Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Axiom

I'm curious if Axiom's name, or more precisely his name alongside Verge's, is a shout-out to Axiom Verge. Mostly because Axiom's name doesn't seem to have anything to do with with him as an agent; Verge is already kinda tenuous a connection, but I can kind of see it, and for whatever reason code names related to psychic individuals in fiction are prone to being pretty tenuous. Axiom, though, is just... huh? Especially because most of the agent codenames connect pretty clearly to the agent's ability set, even if it requires some thinking or requires you reach higher ranks to start going 'oh, I see'. Shelter's codename starts out confusing, but then as you unlock abilities you discover that he does, in fact, have a trend of protecting people with his abilities.

It'd be interesting if it is a deliberate shoutout, anyway.

In any event, Axiom is the second agent to use a Shotgun. It's much less a focal point than with Godmother, but Axiom will absolutely use it regularly and both appreciate its stopping power and not mind much its difficulties with longer range fire.

Animation-wise, it looks fairly odd; Axiom uses the same basic firing animation as XCOM 2's Mutons, which was steadying a precision weapon to line up a clean shot. (Albeit fired from the hip instead of lined up with an eye, but hey, aliens; maybe Muton brains can do such shots more accurately than human brains) Applied to a Shotgun, it ends up coming across like the shotgun is very heavy or something. In terms of aesthetic, a heavier and longer-ranged weapon would probably have looked more natural. It's fine enough just carrying it around, at least; it's just the firing animation that looks off.

Base Stats

9 HP (11 on the lowest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on the lowest difficulty)
12 Mobility
40 Will (50 on the lowest difficulty)

Additionally, the easiest difficulty provides +15 passive crit chance, raises the crit chance bonus from a flank to +40 instead of +33, and provides a passive +5 Defense.

Axiom is tough and fast out the box, with no particular tradeoff relative to Chimera Squad's 'baseline'. His Will could be better, but it's not lower than, say, Godmother's, and similarly his Aim could be better, but 65 is just the game's baseline for agent Aim.

Axiom is, in fact, one of the easier agents to use effectively in part due to his strong starting stat position; I kind of wish he'd been in the initial Tutorial squad instead of Cherub. Certainly, I'd argue a player new to Chimera Squad should grab Axiom first chance they get; he's straightforwardly strong, and makes it a bit easier to power through errors occurring during the earliest portion of the learning process.

Possible Scars

Weakened: -3 HP
Hobbled: -3 Mobility
Shell-Shocked: -15 Will

Shell-Shocked remains pretty ignorable, but while Axiom is probably the agent most able to power through Weakened (Out of the agents that can get it, I mean), it's still a huge problem, and Hobbled is similarly very bad for him. If Axiom does end up with a Scar, he's pretty likely to need to be benched.

Fortunately, he's pretty unlikely to get a Scar if you're not ludicrously aggressive with him, thanks to his innate and level-derived durability advantages.

Base Abilities

Subdue

Turn-ending action: A move-and-melee attack that does 2-3 damage to the target, ignoring Armor and with no chance to miss. If the target is reduced to 0 HP by Subdue, they're knocked Unconscious instead of killed. Some targets cannot be Subdued.

As Axiom is fast and durable, it's good to keep Subdue in mind -he can position aggressively in relative safety, and is more likely to be able to reach targets that are good to Subdue than most agents.

That said, Axiom has another melee attack available and you're encouraged to position him early in the Timeline, so you may well find you have Axiom Subdue less often than, say, Godmother. Just don't forget the option is available, especially as a run progresses.

Rage
Passive: Every time Axiom takes damage, he gains 1 Rage. If Axiom has at least 1 point of Rage when he takes damage or uses Smash, he has a chance of triggering Muton Rage, in which case he will immediately attempt to Smash a nearby enemy. If no targets are in Smash range, he will attempt to take a shot instead. Regardless, his Rage will be completely drained by triggering Muton Rage. Axiom can have a maximum of 5 points of Rage.

In spite of what you might expect from XCOM 2's Berserkers, Axiom will never Smash one of his fellow agents, not even if there's no enemy in reach when Muton Rage triggers.

I've not found the exact numbers, but experience suggests to me it's probably something along the lines of a 10% chance, times Rage count, for Axiom to Muton Rage when damaged or Smashing. (ie a 50% chance at max Rage) It's pretty obvious it scales with the Rage amount, in any event.

I like the idea of Rage but wish it wasn't so thoroughly tied up in RNG. Axiom taking damage is inherently unpredictable (Enemies can miss, for one), and then everything tied up in Rage is centered on RNG, not only the chance for Rage to trigger but as we'll be covering so too are the things that having more Rage benefits. I don't really get why the series keeps coming back to gratuitous RNG with Mutons -Intimidate back in Enemy Unknown/Within, Counterattack and their Stun rate in XCOM 2 (Not to mention Berserkers having a random chance to attack allies and random side effects on their punch), and now Rage and multiple mechanics tied up in it with Axiom in Chimera Squad... all of these are unreliable for no real design reason. I can only assume the dev teams feel it somehow ties into the 'character' of Mutons, but I don't see how 'maybe do things when attacked or attacking' is characterful.

