XCOM®: Chimera Squad

Either you get what they were going for here or you don't. In hindsight this game was ahead of it's time. It could have used an interactive conversation system to let you actually talk to your staff, but the bite-sized encounters and limited base-building makes this feel more like a mobile game, and either you like that or you don't. If you don't want an extreme challenge long war and instead want a bunch of bite-sized encounters, you're going to enjoy this. It's obvious that the problem they were trying to address is that people were ONLY using Snipers, getting their specialized squad members killed or ignoring them completely, and not getting the evocative mix of specialized squadmates that was intended. In reality the squad balance has also always been broken and by eliminated snipers and giving all squad-mates some broken abilities it's a noble attempt to create the original vision for the games which was a series of exciting encounters with mixed heroes, rather than a squad of only snipers taking two steps and then going into Overwatch. In particular it's really nice to have squadmates that can create kinetic shields and fight up-close without constantly getting killed or seriously injured before they can do anything. In XCOM 2 I was incredibly excited for squadmates with swords, until I discovered they are basically completely useless because they don't do enough damage, their powers are extremely difficult to pull off, and they aren't spongy enough. So in that sense this game fixes what was broken in XCOM 2. The breach mechanic is really just rolling the dice for starting scenario, but it does slow the game down such that it's effectively just another layer of missions prep, which might not be the best idea. It is fun to poison spit and draw enemy fire right off the bat. I also appreciate that now you have RPG style initiative instead of constantly swapping squadmates to optimize your attacks. Forcing you to actually use each squadmate in turn unless you use their one-time initiative boost to a fellow squadmate makes the encounters faster forces you to deal with poor positioning or initiative setup rather than spending 10 times as long messing with turn order every single round. The game will run on a potato PC but takes a lot of storage for some reason. The music is relaxing so I actually have the sound on instead of muting the game and playing music while I play. I vastly prefer comic-style still images to in-game cinematics so I hope the series gets more of this in the future.