XCOM: Chimera Squad
- Thread starter Mr Jack
- Start date
Yeah, it looks like an XCOM minigame rather than a full drop. I'm excited.
50% off until 1st May. Time to get in early!
War of the Chosen came out in 2017?
So I've been playing this much of the day now, and I've got to say I like it. The changed turn structure makes a refreshing change from the XCOM norm, and it's got a bunch of interesting mechanics in it. Seeing various aliens wandering around as civilians has a nice feel to it after the previous installments. I've not played enough to get to grips with the depths of the game yet.
If anyone is interested I posted a let's play of the first couple of missions:
If anyone is interested I posted a let's play of the first couple of missions:
Aggressive enemies get a shot at the end of the Breach phase; Alert get an action (move or special) but can't take a shot. At least that's what I think it is.
Finished my playthrough on Expert yesterday. I really enjoyed it. I don't think I would like to see the mainline XCOM series adopt any of the new ideas here, but as a spin off they work really well. I think the rest of this post is going to end up with a critical tone, but please take it as quibbling about something I really liked rather than anything else.
Biggest criticism: the difficult is off. Particularly single encounter missions later on are a complete cakewalk. The balance on once-per-mission abilities makes them too powerful if an encounter is all of the mission. Even the final missions were too easy, a maxed out crew is too powerful. I regret not putting it up to Impossible for the final third.
The timeline I don't mind too much, but it does push you into a very artificial feeling strategy of choosing your targets based on when they act next. I felt there wasn't enough stuff that interacted with the timeline (or perhaps I just didn't have the characters that got those abilities?), but those abilities that did interact it felt super powerful so perhaps that was necessary.
The biggest problem was the combination of the small rooms and the ability to spam character powers meaning that most of the time I kept my entire squad more or less in place unless the mission forced me to do otherwise: taking a second shot, lobbing a grenade, or healing a party member was almost always better than moving. This led to very static encounters. Whereas in the XCOM mainline you want to flank and outmanoeuvre foes, here I was mostly just staying in place and blasting away. The fact half my team had ignore cover abilities made this even more tempting.
All of this gave the game a refreshing new feel - which I think is what they were going for - but, ultimately, felt to me like a structure that offered less than the traditional system. Mind you, perhaps if there is a Chimera Squad 2 they could iterate on all these systems and improve the way they work as well.
Biggest criticism: the difficult is off. Particularly single encounter missions later on are a complete cakewalk. The balance on once-per-mission abilities makes them too powerful if an encounter is all of the mission. Even the final missions were too easy, a maxed out crew is too powerful. I regret not putting it up to Impossible for the final third.
The timeline I don't mind too much, but it does push you into a very artificial feeling strategy of choosing your targets based on when they act next. I felt there wasn't enough stuff that interacted with the timeline (or perhaps I just didn't have the characters that got those abilities?), but those abilities that did interact it felt super powerful so perhaps that was necessary.
The biggest problem was the combination of the small rooms and the ability to spam character powers meaning that most of the time I kept my entire squad more or less in place unless the mission forced me to do otherwise: taking a second shot, lobbing a grenade, or healing a party member was almost always better than moving. This led to very static encounters. Whereas in the XCOM mainline you want to flank and outmanoeuvre foes, here I was mostly just staying in place and blasting away. The fact half my team had ignore cover abilities made this even more tempting.
All of this gave the game a refreshing new feel - which I think is what they were going for - but, ultimately, felt to me like a structure that offered less than the traditional system. Mind you, perhaps if there is a Chimera Squad 2 they could iterate on all these systems and improve the way they work as well.
I think Cherub was intended as a more offensively capable alternative to Terminal, but Terminal's support capabilities are too good to favour Cherub over her and that leaves him in a bit of a no man's land. I ran him through about half the game and I found him pretty good, but ultimately I found I was better off running Godmother and killing enemies faster. Cherub's shield bash is super effective but too situational to be a good substitute for just blasting stuff.
Haven't had that. I had a bug where Blueblood starting having an expanded magazine size for no reason, and the text on his weapons bugged out. Annoying as it stopped him using "Fond Farewell" so much. I also had it randomly not activate his free reload ability. Also annoying.
Forget what you know from XCom. The key here is to spam those special abilities: they're on a cooldown now rather than limited use. I found I often barely moved my characters; it's usually better to use abilities than move and the maps are small enough that you don't have a lot of tactical positioning. Get them in cover; then stand and fire.
The map going red seems pretty inevitable; but you can use the map special abilities and good mission choice to stop it bubbling over. Controlling Unrest is usually the most important factor in choosing your missions.
Yup, target enemy units based on when they act. If you can kill them before their turn that makes a big difference to the overall picture, but if you realise you can't kill the enemies next in the turn order ignore them and target the ones a bit further down the order so your next character(s) can get that kill. Obviously chance to hit still plays into your choice, but a 50% shot at an enemy that you can stop acting is probably better than a 65% shot at one who you can't.