I really hope XCOM 3 finally drops this, whatever it does with Mutons.

Rage itself requires talking about Smash to have anything of substance to talk about though, so moving right along...

Psych Up
Free action: Axiom increases his Rage by 1 point. 1 turn cooldown.

I'm of the opinion you should basically either spam Psych Up every turn, or avoid using it. At 0 Rage, you don't have to worry about Axiom running somewhere exposed or otherwise putting himself in danger unexpectedly. At 1 Rage, that possibility exists, and won't get any worse in its consequences if it does trigger, whereas pumping Axiom's Rage further will boost Smash's chances of doing something powerful.

I wish this was a bit more strategic, even if I actually like the general idea of it. Video games are strangely reluctant to acknowledge that people can, in fact, deliberately alter their mental or emotional state, and I don't really understand why; it's nice to see something like Psych Up in a video game. It's too bad its execution is clunky.

Smash
Turn ending action: Axiom performs a move-and-melee attack with +15 to Aim that does 3-6 damage. If the attack hits, it can randomly inflict Disorientation, Stun, or even Unconsciousness, with the chance of it inflicting one of these rising with higher Rage. 1 turn cooldown.

This is the same basic mechanism as with Stun Lancers and so on back in XCOM 2: a hidden Strength on Will test, where more favorable numbers tilt things more in favor of better results. In this case, Axiom has a base of 40 Strength... but Axiom adds 10 Strength per point of Rage he has, meaning he actually can function as effectively up to 90 Strength. Enemy Will tends to start in the 40-60 range and only rise by 20 points over the course of a run, so that's pretty favorable numbers. Too bad I still don't know exactly how the formula works.

Personally, I wish the accuracy went up with Rage (Axiom never reaches an innate 100% hit chance on Smash, which is frustrating), but Smash is pretty nice, especially since Unconsciousness is much more clearly a good thing in Chimera Squad: in XCOM 2, dead bodies can be Autopsied, sold, and often spent on Items. In Chimera Squad, dead bodies carry no value, while Unconscious enemies on average means more Intel.

(Assuming you're using Captures Are Okay to fix KOed enemies not giving experience, but Captures Are Okay is clearly the intended behavior)

Aside my complaints about reliability, Smash is reasonably well-tuned from an early game perspective, but is another inherent ability that suffers a bit from its failure to scale. Initially Smash is on average slightly weaker than just blasting someone with a Shotgun (Having a lower low roll, specifically) but with the advantages of being move-and-melee, having potentially useful side effects, and functionally being more accurate if Axiom couldn't expect to get a close-range flank on the target; you shouldn't mindlessly default to it at the beginning of a run, but it will in fact often be the better choice than firing Axiom's shotgun.

In the long haul, Shotgun damage becomes even more superior, Ammo Items add reliable side effects (Why gamble on maybe inflicting Disorient with Smash if your Shotgun will definitely Poison the target, which has similar stat penalties?), a fully upgraded Shotgun will Shred Armor where Smash does not, and attaching a Superior Scope to the Shotgun makes it a lot more likely it can achieve better accuracy even on a target in Cover. (Such as by Axiom taking to high ground)

And speaking of Armor, Weapon Attachments matter to the Subdue/Smash comparison, as the Impact Frame adds 2 damage to Subdue -not to melee attacks in general. An Impact Frame-backed Subdue does 4-5 damage, ignores Armor, and can't miss, while Smash still does 3-6 damage, doesn't ignore Armor, and can miss; if Axiom has an Impact Frame (And he's one of the better recipients for an Impact Frame, it should be emphasized), Smash's primary draw becomes the possibility of it rolling a side effect. (Plus one other use I'll get to when we get to it) Which for one thing is pointless if you're finishing off a low-HP target.

So in the long haul Smash becomes ever more niche.

Axiom is actually a really good agent even if you ignore Rage and Smash so this hurts him less than you might think, but it's still unfortunate given Rage and Smash are clearly meant to be a big part of what sets Axiom apart from, say, Godmother. In general, I wish Chimera Squad had actually given agents some kind of internal 'secondary weapon' that scaled somehow and was used to keep their non-shooting abilities relevant; sure, don't make multiple graphics for Terminal's Gremlin or anything, that's fine, but make it so Unlock Potential and the final Training both have the side effect of improving innate abilities like Safeguard, Smash, etc.

I suspect XCOM 3 won't run into this same issue itself given XCOM 2 was very diligent about having non-shooting actions get tied to secondary weapons (Or primary weapons, in the case of Templar) that could be upgraded and all, but it's unfortunate Chimera Squad ran into it so hard, so consistently.

Deputy Agent
+3 Aim

Battering Ram
Pre-Breach Special: If Axiom is in the first slot for a regular door entrance, he will automatically and for free attempt to Panic every enemy nearby, as well as potentially lowering their Alert levels. Only one enemy in the group will ever Panic. Success chance on these effects rises the higher Axiom's Rage currently is.

