YMMV / XCOM: Chimera Squad

• Abandon Shipping: A portion of the Torque/Jane shipping evaporated after official lore revealed that Jane was more of a mentor or mother figure to Torque instead.
• Anti-Climax Boss: In grand XCOM tradition, the Final Boss of the game is profoundly underwhelming. Sovereign, the Big Bad behind the assassination of Mayor Nightingale and leader of the Shrike network, is just a King Mook of the common Shrike Hitmen. You'd think as a former XCOM agent he'd have a few tricks up his sleeves, but all he has is access to the Sustain ability, Contractual Boss Immunity and... a regular handgun. Unlike the Uber Ethereal and Avatars, who at least posed a threat if you let them use their abilites, the only dangerous aspect about fighting Sovereign is that he is accompanied by every type of Elite Mook in the game.
• Catharsis Factor: For players of XCOM 2, getting access to Torque and her Tongue Lash ability can definitely be this. For once, you're the one who can drag an enemy out of cover, instantly incapacitate them and slowly crush them to death. You can even inflict it on other Vipers!
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Due to how tricky it can be to level up newer agents in the late game, most people will focus on whoever they consider the most useful; Cherub, Godmother, Claymore, Torque, Blueblood, and Axiom are all common picks. More specialized characters like Verge or Patchwork are likely to get left behind unless chosen early.
  • Blueblood especially is considered a constant pick for runs on any difficulty and against any of the factions. His gimmick is one of the more simple and practical skillsets in the game, letting him deal high amounts of damage to a single target or pick up kills on other enemies.
  • Patchwork is considered vital when fighting Sacred Coil, as her toolkit makes her especially deadly when fighting mechanical enemies. While she's less effective against the other factions, her being an immense hard-counter against Sacred Coil still makes her a popular choice.
  • Sure, you could make use of specialized ammunition for the right targets... or you could just spend the entire game using tranq rounds while dumping that money and research into better guns to make up the difference and not have to worry about lethality at all, while getting lots of free Intel, itself the most useful of the game's three currencies.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Praetorians, Sorcerers and Ronin can be hair-pullingly frustrating to deal with thanks to their high hp, mobility and ability to mess with your soldiers in various highly annoying ways in addition to dealing significant damage.
  • The Codex returns from XCOM 2 with its clone, teleport, and Psi bomb abilities fully intact. Their saving grace is that Psi bomb doesn't deal as much damage as it used to, and that Codices only spawn during the Progeny investigation. They can also be avoided almost entirely by picking the alternative Dark Event (though you may still run into a few prior to that if you pick the Progeny as your final opponents). They also can't teleport or clone when Bound by Torque. For some reason.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • The Progeny's plans involve forcibly awakening psionics in humanity throughout City 31 and possibly relocating all aliens from the city, but several of the thralls are permanently-brainwashed Slave Mooks who are victimised repeatedly by their Sorcerer masters. Even Violet their leader is this, given the horrific experiments she underwent at the hands of ADVENT; if she got the help she needed like Shelter did, she might not have gone down this path. It's heavily implied she was abducted as a child too, which is equally horrible for her parents...
  • Grey Phoenix cause a lot of trouble in their efforts to accomplish their goals. But ultimately, they don't actually want to hurt anyone, just to leave Earth and find a homeworld that will suit them better. In-universe, it's said they will likely be shown mercy by XCOM.
• Disappointing Last Level: There are three lengthy investigations to take down the Progeny, Gray Phoenix and Sacred Coil, but the final investigation only lasts two proper missions. The final mission in particular is a very long push through hordes of enemies you've fought throughout the game, with only one brief conversation between Chimera Squad and Sovereign as opposed to the Ethereals who got a massive length of time to exposit their beliefs, actions and motivations to the player during the last missions of the first two games. Also, it happens as soon as the last of the first three investigations is over. Better hope you've got all the training and research you wanted to do finished.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Floyd Tesseract, the Sectoid conspiracy theorist who shows up in a number of cutscenes and is a VIP for extraction in one of the missions, managed to gather a number of fans in the playerbase due to his unique personality.
• Fan Nickname: XCOM: Hot Fuzz, XCOPS and Rainbow SiXCOM.
• Fanfic Fuel: As soon as the trailer launched, fans were excited to finally have a canon place to set their stories about humans and aliens cooperating, in an apparent City of Adventure no less.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Torque/Jane Kelly is very popular, if the lewd fanart is anything to go by. It helps that canonically, Kelly is one of Torque's best if not only friends, and she joined the squad primarily out of loyalty to Jane.
• Game-Breaker: Chimera Squad have a few up their sleeve.
