XCOM: Chimera Squad

I've also picked this up. I did not even hear about it until I saw it on youtube. Does anyone know why it is so cheap? I assume it is pretty short??
 
I somehow managed to play for 15 hours or so since Friday, so I think I've got most of the mechanics of how the game works.

Really enjoying it so far. It's a similar experience to XCOM 2 with the same janky graphics engine (XCOM 3 really needs to use Unreal Engine 4) but is different enough to not feel like a reskin of that game.

All the XCOM soldier abilities are fairly different to the last game. Godmother is probably close to a Ranger class, Terminal (healer) is a bit like a support etc. I haven't unlocked a sniper yet, not even sure there is one in the game as it's mostly close quarter combat. There's an excellent melee alien who I have been relying on to run around doing major damage and then parrying shots afterwards (with a cool effect)

Although soldiers don't die, they can be knocked down during a mission and you then have to stabilise them. How it is different to the previous games is that your soldiers don't have any recovery time between missions, even if they are gravely wounded. They do end up with 'scars' which give them some serious debuffs though. My medics mobility was hobbled, so evacuating from missions where there are infinite enemy re-inforcements became more difficult.

You can put them in tactical training to lose the scar debuffs but then they aren't available for 2-3 'days' which could mean 2-3 missions, so the game is encouraging you to not rely heavily one one particular squad and to vary your playstyle more.

There doesn't seem to be much importance placed on movement/positioning now though. I mentioned most missions I've played are inside and don't have a lot of high vantage points to take advantage of. Most missions consist of 'Breach', clear a room as quickly as possible and then breach again, usually twice or three times. Sometimes you have to extract at the end with a VIP, sometimes you have open a chest but most of the time it's just 'kill everything'

I'm playing on 'Expert' difficulty and I'd say that even feels a bit too easy, so I might do another run on Impossible once I've completed it, but the fact I can see myself playing it again is a good sign.

If the three factions you investigate I've completed one and am probably 80% through the second one. Not that you really play these for the story.

Anyone needed to use a backup android? I have had one since the early mission but literally not needed to call it in.
 
I started this last night, only done few missions but i quite like it. Nice change from normal XCOM, with this and gears tactics out so close im sorted for tactic games now! Phoenix Point disappointed me so gave up with it
 
Completed it just before I started work this morning, definitely got my £8.50 out of those 28 hours!

Didn't save-scum. My biggest criticism is that the game is basically too easy if you are an XCOM junky. I don't think I ever had more than 3 blocks in the city anarchy bar.

Apparently I still have 19 achievements to get as well.

Chimera_squad_win.jpg



 
Am on my last investigation now, I choose to do sacred coil last.

Part way through it. Even though I'm not new to this series I do generally suck at these games strategy isn't my strong point.

I have ended up turning difficulty down. The only missions I tend to not like is the VIP ones

Over all though still liking it, Torque and Terminal my fav two with patchwork being very handy as well
 
Really enjoying this. Nice change to the format and got 28 hours so far and probably 3/4 the way through. So worth the £££. My favourite team is Verge, Zephyr, Torque and Terminal. With Cherub, Claymore and Godmother as backups.

Although came across a bug that you lose all of a random soldiers weapons/armour/items. Happened to me twice, but luckily theres a fix in the cheat console. Bit annoying but least you can spawn them back

https://gameranx.com/features/id/19...uad-how-to-use-cheats-console-commands-guide/
 
I've completed it three times so I've got the achievement for seeing all the different faction missions play out.

The shotgun is the best weapon, if playing on impossible i'd probably say Godmother, Claymore and Axiom are good starting choices and as they all use shotguns you can concentrate on master crafting shotguns first.

I'd probably then take Terminal for healing and hope Blueblood comes up ASAP as he can do more damage than anyone once paired with the epic pistol that gives 'lightning hands' and obviously later when he unlocks face off....give him talon rounds and put a +3 magazine and he can pretty much clear a room

Zephyr is good for crowd control in the early-mid game but you can't substantially upgrade her damage output so she starts to become a bit useless.

I found Cherub and Shelter the weakest.
 
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.
 
I found Cherub and Shelter the weakest.

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.
 
Although came across a bug that you lose all of a random soldiers weapons/armour/items. Happened to me twice, but luckily theres a fix in the cheat console. Bit annoying but least you can spawn them back

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.
 
I finished this with 17 hours on clock, really enjoyed it.

Last mission of sacred coil was bloody hard, it jumped up so much in difficultly due to this I expect last mission to be really hard but it was very easy in comparison.

I ended up using terminal and patchwork entire game and rotated the rest.

Found Zephyr a totally useless character so was benched for most part

Really nice spin off title 8/10
 
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