Battering Ram heavily encourages putting Axiom in the first slot, though note that some Breach points will be labeled as doors but not count for Battering Ram, such as shutter door entries. If no Breach point is a proper door, Battering Ram is useless and you should consider slotting Axiom elsewhere to make use of his Breach Item.

Frustratingly, Battering Ram's effectiveness isn't really communicated in a clear, timely manner. The game provides absolutely no direct representation of the Alertness-lowering effect, where you can only infer that it's actually working from stuff like the Breach point warning you that 'agent damage is likely' and then only one enemy is Aggressive. Less egregious but still frustrating is that enemies Panicking in response to Battering Ram occurs and is announced only once the Breach phase is over with, and so you have no way to tell who you should be prioritizing. Maybe that Alert enemy you killed would've Panicked anyway, and you would've been better off targeting a different enemy. Maybe you pile damage onto a target, only for it to survive and Panic afterward such that you clearly can see you'd have been better off distributing damage elsewhere. Etc.

On the plus side, Battering Ram has no limit on uses in a mission and doesn't compete with other actions except indirectly. This minimizes the harm caused by the prior issues; there's no wasting charges or anything like that. The only extent to which leveraging Battering Ram can be a mistake is that you might be better off with someone else in front for turn order reasons, such as Zephyr so she's not left standing in the open for one or more enemy turns, or that you might be better off having Axiom in a different slot so he can use his Breach Item. Those are still relevant concerns, but relatively light ones.

Also, while the game doesn't spell it out for you, you can actually tell ahead of time whether a given door is valid; when you slot Axiom in, if Battering Ram will trigger, the usual open door icon will be replaced with Battering Ram's icon. So you don't have to guess.

I'm not sure what, if any, range limits exist on Battering Room. It can Panic even enemies that weren't relevant to Axiom's Breach point, so 'visible to the Breach point' isn't the rule. My two primary theories are that it either attempts to Panic enemies Axiom can see once he's finished moving into his post-Breach position, or that it simply has an invisible radius drawn from the Breach point that ignores lines of sight/fire; it's possible it's something more esoteric, but these are the two theories I haven't run into contradictions to.

Annoyingly, the Panic component is actually slightly inconvenient, as it may cause a Surprised enemy to Hunker Down, effectively upgrading their Alert level. This isn't too terrible since they'll also skip their first turn, but it can be inconvenient at times, particularly on timed missions where being delayed in your ability to kill an enemy may become a big problem.

Basic Training: +2 HP.

Axiom is encouraged to soak punishment for the squad, and his Muton Rage mechanic means he's disproportionately likely to end up out of position and so be both targeted more readily and hit more easily. He's thus another one of the relatively high priorities for boosting his HP early.

This is actually one of the nicer elements of the game's design, that this basic Training that literally every agent has with no variance at all, not even how much HP is provided, is both a high priority on most agents and yet is a high priority for different reasons with different implications for different agents. That's an impressive trick!

Field Agent
+2 Aim

Aftershock
Passive: Smash now has a 50% chance to do 1-2 damage to enemies in a 2-tile radius around the target, with potential to Disorient, Stun, or knock Unconscious. No friendly fire.

OR

Shrug It Off
Passive: Axiom will sometimes lower damage from any source to 1, regardless of the original damage. The chance to do this is scaled to Rage.

The game doesn't do anything to communicate that Shrug It Off's trigger chance is scaled to Rage, annoyingly. I'm not sure what the trigger chance is, as the config files indicate it's a 20% chance, which can't be flatly true -it triggers too often at high Rage- and can't be 20%*Rage, as I've had Shrug It Off fail to trigger at max Rage. I do know that its chance scales with Rage, with it being something not far removed from 20% per Rage point, as I've never seen it trigger at 0 Rage, only occasionally seen it trigger at 1 Rage, and only rarely seen it fail to trigger at 5 Rage. (Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's supposed to be a 100% chance to trigger at 5 Rage but some minor coding oversight means it's a 99% chance or something of the sort, like how the first generation of Pokémon games have all offensive moves aside Swift have at least a 1/256 chance to miss due to a coding error)

Whatever the case, so long as you make a point of pumping Axiom's Rage, Shrug It Off is a surprisingly reliable extension to Axiom's durability, and conveniently enough taking damage produces Rage, so Shrug It Off tends to kick in if Axiom is getting shot at multiple times. Notably, Axiom is one of the best agents at stacking Armor in the first place, making it easy to get incoming damage low enough Axiom expects to survive long enough to build Rage and start triggering Shrug It Off. That's mildly anti-synergistic in the sense that if Axiom's Armor is reducing incoming damage to 1 anyway then Shrug It Off doesn't help, but less so than you might expect; for one thing, a few enemies do in fact have Shred built into their primary weapon, where high Armor is only temporarily helping aid survival. Sacred Coil is particularly heavy on such enemies, and the endgame is also heavy on Shred, so this aspect comes into play in the hardest portion of the game no matter your Investigation order. For another, it's actually pretty hard to get enough Armor to reduce enemy damage to 1; you're more likely to reduce it to 2 or 3 for even the weaker attacks, where Shrug It Off is still having a noticeable impact on Axiom's survivability.