  • The Motile Inducer lets a squad member gift any other squad member a free turn. This is an incredibly powerful item on its own, but Claymore's final trained ability Heavy Ordnance gives him a bonus use for any grenade he carries. That's any grenade, support devices included. Once you've got the combo, you have a guy who can grant two extra turns to his team-mates whenever he wishes - and is carrying a huge array of guaranteed health-and-armor shredding explosives besides.
  • The Turncoat Grenade not only forces a clump of enemies to shoot at each other, it also robs them of their next turn. Once again, combine it with Claymore for absurdly easy encounters.
  • Blueblood on his own. An underwhelming popgun blaster at first sight, he quickly transforms into a beast, easily out-damaging any other character with his ability to rain down shot after accurate, critical shot on the enemy. Give him a scope, an extended magazine, an epic pistol and some specialised ammo, and you have someone who is absolutely essential on Insane runs.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Nanomedkits in the Armory's inventory will occasionally self-replicate, potentially resulting in a supply of over a hundred of them.
  • A bug with models can sometimes give the shotgun model meant for Axiom to the other two shotgun users, which leaves them holding a BFG nearly as long as they are tall. It looks ridiculous, but admittedly kind of badass.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This picture of a friendly human-Viper interaction was made around XCOM 2's release, predicting not just the premise of humans and aliens being at peace in Chimera Squad but a Viper being a party member in Torque.
  • Also, in his review of XCOM 2, Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee ended with a joke questioning the plausibility of most humans being so accepting of ADVENT's Vichy Earth rule, citing how unlikely they would be to accept a giant snake ("PC Hissy") as their local constable. Jump forward to this game and, yes, a Viper is working as a law enforcement officer.
• Jerkass Woobie: Floyd Tesseract comes off as a deranged Conspiracy Theorist radio jockey, but he feels genuinely guilty for helping the Ethereals take over Earth, and you can tell he's trying to make things right by teaching humanity and the alien survivors not to fall for another dictator or conspiracy.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Verge defected to humanity for pants ^Explanation Verge's backstory was condensed into an image macro where he decides to defect after developing empathy for nice pants. Other fans quickly made jokes about the cruelty of the Elders to not give the Sectoids clothing, thus driving them to side with the humans just to get clothing.
  • Snek Hostess Club is canon ^Explanation Fans very quickly noticed the Freeze-Frame Bonus of a small sign for a Viper-run hostess club, then made jokes about how the snek ladies quickly made themselves more palatable to humans by exploiting their apparent attractiveness. Other jokes asking to let the Interspecies Reviewers pop over for a crossover review quickly made the rounds.
  • Deputy Sheriff Gatekeeper the breeching charge/Chief inspector Chris S. Alid/Sergeant Found ^Explanation Fans jokingly requested other enemies to be turned into more members of Chimera Squad, with amusing dark comedy surrounding the jokes about Chief inspector Chris S. Alid being the ultimate recruiter.
  • haha snek gf go hiss. ^Explanation An XCOM-centric version of the "money printer go brrr" meme, referring to how some fans are unsure of the idea of having aliens in the squad. Doubles as a reference to the fandom's long-standing obsession with the Vipers.
  • XCOPS ^Explanation Fans who are hyped for Chimera Squad love comparing it to police shows like C.O.P.S. (1988). It's also used alternatively by people decidedly not hyped about playing cops.
  • Rainbow SiXCOM: In reference to the famous series of SWAT-themed games, Rainbow Six.
  • A number of jokes and memes from XCOM 2 are revisited in a way that portrays some of them as an Old Shame, due to how speciesist some of the anti-ADVENT memes can become. For example, the War of the Chosen Hunting Lodge is jokingly referenced to as a point of tension between the rehabilitating aliens and XCOM.
• Obvious Beta: Despite being a shorter and somewhat more linear game than it's predecessors, Chimera Squad very much lacks their polish. One can't go through a single encounter without seeing signs of cutting corners on programming. Agents firing diagonally, agents pounding on glass to break it but not breaking it and shooting through it anyway, enemies moving back and forth without taking an action... The bugs are strangely numerous. They are mostly cosmetic, though, except for a particularly painful one. The previous games had cars explode at any stray shot, but sometimes cars in Chimera Squad explode without even being shot first.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Chimera Squad has smaller maps, checkpoints in the form of Breach Points, and generally easier combat than its predecessors.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • Purifiers return from XCOM 2 War of the Chosen: while they were mostly a joke back then, as their very limited range and crippling overspecialization meant that they could be safely defeated without ever causing an injury to your soldiers (on top of them being unable to actually harm Psiops with the Fortress skill, anyone with a hazmat vest, or SPARK troopers). In this game however, with no change to their movesets, Purifiers are now very effective. The maps are all much smaller than in the first game, which means that it's not rare for your soldiers to begin the mission in range of a Purifier. Hazmat vests are much rarer and harder to produce, and there's no Psiops soldier who can No-Sell all their attacks. This leaves Purifiers free to use their flamethrowers to apply burning to your soldiers through cover.
