As you can imagine, this changes the flow of battles significantly, and also has a huge impact on how you strategize. Unlike earlier games, in Chimera Squad, the interleaved turn order now dictates which unit will be allowed to take an action at which point. Turn order is something else that XCOM: Chimera Squad has changed. Make sure the positive effects are applied to those who need them most, and that the negative ones – if there are any – go to the ones who won’t be affected by them terribly.

Each Breach point can have a positive or negative effect on the Agent that uses them, so rather than just randomly assigning an Agent to any Breach point, you need to pay attention to whether or not the buff or debuff in question suits them. When assigning your units to Breach points, you need to be careful about who goes where and pay close attention to various positive and negative effects. Let’s go over some of those things one by one.

Unlike many other turn-based strategy games, Chimera Squad’s pre-battle preparations are not just simply about deciding where to place which units (though that is certainly a factor)- there’s a lot else at play. One of the most important new mechanics XCOM: Chimera Squad introduces is Breach mode, which is sort of a pre-battle preparation, but given just how much it determines for the rest of the battle going forward and how influential the decisions you make here can be for your squad, it’s something that you need to pay very close attention to. With all that out of the way, let’s get started. In this feature, we’ll be going over some handy pointers that you should keep in mind to make your time with the game smoother. It also represents a pretty big shift for the series, introducing several interesting major new mechanics and dropping some older ones, and even though this is one of the more newcomer friendly XCOM games we’ve had in a while, there’s still a lot to keep track of.

Out of nowhere, with little to no fanfare, we have another XCOM game on our hands, and though it might not quite be XCOM 3, Chimera Squad is still pretty darn good.

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