The third reason it's less anti-synergistic than you might assume is Muton Rage: if Axiom does get a bunch of damage piled onto him, he's liable to Shrug It Off a few times and then have Muton Rage trigger and suddenly he's at 0 Rage and can't trigger Shrug It Off until he's built Rage again. If you're relying solely on Shrug It Off to keep Axiom intact, this can easily mean he then gets shot for full damage and goes down because hey, he tanked a bunch of damage already! Whereas if you stack Armor, it's a lot more likely he'll take chip damage again, albeit greater chip damage than when Shrug It Off triggers.

In conjunction with healing, Shrug It Off means Axiom can last quite a while, and Axiom's base mechanics encourage him to get into the thick of things, so even if you're not trying to manipulate AI or anything it's easy to end up with Axiom soaking a bunch of punishment for the team. I'd argue Shrug It Off is pretty cleanly the best choice for a learning player. Conveniently, Axiom has internal access to healing -or you can be playing with the setting where transitioning to a new Encounter fully heals the squad, of course.

Aftershock, meanwhile, is a cute callback to the Berserker Queen's Quake, albeit dumping the knockback and friendly fire and adding even more RNG. (Because it has only a 50% chance of even trying to roll dice at enemies)

Note that Aftershock can trigger even if Smash itself misses, making it a lot easier to justify chancing a Smash if multiple enemies are clustered in reach for a Smash. You're still gambling, mind, but with more favorable odds of a useful result than you might expect.

Also note that Aftershock is running a Strength-on-Will test just like Smash itself, and by extension is more reliable at messing enemies up when Axiom's Rage is high, and more reliable at triggering on enemies with low Will.

Also, an unfortunate oddity with Aftershock is that its area preview will highlight friendlies in the area as if they'll be hit. Thankfully it actually won't hit them, but I imagine there's a decent number of players who have ended up not using Smash in a situation because they were worried it would in fact hurt their agents.

Ultimately, I'm not terribly fond of Aftershock in practice. Chimera Squad is prone to spreading enemies out enough it's somewhat uncommon for even one enemy to be in Aftershock's area, and very rare for multiple to be in reach, and then its benefits are behind so many layers of RNG you can easily have it be the case that you get a perfect opportunity to catch 3 enemies with 1 Smash and then you get zero benefit from Aftershock anyway.

There aren't any real qualifiers to this, either. In the prior games, even dubious area-of-effect tools would at least pretty reliably be relevant against enemies like Chryssalids because you'd pull a pod and its members would all run forward and usually clump up. In Chimera Squad, a room full of Chryssalids starts with them spread out, and they're not going to clump unless they all not only get turns but pile on the same target, which is unlikely, and especially unlikely to have the target survive long enough to get maximum clumping. The player has a few tools for manipulating enemy positions, but nothing that makes it particularly easy to drag enemies together to set up for Aftershock; there is no suction grenade that pulls enemies to its center or anything like that.

So while I like Aftershock as a callback to the Berserker Queen, it's a pretty poor fit to this game.

So in addition to Shrug It Off being nice for a learning player, it's... really just the more reliably relevant option in general.

Special Agent
+1 HP
+2 Aim

Adrenal Surge
Free action: For the rest of the turn, Psych Up has no cooldown, and Smash has no cooldown and only spends one action point. 3 turn cooldown.

This does a lot to make Smash more appealing. Instead of competing with shooting people, you can use Adrenal Surge, Smash as an incidental part of re-positioning, and if it fails to trigger side effects or outright misses... well, it was basically free anyway.

Though it's annoying that the game design encourages you to Psych Up literally five times in a row if you're wanting Smash as effective as possible. It's very tedious, and there really should've been an interface thing to just straight-up pick how much Rage you want Psych Up to add on a given use when Adrenal Surge is active.

Bizarrely, though Smash is a move-and-melee action, if you use Adrenal Surge to Smash using just one action point, Axiom won't be hit with the movement penalty on his next action. This means Adrenal Surge can be used to get Axiom to cover a lot of ground, making him well-suited to retrieving objects in missions where you're supposed to grab a thing and then escape. Just Smash once and then Subdue, or Smash twice, bouncing from one target to the next on your way to the objective.

Also surprising is that if Muton Rage triggers on a Smash during Axiom's own turn with Adrenal Surge up, it only costs 1 action point, just like a regular Smash. This normally doesn't matter because if it's triggering under those conditions you've already spent an action point on Smash and so spending another is spending your last one, but Run And Gun can be provided by a Shotgun Epic Weapon, and Breach point modifiers can provide Run And Run or an action point directly, which can result in Axiom having access to 3 or even 4 action points in a turn.

Overall, Adrenal Surge ends up in an odd place. It's absolutely successful at being a high-impact skill that noticeably improves Axiom's performance, but its two effects are functionally contrary: if you don't pump Axiom's Rage, then Smash can reliably be used for free followed by another action of your choice. If you do pump Rage, there is a very noticeable chance that initiating this Smash will trigger Muton Rage, which will then promptly spend Axiom's remaining action point on an uncontrolled Smash.