  • The smaller maps often daunting numbers of enemies the squad faces means it's a lot harder to complete missions with no wounded soldiers. Unlike in previous games of the series where players could assault enemy pods individually and have either equal numbers or even a slight numerical advantage for the vast majority of fights, Chimera Squad never deploys more than 4 soldiers at once, and now every enemy in an encounter takes part in the fight from the start. This means that it's not rare for Chimera Squad to face 8 or more foes in an encounter (some of whom may be able to take multiple actions, like Sacred Coil Ronin), and this all but guarantees someone on the squad takes a hit. It drastically shifts your focus from "who can I kill" to "who can I disable" (making Verge one of your most powerful agents early on), and it's worth noting that grenades no longer cost an action to throw nor do they end your turn on doing so.
  • The new intermixed initiative order makes being Mind Controlled even more dangerous. As mind controlled units retain their initiative order, so it's entirely possible the unit being mind controlled goes next, before any of their allies might attempt to end the mind control. Also, when your control effects end (such as Patchwork's hacking of enemy robots or turrets) they get to take their turn instantly!
• That One Attack:
  • Gray Phoenix Praetorians can challenge your agents to a duel, which makes all attacks between the duelists unfailingly accurate. While this can help in taking down a strong enemy quickly if the duel targets one of your heavy hitters, it has an annoying tendency to get your less offensively inclined support characters curbstomped instead.
  • Soulfire, used by the Progeny's Acolytes, for the exact reason as above. With zero chance to miss, your soldiers will be taking damage, which scales considerably as time passes. Eventually your toughest agent will only be able to take 2-3 attacks before going down, and the 2-3 Acolytes in every encounter will nuke any wounded soldier if you can't disable them first.
  • Remember how in XCOM 2 your Psi Operatives could use Null Lance, a devastating beam of psionic energy that hits multiple enemies? Here, the Progeny Sorcerers can use it against your agents.
  • Sacred Coil's basic mook, Androids, have a Self-Destruct Mechanism that they activate the moment they get a turn. This means they detonate when you destroy them (they cannot be subdued), doing a lot of damage in a wide AOE. Their numbers, armor and high initiative give them a good chance of getting this off, and then they will happily walk into reaction fire in order to wipe out operatives, cover, civilians and objectives.
  • Ronin, the elite units of Sacred Coil, primarily attack with a Melee Strike that can rupture your unit, disable their weapon, or root them in place. They also have Lightning Reflexes, so the first overwatch against them will always miss. But the worst thing about them is their Tempo Surge ability, which allows them to take two more actions shortly after their current turn.
• That One Boss: The final Sacred Coil mission has an Ax-Crazy Gatekeeper that combines all the traits of its species from XCOM 2 with the fact it has no problem zombifying Coil troops, plus endless reinforcements. More than one person reports having to lower the difficulty just to get past this mission, and that it's harder than the Final Boss. Fortunately, this can (mostly) be avoided by investigating Sacred Coil first.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Big Bad himself. The concept of fighting a former XCOM agent from the Second Alien War is an exciting one, considering how badass and powerful Colonel-rank soldiers are. From a story perspective, seeing someone who used to fight for freedom become a Knight Templar in fear of that same threat returning is one that could have plenty of interesting interactions and reactions from your teammembers, since everyone suffered under the rule of the Ethereals. Unfortunately, Sovereign only has a handful of lines right before becoming a complete pushover during the Final Boss fight, meaning that his perspective is never fully explored even compared to the other syndicate leaders in the game.
• Woobie Species: The Archons, as the game reveals, were created through "cruelty bordering on hatred." Previous games mentioned how their physical bodies were slapdash amalgamations of leftover Muton shoved into a robotic torso, but we learn here that they were not Empty Shells. Their control method was to subject their still-conscious mind to permanent agony, lessened only when they obeyed the Ethereals' directives. Even worse, they avert Being Tortured Makes You Evil; when the horrified humans built them a psionic Lotus-Eater Machine to live in, they're actually peaceful, shy due to their trauma, and often turn their psionic projections into elephants just to play with whoever visits them. Yet, still-enslaved Archons still appear as enemies and will battle to the death, unless you choose to capture them instead.

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