One of Chimera Squad’s largest departures from previous games is that the 11 possible members of your team are unique, predetermined characters with names, distinct personalities, and excellent voice acting. Some of these changes are just different from what we’ve come to expect from Firaxis’ XCOM rather than better or worse, but the focus generally seems to have shifted more toward smaller-scale tactics over long-term strategic decisions, which left Chimera Squad feeling thinner overall.

Missions have been broken into bite-sized chunks, your soldiers’ turns are interwoven with the enemy’s using a new initiative system, and you now start battles with a sudden breach directly into the fray instead of a slow tactical advance. With that thematic change also comes a boatload of mechanical ones, some more successful than others. The light but well-written story has you controlling XCOM’s diverse Chimera Squad as you take to the streets of the massive City 31 to track down a series of shadowy syndicates looking to disturb that fragile peace. Advent is defeated, Earth is saved, and humans and aliens are figuring out how to live in harmony – well, most of them, at least. Rather than fighting an alien invasion or leading a resistance movement, Chimera Squad is basically “XCOM: Cops,” which is still quite compelling despite the lower stakes.

Instead, it feels more like a beta of sorts for that eventual sequel, setting up how its world has changed in the aftermath of the liberation of Earth and testing the waters with some radical alterations to traditional mechanics, but not in a way that amounts to a particularly polished whole. This XCOM spin-off is a full-length game set five years after the events of XCOM 2, but it’s by no means an XCOM 3. Much like it's titular team of aliens and humans, XCOM: Chimera Squad is made up of a bunch of disparate parts merged into one package – sometimes less than gracefully.

Xcom 2 made whole