If Adrenal Surge just set Rage to max, then getting a Muton Rage trigger out of Smash would be a free additional hit, albeit one that risks Axiom ending up in a bad position. If Adrenal Surge instead just let Axiom Smash for 1 action point, there'd still be the possibility of the second action point being wasted by Muton Rage, but a lot of the time the odds would be low, or zero if the player didn't use Psych Up. With it doing both, though, maximizing the Rage-boosting component means maximizing the odds of getting no use out of the Smash-uses-1-action-point component.

It's functional enough as a notable levelup, but I have a suspicion the dev team didn't really recognize the contradictory aspects baked into Adrenal Surge. I genuinely have to wonder if they even noticed/intended for the part where Muton Rage triggering spends an action point if Axiom has any; this contradiction would vanish if Muton Rage's Smash was completely free, and in normal conditions it doesn't matter that Muton Rage will spend currently-present action points: normally it triggering is either occurring outside Axiom's turn or as a result of him ending his turn with Smash, and in both cases he has no action points to waste on Muton Rage. Chimera Squad has enough oversights in this vein I wouldn't be surprised if the dev team genuinely missed it in playtesting, or a late coding change introduced it very shortly before finalizing and releasing the game, or some such.

Unlock Potential Training: +1 Mobility, +1 Armor.

Much like Godmother, but replacing the unreliable protection of some Dodge with Armor, which actually applies more widely and doesn't involve RNG for whether it even does anything.

As Armor stacking has each added point functionally more beneficial than the last until reaching the point of pity damage, this makes Axiom one of the best agents for stacking on Armor. Notably, body armor upgrades automatically include a point of Armor, so this doesn't drop off in relevance with rising enemy damage -not cleanly, anyway.

Just keep in mind a decent number of enemy actions do damage that bypasses Armor, and that some enemies can Shred Armor. Axiom can go down fairly abruptly if you're expecting his Armor to save him and are facing enemies that don't care or are able to remove it.

Senior Agent
+2 Aim

Fear Factor
Passive: Smash now has a chance to induce Panic in enemies around the target. For each point of Rage Axiom has, this is calculated as if the enemies had 10 less Will, increasing the chance of Panic.

OR

Regeneration
Passive: Axiom regenerates 2 HP per turn, every turn, forever.

This is actually a pretty difficult decision. Regeneration is huge, especially if you're not playing with full heals between Encounters, making medical support less important to the team, making it more tolerable to have Axiom soak hits, and making it less of a problem if Muton Rage gets him hurt unnecessarily. It's especially powerful with Shrug It Off, potentially allowing Axiom to soak multiple hits, have only lost like 4 HP, and promptly heal half of it off for free.

Fear Factor, meanwhile, will prevent damage when it triggers, and thanks to Adrenal Surge you're going to get free opportunities to leverage it periodically. And unlike Regeneration it doesn't require the AI cooperate in aiming at Axiom in particular.

It's also worth noting that squadmates are a relevant consideration, as well as your level-up picks on squadmates. Cherub discourages picking Regeneration, because ideal play will involve him preventing damage entirely. Terminal, meanwhile, counter-intuitively encourages Regeneration, particularly if you pick up Armor System, as you can Safeguard Axiom and have him stand in the open to draw fire, with Armor System atop his own natural Armor giving him a surprising amount of survivability.

I'm pretty hard on Aftershock, but while I'm not entirely sure what Fear Factor's radius is, it, surprisingly, is noticeably larger than Aftershock's radius. (I'd guesstimate a 4 tile radius) As such, it's noticeably more prone to actually getting a chance to be relevant, and Panic eats an entire turn from a given enemy, so when it kicks in it's quite impactful, letting you simply ignore that enemy in favor of other targets for a Round. The main issue to keep in mind is that robots and some non-robot elite enemies (Including all bosses) are completely immune; Sacred Coil in particular will intermittently produce missions where all or nearly all enemies are robots, but even in the other Investigations this can create situations where you don't have an opportunity to trigger Fear Factor. (Because Axiom can't Smash anybody with Panic-vulnerable buddies in range)

Somewhat amusingly to me, Fear Factor is at its most reliable in the Gray Phoenix Investigation, as Gray Phoenix forces include no line troops that are immune to mental effects. They're also relatively prone to clustering up if you let them get turns, among other points having a disproportionate amount of melee-capable units, further exaggerating this. There's an argument for, say, doing a run where you start with Progeny and Axion, go for Aftershock and Fear Factor, and then have fun with Smashing Gray Phoenix forces. (And then presumably benching Axiom in favor of a different agent for the Sacred Coil Investigation)

Overall, if you're unsure which to pick, Regeneration is probably the safer choice. Even if you have full heals between Encounters, the combat healing can get you through a rough fight with no agents going down, which can be really appreciated when first learning the game.

On the topic of Panic, it's worth noting that in Chimera Squad your agents will never Panic without an ability explicitly attempting to specifically trigger Panic. So don't worry about them freaking out in response to damage, allies going down, or any other general Panic-inducers from the prior games: if no psionic enemy is on the field, your agents have nerves of steel.

