XCOM: Chimera Squad Review — A Smaller, Faster XCOM That Knows What It Is

XCOM: Chimera Squad asks a question the series never had to answer before: what happens after the war ends and the aliens stay? Firaxis Games built a whole game around that premise, and it mostly works. Released on PC on April 24, 2020, published by 2K, Chimera Squad is a turn-based tactical game that trades the franchise’s globe-spanning resistance for a single city and a squad of eleven cops.

Trailer, via XCOM.

City 31 and Mayor Nightingale

The setting is City 31, an experimental city where humans and aliens attempt cohabitation. The in-game clock puts the story five years after XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. The real-world gap is longer: the game is six years old now, since it arrived in 2020.

The peace is thin. Mayor Nightingale is killed in a terrorist attack, and Chimera Squad is tasked with finding who did it.

That investigation runs through three criminal factions, confronted one at a time. The Progeny is a doomsday cult of psionic individuals. Gray Phoenix is a street gang of aliens who see themselves as unfit for Earth society. Sacred Coil is a religious cult preaching salvation for those who opposed XCOM, made up of former ADVENT soldiers and aliens.

Behind all three sits a fourth group the squad codenames “Atlas.” Atlas attacks City 31’s Town Hall; Chimera Squad rescues Deputy Mayor Parata and fights off the attackers. The squad then learns Atlas ordered Nightingale’s assassination and backed the other factions to destabilize the city and seize it. Chimera Squad storms the Atlas hideout and defeats its leader.

One month later, two figures watch the squad’s headquarters on a monitor. By the time XCOM realizes it is in a new war with the threat they represent, one says, it will be too late.

That ending is the most interesting thing in the game. It is also the least resolved.

Breach Mode and Interleaved Turns

Chimera Squad keeps the tactical bones of the series and changes the rhythm. Missions begin in a planning phase called “breach mode,” where players position units at designated entry points before entering the combat area. Different entry points carry different bonuses and challenges, and units can be split across several of them.

Once combat starts, turns alternate between player-controlled units and computer-controlled enemies based on position. The game calls this “interleaved turns.” It is a real break from earlier XCOM games, which had every player unit act and then every enemy act. Some agents have abilities that shift the turn order, and once per mission the player can force one unit to act next no matter the order.

Units still move, attack, take defensive cover, or use special abilities. What changes is the pressure. There is no long setup turn where the whole squad moves as one block. Each decision lands immediately.

Eleven Agents, No Classes

The squad is eleven characters, human and alien, each with unique abilities instead of the classes from previous installments. This is the game’s sharpest idea and its biggest constraint. Every agent is a person with a stated reason for joining, and every agent is also a fixed tool. You do not build them; you deploy them.

Missions may contain multiple separate combat segments, and players choose which characters participate before each one. Between fights, the strategy layer handles equipment upgrades and assigns squad members to investigations. It also tracks unrest in each district. Ignore that unrest and the city breaks into violence.

The district system gives the non-combat half of the game actual stakes. It is not decoration. Let a district slide and the campaign gets harder in a way you can see coming and cannot fully prevent.

What Chimera Squad gives up is scale. Previous XCOM games were about losing countries. This one is about losing neighborhoods. That is a smaller story, told with more attention to the people in it.

What Chimera Squad Gets Right

The breach mode and interleaved turns are the reason to play. They cut the dead time out of XCOM combat and replace it with a decision that matters before a shot is fired. Where to enter, who enters where, and who acts when — those three questions carry most missions.

The eleven fixed agents support that design. A squad of specialists with set abilities forces players to solve problems with the roster they have rather than the roster they wish they had. It is a tighter puzzle than class-building, and a less forgiving one.

The story is thinner. Three factions plus a hidden fourth is a clean structure, and the game moves through it efficiently, but the factions are defined by what they are rather than who is in them. The Progeny, Gray Phoenix, and Sacred Coil each get a premise and not much more.

The ending promises a new war and delivers a monitor. Two unnamed figures, one line, no follow-up. As a closer it is a hook, not a conclusion, and it leaves the most interesting thread — what comes after City 31 — hanging.

A Smaller XCOM That Knows It

XCOM: Chimera Squad is the series at its most compact and its most experimental. The breach-and-clear loop and interleaved turns are genuine improvements to turn-based tactical combat, and the eleven-agent roster is a smart answer to the problem of a squad game with no classes.

The trade is scope. City 31 is one city, the campaign is short, and the villain factions are sketches. Players who came for the global resistance of XCOM 2 will find less here. Players who came for the combat will find it faster and tighter.

With a score of 7.8/10, this is a confident side project rather than a main entry. It tries one big idea and lands it. The unresolved ending is the part worth watching, because it is the only part of Chimera Squad that points somewhere the series has not gone.

City 31 · Firaxis Games · game review · turn-based tactics · XCOM Chimera Squad · XCOM series