XCOM®: Chimera Squad
Skip · Strategy · 2020
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $9.99.
- Length
- 21.3h
- Value
- $0.47/hr
- Reviews
- 71% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 56% over the last 30 days against 71% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7770, NVIDIA GeForce 650 or better, 18 GB of storage. Windows only.
XCOM: Chimera Squad delivers an all-new story and turn-based tactical combat experience in the XCOM universe.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2023 is where it bottomed out, at $2.99. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 60 in the 6 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 46 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 66 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 63 percent. Among the games that feel like it, XCOM: Enemy Unknown ($14.99, scores 86) beats it on value, while it beats Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ ($39.99, scores 9).
Players rate it 71 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 56 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 5 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written October 2024 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 36 percent of the 2,080 reviews written there were positive, against 71 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 21.3 hours. Doing everything runs 65, 3.0 times as long.
The drop-off
90% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
68 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Not really a big fan of it and probably not gonna try and finish it. I See the appeal and the idea is cool but I dont really think it was executed well tho. Also just not a big fan of the art direction in general and some of the new designs.
Game is very buggy, crashes randomly, and has odd stuttering when enemies take turns that might leave your game frozen for a dozen seconds at a time or when enemies move through your line of sight. The game also can hang for a moment and force you to wait while the enemy cycles through a taunt animation or something. Overall, 7/10 fun game to play through once, but I feel no urge to replay this again.
Chimera Squad tends to get quite a lot of negative comments for one simple reason : it has XCOM in the title. Like many others, I was initially hoping for an XCOM 3 here, but that was never the plan with this game. It's a spin off, with a smaller budget and it doesn't take itself too seriously. Once I realised that, I found this game to be an enjoyable little strategy diversion for a few days, and one which comes...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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XCOM®: Chimera Squad scores 32/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/882100/xcom-chimera-squadThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 14, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.