Conversely, Panic is... pretty poorly-coded, with all kinds of janky interactions with other effects. Progeny Brutes, for example, can go into a kind of melee Overwatch, and if they Panic and move elsewhere, this melee Overwatch persists... and remains where they were, not moving with them. So if you're trying out Fear Factor, be aware some pretty strange things are liable to come up in the course of your run.

Principal Agent
+2 Aim

Final Stats
11 HP (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
76 Aim
13 Mobility (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
1 Armor (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)

At max level, Smash has a 91% chance to hit. That's still a bit risky, but for one thing it's high enough a Holo Targeting will turn it into a sure hit. I thus like to buy a Targeting System off the Scavenger Market as soon as I can in any run I'm using Axiom in.

Quake
Turn ending action: Axiom moves to a targeted location in his movement radius and performs Quake. All destructible environmental objects within 2 tiles will be destroyed, and all enemies in that radius will unavoidably take 5-7 damage. 1 charge per mission.

Quake is surprisingly limited in utility, in part because it guarantees Axiom is standing in the open himself unless targeted adjacent to indestructible Cover. It's especially frustrating that it doesn't benefit from Aftershock and Fear Factor -if you take both of those, a lucky Smash can easily outperform Quake in utility, even though Quake is Smash But More So in a conceptual sense. It also just feels odd given this is an even more explicit callback to the Berserker Queen's Quake move.

Like with Aftershock, its radius is also just a little too tight relative to how Chimera Squad tends to spread enemies out. It suffers less from this because you don't center it on an enemy, meaning that eg Axiom can Quake a couple enemies who are 4 tiles apart by stopping in between them, but it's still an issue; it can be surprisingly difficult to catch more than 2 enemies from a given Quake.

It's also another action that gets hurt a bit by the lack of scaling. If you get Quake online before getting Ammo or upgrading Shotguns even once, it hits harder than a Shotgun per target, can't miss, can hit multiple targets, doesn't spend ammo, and the move-and-attack aspect can be useful in its own right. But then a fully upgraded Shotgun backed by Ammo is doing at least 7-9 damage, may well be backed by a Scope and/or Holo Targeting, Shreds a point of Armor, generally applies a side effect that adds even more damage... even catching 2 targets with a Quake may end up behind in total damage at that point, and Chimera Squad is designed so it's generally better to pile damage onto one target anyway. You'd literally rather do 10 damage to one target that has 10 HP than do 14 damage across two targets, because removing an attacker before they get a turn buys time for other agents to continue to prevent enemies from acting.

Which is a bit of a contrast with XCOM 2, caused by the turn order mechanics; in XCOM 2, you can have one soldier mass-attack and then other soldiers follow up and finish targets before the enemy turn. Not necessarily so in Chimera Squad.

Quake is at least out-the-box powerful enough it doesn't fall too far behind, and the fact that it can't miss gives it notable utility for finishing targets behind High Cover, but in the long haul it's honestly easy to forget Axiom has it thanks to its low utility, which is a little unfortunate for an ability locked behind the final levelup.

Final Training: Unlock Counterattack.

Counterattack
Passive: Axiom has a chance to negate and counterattack against melee attacks, doing 6-9 damage when it triggers.

I haven't been able to find what the chance is, but suspect it's the same chance as Mutons had in XCOM 2; a 66% chance to trigger. This would be both the easy thing to do and fit roughly with my experience, where it's a little surprising for Counterattack to not trigger, but not that surprising.

Note that this can, in fact, counter melee Overwatch effects. This can be pretty frustrating, actually, as it will cancel out whatever you had Axiom doing, and in fact will outright end his turn even if he should have action points remaining. This is particularly obnoxious if you're trying to do an Adrenal Surge Smash chain, especially since Axiom's animations will reflect the original plan, not the Counterattack derail; that is, Axiom will mechanically stop wherever he Counterattacked at, but appear to be standing wherever you last sent him.

Counterattack being able to trigger on melee Overwatch is thus effectively something of a secret disadvantage. Without Counterattack, there are situations where it can make sense to have Axiom ignore melee Overwatch and charge on through to accomplish a goal; Axiom is tough enough to shrug off a hit, for one. With Counterattack, though, such a plan is very likely to be interrupted, where you really shouldn't even risk it.

It's nice if you happen to have been trying to Smash the melee Overwatcher, at least, since it cancels their damage, but this is very much not ideal design. It really shouldn't have interrupted Axiom's turn like this. As-is, there's an argument for not performing the Training at all!

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Like with Verge, Axiom takes the XCOM 2 Muton design and makes it 'friendlier'. Unlike with Verge, this is actually a widespread change: every Muton in Chimera Squad uses a new Muton design that's 'friendlier'.

I tend to dislike this kind of thing in general (If I liked an enemy enough to want them as an ally, isn't the natural assumption that I liked their existing design?), but in Chimera Squad's case there's two further issues making this particularly janky/unpleasant.

Firstly:

The Berserker model hasn't changed any (It's smaller in-game than in XCOM 2, but that's it), still having the more Predator-esque unfolding fang-filled mouth.

Strictly speaking, in XCOM 2 you don't see non-Berserker Mutons having this unfolding mouth, as they keep their mouth firmly clamped on their respirator...

