XCOM: Chimera Squad (Not Quite Review Corner)

This is a fun one!

In the world of XCOM, an alien invasion in 2016 subjugated Earth under the rule of the Elders and their many unusual minions. However the secretive military counter-insurgency XCOM rallied, the Elders were defeated, and now everyone gets to live happily ever after.

Sorta.

The problem is there are millions of non-humans, human hybrids, clones and other remnants of the bad old days kicking around. Mass slaughter is off the table. Everyone has to learn to live together and forget the past. In the riot-torn starport of City 31, precise geographic location unspecified, that means someone has to keep the peace.

That someone is Chimera Squad. That someone is you.

Chimera Squad is a group of hero-level characters, some human, others not. They all have their unique abilities, personalities, and quirks. Axiom the Muton likes to eat what he catches, and loses his temper very easily. Blueblood the ex-cop has personal ties to City 31. Torque the Viper just wants a chance to tear loose and chew on Canadian bacon. None of it is in-depth; you learn about as much about these characters as you do the bulls of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct or any police procedural.

The characterization's strong, voice acting's good and the game isn't so hung up on its cinematics as to require full motion capture of every least facial twitch. There are radio bits and other snippets to keep you engaged with the city, and while City 31 doesn't have the same gravitas a city of its size in the real world would, it does feel solid and engaging.

Chimera Squad's special ops cops face off against former soldiers of the occupation, weapons smugglers and psychic psychotics, trying to keep a lid on the city's roiling pot of trouble. If things get too hot, the city will collapse and your mission will end.

Mechanically this is the same small scale squad tactical game you enjoyed when it was called XCOM 2. The maps aren't as huge, but you face the same strategic challenges: hide here, go there, run to higher ground for a better shot? Flank, and risk being flanked? Play it safe but miss out on an opportunity? These are the questions you'll have to answer on the battlefield, but be warned: the enemy's intelligent and very dangerous. Get it wrong, and you're cooked.

The big difference is in this game there is no permadeath. If a cop falls, they have to be rescued before they Bleed Out. Otherwise the game ends there; Chimera Squad can't afford to lose a single operative.

At least, that's the obvious big difference. Having played, I now know that the bigger difference by far is how the game treats its special use items.

In previous iterations when you gave your troopers a grenade, a medkit or a similar one-shot item, you knew that to use that item you needed to spend one of your trooper's action points. Each trooper only had two, so it became part of the game's economy. The opportunity cost of using an item meant you didn't have that action point to shoot or move.

That's gone. Using an item costs nothing. It's grenade Christmas, and you are Santa Boom-Boom. Spray medkits everywhere, charge up your troopers with whatever hot alien tech you bought at the Scavenger's Market. You can still move and shoot after flinging your kit around like a frenzied monkey. Throw a bubble grenade to tie down the trooper who otherwise would flank you, move up, and beat his buddy senseless with the butt of your shotgun.

That's the other big battlefield change: you can bring them in alive. I started using the Subdue maneuver early on because it suited my concept of how cops should behave: take them alive whenever possible. Sure, you get Intelligence rewards from the interrogation, but that wasn't why I did it. I figure, I'm playing a cop. Cops arrest people.

Then I noticed something. Subdue never fails. If you can get to the target you have a 100% chance to hit, which in RNG-happy XCOM is the Golden Snitch. Subdue doesn't use ammunition. Subdue can do as much as 5 points of damage under the right circumstances. Some characters like Cherub and Zephyr can do much more than that. Zephyr can crush multiple targets in one action, and Cherub can hit several targets with his shield bash wave. So given the option between taking a shot that might miss and uses ammunition, or Subdue, which never fails and costs nothing, I often pick Subdue. Perps vanish under a wall of beefy cop flesh, while off in the back Torque reads the Miranda warning - or whatever passes for Miranda in City 31.

Which is the game in a nutshell. Chimera Squad seems simple enough, but there's a lot going on under the hood. It allows you to play several different ways, but understanding all the systems feels like juggling frogs. I lost my first Ironman game to Anarchy after creaming the first two opposing factions, because I didn't understand all the ways I could crush Anarchy and keep the city moving. I didn't put Verge first in the Breach because I didn't understand how his Levitation ability helps me. I didn't appreciate Scars until I noticed my guys missing shots and moving slowly because they were covered in Scars.

You'll find yourself falling in love with one character, like Terminal, swearing you can't go out without her. Then you'll see how Zephyr's martial arts are game-winners, or how Cherub's shield block can save a tricky breach. There's enough variety in your heroes that you will want to see how they all perform, and find new ways to use their abilities. There's no reason to pick one squad and stick with that one squad forever and ever Amen.

As a game it's remarkably forgiving, technically as well as mechanically. My NUC's processor is underpowered for this and occasionally smells bunt toast, immediately crashing out. It often coincides with a lot of on-screen activity, like enemy reinforcements arriving on-scene. This is infrequent; it happens maybe once in a four hour session, and sometimes doesn't happen at all. Given my machine's not up to the game's spec, I'm pleased I get this level of functionality. There are one or two graphical glitches, but nothing to write home about. Frankly, I've seen top-end AAA titles with worse graphical issues.

