Chimera Squad Analysis: Intro

X-COM: Chimera Squad is an interesting surprise, a smaller, more experimental game contrasting with XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen suffering heavily from epic ambitions they struggled to realize, and Chimera Squad fundamentally interrogates the framework of prior games by using different solutions to many of the same goals/problems. It's also something of an interquel, making some fairly significant shifts in the apparent narrative direction of the series, in that XCOM 2's ending heavily implies that Earth is still contested territory with ADVENT remaining in control of large portions of it and pretending to their populace that nothing has happened, while Chimera Squad skips right on past the process of the Earth being taken from ADVENT's control and on to the Earth being broadly in a relatively stable state of non-ADVENT control.

Also interesting is that Chimera Squad looks at War of the Chosen's introduction of the Skirmishers and takes things a step further, with most of the species the Ethereals brought to Earth being properly treated as real people with personalities and the ability to be reasoned with, up to and including that the player can have aliens in their own forces. I was already pleasantly surprised by War of the Chosen stepping away from the 'always kill all non-humans' undertone of XCOM 2 and its predecessor, but hadn't really expected any future games to go particularly further on this topic. This is appreciated both for ethical sorts of reasons but also because honestly several XCOM 2 enemies look like they should be fun gameplay pieces to use yourself -and indeed Chimera Squad is fairly successful in using some of them as a base for distinctive and interesting gameplay pieces.

Another interesting element to me is that Chimera Squad breaks away from the model of the prior games where the player is treated as an in-universe entity other characters talk to and so on. There's the relatively obvious point of a lack of characters talking directly to the camera, as well as the lack of a nameless figure only ever referred to by an anonymous term like 'the Commander', but it actually even holds to this change in conceit in relatively innocuous ways; in the prior games, your soldiers have a radio filter applied to all their lines, because the concept is that you're literally hearing them over a radio or some such. In Chimera Squad, the radio effects are reserved for Director Kelly, and for Whisper when he's talking to the squad mid-mission; your agents -and your enemies- have unfiltered voices, as if you're hearing them in person, because you're non-specifically playing the whole squad.

Non-specifically because the game lets you pick different squad members, in multiple senses of the word: while secondary materials like the game's pre-release trailers treat Godmother as the squad's leader in the field, it's entirely possible for a run to simply never recruit Godmother. Chimera Squad is very much operating on the somewhat abstract 'player controls a group, who in-universe are either supposed to be spontaneously cooperating or where the leadership could be literally anyone' model you see in a lot of tactics games and multi-character RPGs.

I'm impressed the team kept the handling on this point as consistent as they did, rather than mindlessly applying radio filters to all dialogue in the field because that's how the prior games always did it, or anything of that sort.

I should point out that it seems unlikely Chimera Squad is particularly representative of the gameplay direction XCOM 3 is liable to go whenever it comes into being. I won't be surprised if bits and pieces of things introduced by Chimera Squad make their way into XCOM 3, but many of its major system overhauls seem unlikely to be the foundation of XCOM 3. Which is maybe unfortunate, as I quite like some of these big changes.

For example, the prior games have consistently struggled with the pod system ending up with a bunch of jank resulting from it, such as how advancing on the enemy is risking pulling inactive pods and so close-quarters abilities carry risks simply not present on longer-range abilities. Chimera Squad resolves this issue not by sticking to the pod system and trying to further refine patrol routes and map design to minimize the issues (Which is what XCOM 2 did), but instead by getting rid of the pod system entirely, replacing it with the Encounter system. Which is basically that you enter a map, you fight the enemies in that map and do whatever non-combat objectives may or may not be present, and then you move to a new map; in XCOM 2 terms, all enemies actually present are fully active at all times, but combat is still spaced out in the manner the pod system was always trying to accomplish.

Also correlated to this and quite surprising is the removal of the fog of war. The player simply always has full awareness of the entire map at all times. Their units have line of sight considerations, where an agent may be unable to fire on a target because it's too far away or something is in the way, but the player will never be blindsided by turning a corner into enemies they didn't realize were there, or didn't get the chance to see moving there even though their soldiers technically witnessed it, among other implications. Chimera Squad thus ends up with a more 'solve the puzzle' sort of experience, where most of the information is out in the open. Though, surprisingly, the F1 functionality from Enemy Unknown/Within of being able to check statlines and abilities that didn't return in XCOM 2 also doesn't return in Chimera Squad, so not as fully in the open as it could be. Regardless, the removal of fog of war is a pleasant surprise, as it's a constant painpoint in the prior two games that the way their engine draws line of sight is difficult to correctly read and at times is straight-up seriously bugged -even into XCOM 2 you'll still get the occasional moment of activating a pod through walls or solid ground because the engine drew line of sight in an extremely strange way in regard to a corner or the like.

By a similar token, Chimera Squad introduces the Breach Phase. When seeing pre-release hype and all, I had the impression this was basically a gimmick being attached, but in actually playing the game it rapidly became obvious that it was actually a direct evolution of XCOM 2's 'Overwatch ambush' mechanic, but considerably smoothed out. XCOM 2 really intends for the player to open most missions by sneaking up on a pod, setting a bunch of people in Overwatch, and then having someone take a direct offensive action to kick off the encounter, but the process of ordering an Overwatch ambush is implemented in a clunky way, only one ability more interesting than 'shoot a guy' can be used in a given Overwatch ambush, and as I've been over extensively on this site the mechanical design of enemies and player unit progression combine to make Overwatch ambushes increasingly a bit of a trap to try to employ as a run progresses.

