XCOM: Chimera Squad

A lore-breaking spinoff that removes most of what makes the new XCOM special and replaces it with short bouts of repetitive tactical combat and bad writing.

Firaxis lets its hair down for a fun, ragtag twist on XCOM's proven recipe of tactics and tension.

Chimera Squad is a more focused experience, and it doesn't outstay its welcome, but that focus is something of a double-edged sword.

An attempt to simplify and streamline XCOM sounds like a disaster in the making but the original’s tense turn-based combat is still highly entertaining even in this reduced form.

XCOM: Chimera Squad is a great game, all told. It's a cheap, fairly lengthy campaign that manages to be both familiar for fans of the series and offer something new and fresh to the XCOM universe.

While not all of the wild departures fire on all cylinders, XCOM: Chimera Squad‘s open-ended difficulty settings allow everyone to bend the strong combat groundwork to their will. Chimera Squad embraces the strange, and is predominately better for it.

Your enemies want City 31 to burn. It's up to Chimera Squad to put them down.

XCOM: Chimera Squad is a brave adventure into new territory. Featuring a more interesting narrative design, some much-needed changes to combat, and a cast of interesting characters, all of these things would lead to a brilliant game if it weren't for the myriad of bugs, crashes, and usual XCOM tiring randomness. It's an absolute must-buy for fans of the genre, especially at its current price, but ...

XCOM: Chimera Squad may be a full XCOM spin-off, but it feels more like testing ground for radical departures from the previous two games than a proper sequel. It plays with bold changes to the existing mechanics and story, but only props them up with a thin bit of scaffolding rather than a cohesive whole. Its unique characters are wonderful and its new ideas are certainly an interesting change of...

Riddled with many different types of bugs, XCOM: Chimera Squad is a hard sell. If you enjoy the setting and want another strategy title to play, this might be it, but you'll probably want to wait.

These are annoyances, though, not game breakers. Overall, Chimera Squad is solid. It's still a shadow of its progenitor, with its new ideas not quite making up for the loss of old ones. But if you try to treat it as its own thing, play at a higher difficulty, and do your best to ignore the snake's voice, I'd say it's worth a punt.

Chimera Squad is a fun but forgettable XCOM experience.