Once a battle begins, allies and enemies take turns attacking, with the rotation order listed on the right-hand side of the screen. This is an automated initiative system that developers at Firaxis are calling “interleaved turns.” Once per round, players can use the Team Up action to push one character to the front of the line. This is opposed to the standard XCOM approach, which gives players a handful of moves before passing control to the enemy team.

Chimera Squad’s character-management system has fewer customization options than XCOM 2, but it allows players to strategically upgrade their agents’ skills and help them recover from critical injuries. Along with the training room, which takes characters out of commission for a few days at a time, there’s a standard item shop and a Scavenger Market filled with rare gadgets, but the latter isn’t always open. Players can also build new weapons and tools, including bipedal androids that will stand-in for soldiers who fall unconscious.

Firaxis

One of the best features of XCOM 2 was the ability to rename characters and customize their appearances. There were plenty of celebrity-themed fire teams, and players often added friends to their squads, a tactic that exacerbated the emotional punch of each in-game death. Renaming characters isn’t an option in Chimera Squad, since each agent has an established, unique skillset, a Firaxis spokesperson told Engadget.

Chimera Squad isn’t XCOM 3, but it’s a step in that direction. Firaxis didn’t offer any information about a fully-fledged follow-up to 2016’s XCOM 2, but a spokesperson said, “We remain committed to the XCOM franchise.”