Whereas in Chimera Squad you start each and every Encounter with the Breach Phase, where your units all get to act first, taking shots or using Breach Phase-specific abilities, and then the enemies get a Breach Phase chance to act themselves, and then the regular combat mechanics kick in after that. This basically perfectly executes the goal of XCOM 2's Overwatch ambush mechanic but minus all the janky problems with the Overwatch ambush mechanic: there is no point where the player stops making use of the Breach Phase because it's mechanically sub-optimal to use it or anything like that, the Breach Phase itself is more interesting and less frustrating (Overwatch ambushes also suffer from it not being obvious what order your units will fire in or what order they'll pick targets, among other things, where Chimera Squad solves this problem by giving you direct control over all this), and there's no possibility of being denied it due to some unexpected janky mechanics point the game never explained and possibly never intended. (That is, in XCOM 2 a learning player especially is going to end up losing Concealment before getting to ambush a pod through unexpected pod positions, insufficiently clear communication on what breaks Concealment vs what does not, walking into pod detection zones when sidling up to a corner even though that feels like it should be safe to do, the non-obvious point that the ambush only fires on enemies that move, and so on -and even an experienced player can still get caught out by janky weirdness)

This is one piece where it would be misleading to say I hope it returns in XCOM 3, but it's absolutely accurate to say I'd rather see something like the Breach Phase than something like XCOM 2's Overwatch ambushes return in XCOM 3.

So that's all cool and good.

Surprisingly, where Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 both have multiple DLC, Chimera Squad has no DLC. I'd started out seeing the design and thinking it was built with an eye toward extensibility, where it was easy to imagine DLC for new agents, new Epic Weapons, possibly entire new Investigations, but no DLC has happened and with poking at the mod scene some it's become clear Chimera Squad was in fact not built with DLC particularly in mind. For example, there's exactly 11 locker slots for your 11 agents, where modders had to work some magic to get the game to not do janky, problematic stuff if they added in new agents; the game not only never got agent DLC, it was designed under the hood in a way that was quite unfriendly to creating such DLC!

Speaking of mods, I should note that if a player has sunk hundreds of hours into XCOM 2 and is hoping Chimera Squad will be similarly replayable... well, no. I like it well enough, but it doesn't manage the heights of XCOM 2's replayability. It has Steam Workshop support built in, for example, but its mod scene is very dead -there was a flurry of mods in the first few months after its release, but as of this writing the last time a mod was uploaded to the Steam Workshop was February 8th, 2022. So... basically a year of nothing. XCOM 2, by contrast, has yet to go more than a month without at least one new mod getting uploaded since I started paying attention to its mod scene, even if the really impressive and interesting mods seem to have largely stopped happening.

More fundamentally, Chimera Squad unfortunately just has less baseline replayability, which is a bit unfortunate in general but especially given it was clearly built with an eye toward replayability. It has a screen for checking out how much of the game's content you've seen overall, for example, but also out of 11 total agents a given run will get at most 8, and the Investigations can be done in several possible orders -to see all the major content of the game requires a minimum of 3 full runs, where in base XCOM 2 the only reason you need 2 runs to see all the content is enabling the Tutorial makes the very early game very different.

Alas, in a more moment-to-moment sense, Chimera Squad doesn't manage the kind of variety XCOM 2 does. One of the big ones is the consideration of maps: in XCOM 2, only a handful of special missions (The DLC missions, the Leviathan mission, the initial Tutorial mission, the Lost and Abandoned missions) are completely fixed layouts, whereas in Chimera Squad every map's layout is completely fixed. And that's not even 'every Encounter map's layout' the way you might expect, it's actually that a given mission type has a limited pool of Encounter chains, where some of these are sufficiently distinctive you'll eventually reach the point where seeing the beginning of the first Encounter means you already know what the second and, if there is one, third Encounters are going to be. The pool is sufficiently limited overall it is in fact unsurprising for a single run to encounter a specific map chain two, sometimes even three times!

Also not helping is that Chimera Squad's mission variety isn't terribly varied in practice. For many missions, you'll do 1-2 Encounters that are just a straight combat encounter, and then the final Encounter will be to destroy a thing, or grab a thing, or actually another 'take out every enemy' case, and they end up feeling pretty same-y overall. The main standard mission type that breaks away from this pattern successfully is the missions to evac a VIP -which unfortunately get pretty repetitive with themselves, and suffer some from some mechanics jank and from optimal play in them tending to involve boring stretches of relative nothingness.

Similarly, Chimera Squad has a 'Dark Event' system of its own, and actually tries to make it a bit more substantial, but most Dark Event effects are both unreliable and minor when they do apply.

I still think Chimera Squad is a game worth playing and discussing (For thing, a lot of its narrative decisions are noteworthy), but it doesn't reach the heights of potential I'd hoped when it was first announced.

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Next time, we discuss one of Chimera Squad's biggest, most obvious experiments: the Timeline.

See you then.