandibles, suggesting pretty specifically a non-human skull, which makes sense as a symbol of a faction that started its life, in-universe, as a resistance faction against the alien oppressors. What I suspect basically every player overlooks is that it actually looks a lot like the generic Resistance icon from XCOM 2. No, really, have a look;

You can see the Resistance icon on those two flags, and it's really easy to connect this to Shrike's icon; add lines around the sides and bottom plus add the mandible spikes, and cover up the three star icons, and you have essentially the Shrike icon! The proportions aren't quite right, but the generalities are there.

I really hope this is actually intentional, because it's a great bit that makes perfect sense, where you can easily see how Shrike's current icon could have come about just by virtue of a proto-Shrike resistance person who was given one or more Resistance flags/patches/whatever having the right kind of artistic sense to see how they could fiddle with it to get the alien skull look, doing so, and having the resulting icon resonate with Resistance members who have a particularly committed 'kill the aliens' attitude. (And then presumably fiddle with it over time to arrive at the proportions we see in Chimera Squad)

Mind, this itself touches on one of the bits of Shrike where I'm not sure how I should be taking it. In several key regards, Shrike is presented as a particularly 'hardcore' Resistance group, in the sense of being a bunch of humans who don't want aliens to integrate and would in fact prefer to put bullets into all of them. But in several other regards, they're presented as almost the opposite of that; among other points, they're actually the only faction in the game whose internal forces cover all four of the game's core animation sets. (Human/hybrid, Muton, Sectoid, and Viper)

There's plot stuff I'll be getting into later that suggests this dissonance is probably intentional instead of dev error, but I say 'suggests' because we don't get any firm answers as far as this particular point goes. I honestly won't be at all surprised if XCOM 3 comes along and handles Shrike in a manner that's just incoherent on this point. I hope that's not how things go down, certainly, but it seems very plausible, and even within Chimera Squad itself the whole thing can come across like some kind of error, since Director Kelly never acknowledges the apparent discrepancy between 'Shrike is particularly hostile to the aliens' and 'Shrike has a lot of aliens in their ranks'.

As a gameplay faction, Shrike doesn't have a strong 'identity' the way the other factions shoot for, which makes sense since Shrike forces aren't really meant to stand on their own as a complete enemy force; outside the Tutorial mission, which is of course a bit of a joke mission since it's a dedicated tutorial, Shrike forces are always showing up in support to other forces. (Albeit you will occasionally see a mission be very Shrike-stacked; my experience is that VIP Extraction missions are particularly prone to this, as Shrike forces tend to dominate the infinite reinforcements)

That said, they do still have something of a gameplay identity, and that identity is that they skew toward being elite and being Armored; of their 6 regular units, only 2 of them don't have Armor, and half of their forces are clearly handled by the game as elite units that you don't see very often, and only see one or occasionally two copies of in a given Encounter. And even their basic forces tend to be a cut above comparable units on other factions; a Shrike Trooper is largely a better Progeny Thrall, for example. The Armor and elite, well-equipped forces undertone is consistent with their aesthetics, and notably Shrike are the faction that has the strongest undertone of military uniformity to their visuals; you might expect Sacred Coil to be the faction with the strongest visual undertone of enforcing uniformity with military uniforms, what with being a holdout of still-loyal ADVENT soldiers, but no, Shrike has them beat on this point.

The fact that Shrike forces tend to be a cut above Investigation forces means in practice Shrike units showing up tends to slightly drag up the difficulty a mission, which seems likely to be an intended effect given one of the Dark Events (Which are mostly straightforward 'this being in play makes things harder' effects) just causes Shrike forces to be present in a mission. This 'Shrike makes things harder' effect is... pretty minor, enough so it can easily be counterbalanced by other factors -for example, if your team is heavy on agents who don't like fighting robots, you may find it a relief for Sacred Coil forces to be displaced by Shrike forces- but is an understandable attempt to create some kind of consistent implication to their presence when they can show up in any Investigation, especially given the Investigation targets scooped up a lot of options to theoretically focus on. (That is, Shrike could have been made The Psychic Faction to have a reliably distinct presence, but only if the Investigation targets were consistent about not having any powerful psychic abilities like Mind Control, which the game of course didn't do)

On a different note, an implication of the whole Investigation system is that Shrike forces are the most likely reason for a player to cotton onto the Act-based stat bonuses, since a single run can potentially see eg Shrike Troopers in every Investigation and notice their stats improving across them, whereas you're not going to see Progeny Thrall HP going up within a single run. And given how long a run takes to do, it would be so easy to do a run that hits the Progeny first, then a run that hits them last, and literal months of your real life have passed so you don't clearly remember what Thrall HP was in your first run so you either don't notice it's different or you do notice but you figure your memory is wrong.

Thankfully, probably most players do correctly work out that later Investigations boost enemy stats thanks to Shrike being around to provide clear evidence of it happening within a run. I... suspect there are still a good number of players who don't guess the Act-based stat bonuses exist, or do guess this but have their inferences of the details be very wrong (eg guessing it's based on something other than completing Investigations), but still, it's nice that this aspect isn't maximally opaque the way it so easily could have been.

Also, I should explicitly point out that Shrike doesn't do the musical identity thing the other factions do, as there is no point where Shrike is an Investigation target with standard missions to play a faction-specific music in the way there is for the other factions. Like yeah the Tutorial has unique music, but I wouldn't argue It's Clearly Meant To Be Shrike Music. So no link to Shrike music in this post, sorry.

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Next time, we start on Shrike's most basic of units, the Trooper.

See you then.

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