XCOM: Chimera Squad isn’t your normal kinda XCOM experience, and while in some ways (reduced scale, smaller missions) that’s a bummer, in other ways—namely the new “Breach” system—it has been an absolute pleasure to play.
Nathan has played more of the game than I have, so definitely go and check out his impressions piece if you’d like to know more about the game overall, but I just wanted to take a minute today to talk about that breach system, which is the one big gameplay change for this spin-off and is I think one of the most successful turn-based innovations in years.
It works like this: in Chimera Squad, missions are no longer sprawling affairs where you spend half your time traversing the map with your heart in your mouth. Instead, with the game’s focus now on explosive SWAT team work, the action is now focused on specific room-by-room encounters, and each time you move between them, you get to do a Breach move.
This pauses the game and gives you a chance to plan a single, dramatic entrance to the new area, where a door is kicked or blown down and your entire team comes storming in, guns blazing. It sounds like a very fast, Call of Duty-kinda move, but it actually suits the turn-based nature of XCOM to a tee.
I’m not going to lie, there are downsides to this, which Nathan has already spelled out. It reduces the scale of missions, and changes the nature of them too; while the story is set in the XCOM universe, this at times feels more like an old Rainbow Six game than the kind of thing we’re used to from in this world.
(Please, Ubisoft, make a Rainbow Six game like this.)
I get why some fans are down on this, even taking into the account the fact this is an experimental spin-off. Yet that’s partly why I’ve embraced it; free from the shackles of legacy and expectation, Chimera Squad has been free to try some wild new shit like Breaches, and I love it.
To get big-picture on you for a moment, I think turn-based tactics is the single best type of gameplay experience in the world. It has been tried and tested over thousands of years, on tabletops and computers, from chess to Advance Wars, and remains a pillar of so many genres because it works. You get time to think and plan and get devious, which is rewarding on a wider strategic level, but there’s also a more immediate satisfaction to come from seeing the planned move take place in a singular moment, that instant of dread and exhilaration between a plan being an idea and becoming reality.