XCOM: Chimera Squad

Chimera Squad is a 2020 spin-off from XCOM 2, released at a low price. After the resistance won, humans and former aliens live together in City 31. You command a squad of agents of several species who keep order there, investigating three criminal factions while the city's unrest rises.

Every encounter starts with a breach: the squad picks entry points and bursts into a room, with bonuses or penalties for each door or window. Turns are interleaved, with friendly and enemy units acting in a mixed order rather than one side at a time. The agents are named characters with their own abilities and voices.

The breach and the interleaved turns make it play differently from every other XCOM game. Fights are short, sharp rooms rather than long maps, and the turn order shown on screen lets you stop an enemy before it acts. It is small, quick and cheap, and many players found that a relief.

Agents do not die permanently in the usual way: if one falls, the mission is failed and must be tried again. That removes much of what makes XCOM hurt, and the story is light.

Chimera Squad keeps the XCOM tactical layer, changes how turns are ordered, and replaces the squad of expendable soldiers with fixed characters. Where X-COM was about losing people, this is about a team. It is the XCOM to play if you want to see what changes when the cast cannot change.