... but you can see the pronounced line of their jaw that is clearly meant to approximate how a Berserker's face looks when their mouth is more or less closed, from the tusk-tipped portion of their jaw meeting toward the bottom of their face. So in XCOM 2, the Berserker mouth was meant to be, roughly, just how Muton mouths looked in general, whereas in Chimera Squad most Mutons have a more human-type mouth, magnifying all the strangeness I covered in the XCOM 2 Berserker post: in addition to things like the faceplate oddness, now the mouth radically restructures itself when a Muton goes Berserker?

The second issue is, well...

... frankly, I find the Chimera Squad Muton design much more off-putting than the XCOM 2 Muton design.

To Chimera Squad's credit, they did less overall to change the design than I'd have expected if somebody told me beforehand about their design being overhauled to be less of an Evil Enemy Design; Mutons retain their claw-like fingernails, the overall shape and proportions of their body is actually the same even though their visual profile looks different because they're not put in XCOM 2 Muton armor (Which for one thing gave them a particularly hunchbacked look by virtue of the upper back of the armor protruding significantly), and they even retain the implied toe organization of regular Mutons from XCOM 2 with their shoes presenting a single big split toward the middle. (Which is actually another example of Berserkers always having been weirdly different, as they have a more human foot plan aside missing a toe and their toenails being claw-like)

But they did absolutely overhaul the face/head to bring it more in line with human norms, and... it works okay when you're looking at Axiom's portraits, where the head-on perspective obscures the very non-human neck construction, among other things the art does, but in-engine models just look very wrong. It's especially off-putting when a Muton actually bothers to smile, revealing their mouth is full of nothing but very even molars. For one thing, molars are for grinding vegetation; the kind of teeth Chimera Squad Mutons have is mostly found on for example grazing animals that subsist primarily on grass. This is very at odds with how the series has tended to present Mutons; stuff like the Berserker jaw and to a lesser extent the claw-like nails points more heavily toward a carnivorous diet. Even if Mutons are supposed to be more omnivorous like humans and their close relatives, you'd at least expect some fang-like incisors, exactly as you find on humans and a number of other primates. So in addition to the gut-level 'oh god' reaction I have to seeing a Muton smile in Chimera Squad, the teeth are difficult to accept from a realism standpoint to boot.

(I suspect the devs themselves noticed how off-putting it is, because Mutons pretty much always have their lips firmly closed in Chimera Squad, where the game is much more willing to have both 2D and 3D renditions of Sectoids and Vipers opening their mouths. Here's hoping XCOM 3 re-retcons Muton mouths to the XCOM 2 design, or at least to something less off-putting than the Chimera Squad design)

The eye overhaul similarly bothers me; making eyes bigger and bringing them in line with the human coloration pattern (Large whites surrounding a smaller colored area itself surrounding a smaller black circle... a curious qualifier to this is that Axiom's 'whites' are actually blue) is one of the most common ways for pop culture to endeavor to make non-human beings more appealing, and while I understand the principles behind it, I'm fundamentally not a fan of it and particularly not a fan of how Chimera Squad went about applying it to Mutons.

The XCOM 2 Muton design has small eyes recessed deep inside a concave area; while I suspect the artist motive for giving them such eyes was so they'd 'look evil', this is actually a thing you see in a number of real-life animals, and one of the functions it serves is to protect the eyes, making the strike area for actually hitting an eye really small. This makes a lot of sense for the Designated Serious Soldier Alien to have, whether you're talking in the sense of being one of the factors motivating the Ethereals to decide on them as a primary soldier species or in the sense of the Ethereals modifying Mutons to be more effective soldiers.

Chimera Squad retains the basic shape and in fact adds ridges around the eyes to retain the visual effect of the eyes being relatively recessed, but makes them so much larger they basically entirely fill what was empty air in XCOM 2, and the result is that Mutons now have particularly vulnerable eyes. Which... seems quite wrong.

And I don't think it actually makes Mutons seem particularly 'friendlier' in practice. Among other points, Chimera Squad struggles to make the Muton face express anything -Mutons in XCOM 2 come across as 'evil' in part by virtue of perpetually looking angry, which is partly down to foundational design but also pretty heavily caused by how their face animates where they successfully produce glares and whatnot. The converse to that is that I can easily imagine an XCOM 2 Muton actually looking happy, or bored, through simply flexing its face differently. Chimera Squad's Mutons perpetually look blank-faced, like they're not really feeling anything -even when Axiom is using Smash, for example, his face more or less doesn't move. It's easy to miss because the camera doesn't necessarily zoom in on Axiom on a given Smash, and even when it does the zoom-in lasts only briefly, but ever since I first noticed it I can't un-see it.

Notably, this isn't restricted to the 3D Muton models; even the 2D art seems to struggle to imagine expressiveness from the new Muton face. I spent a long time thinking Axiom had only the one portrait, because it's easy to miss when he actually uses an alternate portrait, even when the game switches directly from one to another. Also notable is this doesn't seem to be an intentional feature of Mutons; Axiom in particular largely has his lines written and delivered as fairly calm, but outside Axiom I'd say Mutons are on average the most emotionally expressive species in the game (Yes, including humans) when it comes to their audio: it's not that Mutons are meant to be either generally calm or generally difficult for a human to read their emotional state (Either of which would be pretty weird to do, given how prior games handled Mutons, but work with me), it really seems to be just the art teams struggling with making Muton faces adequately expressive.