So of course I'm recommending it, particularly in these times of wonder where staying in all day is the new normal. If you're not already mainlining Animal Crossing because you like noodling around with raccoon bankers, then now's the time to save the city with your band of misfit 5-0.

Enjoy!

The Cop Shop (Trail of Cthulhu / Night's Black Agents)

At some point the player characters are going to run afoul of the law, even if they are the law. The things they get up to - breaking and entering is often where it starts, but never where it stops - almost guarantees that, at some point, the local plods are going to want to have a quiet word. Or possibly a loud one, depending on the jurisdiction, but in either case you, as Keeper, need to have some idea what to do next.

First, let's set the scene. It doesn't matter what era the game's taking place in, for this purpose, as the scene's broadly the same. The characters have done something blatantly illegal, and evidence remains that might indicate who did it, and how. Moreover there's always the chance that the police know more than they ought about the occult aspects of the campaign, whether it's infested with bloodsuckers, or a mere bubble of fragile humanity lodged in a sea of unthinking chaos. Then what happens, and what ought the characters to do about it?

The Keeper needs to bear in mind that:

1. The cops don't know everything. Outside of television and Agatha Christie, there really isn't a master detective out there who, having taken only a cursory look at the crime scene, understands exactly how it was done and who did it. To the players, what happened may seem painfully obvious. To the first responders, it's a pool of blood, some expended rounds, and maybe some body parts or a corpse. 
2. Finding out what happened takes time. Investigating the scene, making drawings or taking photographs, collecting evidence, the canvass, interviews;all these things take hours, days, maybe even months before any kind of resolution is achieved.
3. There are always other suspects. That cult leader or necromancer the characters put down like a rabid dog undoubtedly had plenty of enemies, and the police are going to go through that list name by name. It only gets more complicated if anything screwy's on the scene, like a burial pit with a dozen or more other dead bodies in it, or physical evidence that suggests the decedent is someone, or thing, completely out of the ordinary.
4. There are always other cases. To the protagonists, this is the only crime in town, but to the cops this is maybe the third shooting tonight. It could just go cold, as so many cases do, or  something much more urgent - a terror threat, a spectacular burglary - may come up to distract the law.  

That said, if the characters make it easy for them, the cops might be knocking on their door sooner rather than later. Did they leave fingerprints everywhere? Or, worse yet, business cards? Were they seen talking with the decedent shortly before the incident? Did the dead person or crime scene have any kind of record of them, say in an appointments book, CCTV, or a collection of blackmail photographs? Then the characters ought to take care, or they'll find themselves in serious trouble.

But what happens when the police know more than the characters would like them to? Some fantasy novels - Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series, for instance - assume that there are organizations, or people, within the police who understand the spooky stuff, and who can take action against it. What happens then? 

A great deal will depend on the setting. Trail of Cthulhu posits two types of game, Purist, and Pulp. Bookhounds of London further divides into Arabesque, Technicolor, and Sordid. A Pulp or Technicolor game is probably best suited to a campaign setting in which the police have a Peter Grant style organization within it, dedicated to dealing with occult threats and capable of using arcane powers. In that kind of setting the police could be very useful allies, but even more dangerous enemies. If the Occult Sciences secret division of whatever passes for Military Intelligence decides that the player characters know too much, it has all the resources of a vengeful Government to bring to bear on them. At that point the characters had better leave the area as soon as they're able.

A Purist setting allows for more nuance. There probably are policemen who've seen too much; there may even be one or two who've begun putting the pieces together. But those are lone wolves, disbelieved - even mocked - by their fellow officers. Promotion doesn't come easily to them. In some situations - an Arabesque campaign, for instance - these policemen may have other resources to bring to bear. Imagine a setting in which the constable who always seemed to have that certain something about him, is actually a Knight of the City, protected by London itself; though he, oblivious, may not realize it, the City is helping him each day, keeping him from harm, helping him in his work. Or one in which, being a seventh son of a seventh son, he has the gift of second sight.

Sordid has its own complications. There may be police who know a little about the occult, or even the Mythos, but nothing's free in a Sordid world, and everyone's on the take. Expecting someone like that to be a faithful ally is expecting far too much. On the other hand, a cop with that kind of knowledge may throw their weight around, leaning on the characters when they need to, even blackmailing them if the opportunity arises. 

Night's Black Agents is a different situation. In those games, the police exist mainly as roadblocks or barriers, to be thrown in whenever Heat gets a little too much for the characters. Exciting chase scenes can be had, maybe even a gun battle or two, but the characters generally aren't expected to do much interacting with the local law on a face-to-face basis, particularly since the agents probably aren't going to be in one place long enough. Athens tonight, Paris tomorrow, and if they happen to leave two bodies behind in their travels, they're too far away from the scene to care.