It's also worth pointing out here that while glowing eyes with no pupil -as XCOM 2 Mutons have- is a stock feature to apply to 'bad guy species' (eg demons), there are plenty of cases of pop culture managing to use the effect for non-evil people and have it work fine. Warcraft has been giving glowing pupilless eyes to paladins and whatnot for over two decades, for example. So while I recognize the thought process in moving away from the beady yellow, glowing eyes of XCOM 2's Mutons, I think it's fundamentally incorrect of one.

On the whole, I think the Muton redesign is one of the biggest missteps of Chimera Squad, and I dearly hope XCOM 3 does not stick closely to it. Even with liking some of the Muton civilian clothing looks... I think this is very much more downside than upside.

I'm rather curious why Mutons in particular have this problem. Sectoids, Vipers, and hybrids get new designs, but none of them got a universally-applied overhaul trying to make them look friendlier. (eg Verge moves away from the death's-head grin, but plenty of Sectoids retain it, and overall Sectoids are mostly just XCOM 2 Sectoids in clothing and carrying rifles and all) I get why a lot of the enemy-only species evade this issue -they generally have exactly their XCOM 2 model, no changes, or at most the model is resized- but it's quite surprising the snake-people aliens didn't get their look 'softened' at all while this mess happened with Mutons. Snakes are already upsetting/intimidating/frightening for plenty of people before you make them larger than a human; Vipers are the species I'd most expect to get an attempted softening that backfired!

As for Axiom as a character, in spite of all my issues with the Muton aesthetic I'm actually pretty fond of Axiom's writing. I'd probably place him as my second or maybe third favorite agent; among other points, the game does a pretty good job of striking a balance between 'Axiom has been integrated with the current culture for a while' and 'Axiom is still ultimately an alien who comes from a different mental place from your average human'.

For example, one of my favorite agent interactions n the game is one where Axiom informs Claymore he 'fights like a woman'; Claymore (Who, it should be noted, is a man, and one who could be described as Very Masculine, with a large frame, a full beard, and other factors meaning one is unlikely to interpret him as at all feminine) pretty clearly is not sure what to make of this, and you can tell part of what's on his mind is the pretty widespread Real Human Thing that people using that type of expression are usually using it as a negative. ('You hit like a girl' being a stock way to say someone doesn't hit particularly hard, with the undertone generally being this is not merely an observation but in fact an insult, for example)

But then he asks what Axiom actually means by that, and Axiom proceeds to talk about how Claymore inspires others and leads from the front and stuff, connecting back to how in XCOM 2 Berserkers are indicated to all be female and do in fact act as pod leaders. So to Axiom, 'fight like a woman' means, basically, 'fight like a Berserker', because that's the Muton context for a female-coded way of fighting.

It's a really nice moment and my one complaint about it in particular is it would've been nice to actually have such a lead-from-the-front female Muton agent. And... well, there's evidence such a thing was intended and just didn't make it into the final game for whatever reason; there's a partially-complete agent in the code called 'Titan', complete enough that a mod was able to get a reasonably functional (if ugly) rendition out on the Workshop. I kind of suspect Chimera Squad got a little less polish than the devs intended; it's nowhere near as noticeable as with War of the Chosen or even base XCOM 2, but Chimera Squad has a non-trivial amount of evidence the devs intended to do a bit more than they did.

Anyway, though, back to Axiom.

Another thing I quite like about Axiom as a character is that his out-of-combat conversations are pretty calm and easygoing. It would have been so easy for Chimera Squad to just write Axiom as a 'Hulk angry! Hulk smash!' sort of character all-around, having him getting audibly angrily readily in conversations with his fellow agents and so on, but instead Axiom is actually one of the most consistently calm and easygoing agents in regular conversation. It's only in combat conditions that we get Angry Axiom as a thing, and even there he isn't doing things like angrily shouting mean things at his fellow agents in combat. (And to be clear, Chimera Squad absolutely has a system for agents to spontaneously talk to each other in combat, where the devs could have had Axiom yelling angry stuff at agents; this is a deliberate characterization decision, not a side effect of the game's technical limitations)

It strikes a nice balance between staying true to what we've seen of Mutons in prior games without just indulging in mindless stereotyping. You can imagine that something about Muton biology does lend itself to a particularly pronounced form of 'combat getting adrenaline pumping', yet Mutons are clearly allowed to be more well-rounded of characters than just 'perpetual anger is my only character trait'. I'm more used to seeing sequels just do the dumb stereotyping thing... and usually when they escape that problem, it's by simply abandoning everything that came before, where 'this people is a continuation of the people from the prior game' just comes across like an obvious lie.

So it's really nice that Chimera Squad dodged both those outcomes.

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Next time, we move onto the final Shotgun-wielding agent: Claymore.

See you then.