In those situations, it may be worth the Keeper making a note of where the characters have been, in case they go back. Say they made a mess in Athens, went to Paris, had several more adventures, and then, after the Athens debacle has long since faded in the players' memories, they go back to Greece - Heraklion, why not - for another piece of the puzzle. The characters may have forgotten, but the Greek police won't, and old sins may come back to haunt the agents. Sure, they've changed covers since then, but it only takes one careless moment for Heat to suddenly skyrocket, as the cops realize the doofus they caught taking photographs of a military base is actually the same person involved in multiple homicides a year ago. 

Guilty Pleasures: Doll

There are times when all you want to do is curl up with a bad book. Not a blindingly awful one, not the kind you fling at the wall and scream obscenities at; I'm talking about the books you sometimes don't want to admit you enjoy. I re-read McBain's 87th Precinct thriller Doll today. It's one of that tribe.

I almost want to defend it, but I can't. It's formulaic, pulp, the characters are cardboard, the situation is at best odd, and none of that matters. I enjoyed it anyway. Mind you, it helps that it's the kind of novel that only takes an hour or two to read.

McBain is the best known pseudonym of Salvatore Lombino, a native New Yorker and former Navy man who found fame in the 50s as a writer of pulps. His 87th Precinct stories, set in the fictional city of Isola (New York with the serial numbers filed off), are the ones I enjoy the most. I know he's written other stuff, and I keep meaning to watch The Blackboard Jungle, but his police procedurals are the ones I find interesting. As a series, they start with a bang, and if they'd kept on in that vein I'd have called it one of the greatest police procedural collections going. Every little detail, from the vomit green paint on the precinct walls to the bitching of the bulls as they slowly work their way through another case, seems authentic. The characters, at least at the start, are fleshed out nicely, and have their own story arcs, something that many procedurals don't bother with. McBain was young then, and it shows.

As he gets older, the precinct goes to the dogs.

It's the little things that start to annoy. Steve Carella, probably McBain's fictionalized Lombino, is the first to get fuzzy around the edges. He starts as a tough detective with a deaf mute girlfriend, who he meets while on a case, and his ongoing relationship with her and his friends at the precinct holds the setting together. That's all well and good. He gets married, even better. Then there are kids, and the wife's husband gifts them with an Irish housekeeper, Fanny. Not so good. Though Fanny is on a contract, when the contract's up she declares she'll stay anyway. Even worse. McBain handwaves 'how can they afford a housekeeper, even one who doesn't want a salary', much the same way he handwaves the mansion that Steve Carella eventually moves into. It was bought cheap, apparently. I don't know who was running Internal Affairs, but they ought to have given Steve a closer look. Even cheap mansions cost more than a detective makes, and throughout the series neither Steve nor anyone else gets promoted. Suddenly the tough, plausible Italian cop is Dick Tracy, foiling master criminals by day and going home each night to his wife and twin kids, neither of whom seem to be in any hurry to grow up.

Did I say Dick Tracy? Perhaps it ought to have been Princess Peach. Steve has a nasty habit of getting shot / kidnapped / knocked on the head, and Doll kicks off when Carella's taken hostage by the killers of Tinka Sachs, a glamorous fashion model with a suspiciously empty bank account. The murderer's moll, a busty femme fatale, stuffs Steve full of heroin, trying to make him tell them how he almost caught them. Meanwhile his friends at the precinct think Steve's been murdered, and his buddy Bert Kling is on the verge of being kicked off the force because he wasn't watching Steve's back at the psychological moment. It's a race against time to rescue Steve before the murderer finally twigs that sticking around is a monumentally stupid idea, and keeping a cop hostage slightly more so.

It's pretty standard pulp, and if this was the only 87th Precinct novel I'd ever read, the plot wouldn't seem that formulaic to me, though I'd probably wonder whether this was written before or after The French Connection II. However it isn't the only one, and by now I'm starting to recognize the signs. There's Bert, unlucky in love, mourning over his dead girlfiend. He's Cupid's version of Dirty Harry; none of his relationships end well, and the murder of his latest is the reason why he's on edge and fighting with Steve when the story starts. There's Steve, the hero of the precinct, going down like a glass jaw champeen yet again, allowing all his buddies a chance to say how sorry they are he's dead. Not, and I think this would be more likely, a chance to start a betting pool on how Steve's going to get out of his fix this time. There's the murderer, dumb as a sackful of rocks, who does all the wrong things and then obligingly stays in Isola long enough for Steve's buddies to track him down and fill him full of lead. All the old favourites show up: Myer Myer, Artie Brown, Byrnes, Andy Parker. It's what would happen if someone gave the cast of As the World Turns guns and badges.

I suppose if you put a pistol to my head and demanded answers, I'd say I like Doll - and the other 87th Precinct novels - because they're soap operas. There's a reason why those things are popular. They don't demand much of your attention and entertain you just enough to keep you happy. They're not supposed to make you think. They're not supposed to be good for you. They're just fun.

That's good enough, on a lazy, sunny afternoon.