When news broke back in February that the Ukrainian branch of 4A Games was breaking away from the Metro universe and rebranding, I was intrigued.Metro Exodusis one of my favorite games of all time, and the Kyiv branch was instrumental to its success.
La Quimera was supposed to be a big departure from the grim nuclear wastelands of Metro, which meant a world of possibilities. I was hoping thatReburn, as the company is now known, would be able to make good on these.
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The new game is set in 2064, ina world where nations as we know it collapsed and gave way to city-states and companies that fight for resourcesusing private military companies.
Having grown up in Colombia, the setting of La Quimera felt familiar, considering that it kicks off in a Ukrainian interpretation of a future dysfunctional Venezuela.
A False Start
For the most part, although it is a valiant debut effort for Reburn, La Quimera misses the mark. It’s impossible to talk about the release of the game without mentioningits abortive launchthough.
La Quimera was supposed to come out on April 25th, butReburn announced thegame would be delayedindefinitelyas soon asthe first media reviews went up. I was preparing my own review of the game at the time, but decided to put it on hold — after all, if the version of La Quimera you’ll get is not the one that I played, then my early review wouldn’t mean much.
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Given the scale of issues I had with the game, I was hoping Reburn would keep it in the oven for a couple more months. To say I was surprised that it launched less than three weeks after the postponement announcement is an understatement.
As a private military contractor,your work routine involves picking up contracts at the terminal, then fulfilling them to get rewards.You can use your earnings to unlock new weapons and upgrades. It’s a cool core idea, but one that is not fully realized in La Quimera.
The contracts page is really just a “select level” screen in disguise, allowing you to replay earlier levels at different difficulties to earn some more coin.
Each contract is fully scripted, which is a blessing and a curse.The first time you play through it feels cool, with plenty of unique set pieces that work for the most part, but there’s next to zero replayability.
I only got to experience the game alone, but you can team up with a couple of buddies in La Quimera.The levels feel fairly cramped even as a solo player though, so it’s difficult to imagine how a full squad would fare.
As seductive as the game’s premise may initially seem, the entire plot feels like a bit of a blur. The game ends almost as quickly as it started, which makes La Quimera feel like a bit of a proof of concept rather than a full game.
Bot-Bashing Bonanza
Fighting in La Quimera is divided between humans and robots. The former are fairly straightforward if you’ve played any FPS before: people made of flesh and bone just like you, occasionally with a little bit of armor to spice things up.
While humans play out fairly similarly, apart from different specializations, the robots are a whole new ball game.
You gettiny robots, big robots, flying robots, jumping robots, and a couple of boss-like ones that will test your patience.
I enjoyed how La Quimera mixed up enemy types, often in the same engagement, but that was frequently undone by the ammunition system.
The weapons in the game come in electromagnetic and standard bullet flavors. EM rounds stun robots and deal heavy damage to them, but take three to five shots to take a human down. As you’ve probably guessed, bullets kill your fellow humans quickly, but are underwhelming against clankers.
I quickly grew frustrated during my playthrough of La Quimera becausealmost every combat sequence mixed in humans and bots, but to change ammunition you need to swap weapons. Jumping between primary and secondary every five seconds gets old extremely fast.
The armory in La Quimera is easily the standout feature of the game. The near-futuristic setting allowed Reburn to get creative with the guns, while leaning on real-world weapons for inspiration.
Underneath all of each decked out futuristic gun is a familiar face, like the AK-203 or an AR-15-inspired platform. The fact that we’re fighting mercenary wars in 2064 with slightly modified Kalashnikovs is prophetic.
There’s not much in the way of weapon customization in La Quimera, but that never felt like a problem considering how well-designed and balanced most of the guns are.
Things are different once you get into your exoskeleton.You’re able to mix and match the helmet, torso, arms, and legs of your second skin, and it was nice to see how these changes had tangible effects on my playstyle. The compact level design of La Quimera didn’t always allow that to shine through.
The levels in La Quimera have that run-and-gun,linear design that I lovewhen done well, and that was the case sometimes. Shooting my way out of the corporate headquarters was extremely memorable because of how well-balanced the entire affair was.
Most missions are not exactly there, though, andit gets easy to spot who’s the stepchild in the level design phase.
The fact that you have rather limited health and ammunition plays well into the better levels. Feeling exasperated when running out of bullets and having to duke it out against humans with the EM gun made me rethink my life choices mag-dumping earlier in the level, and the scarce medkits make every use a major decision.
A Beautiful World With Strange People
I have mixed feelings about the visuals of La Quimera.Parts of the game look absolutely gorgeous, particularly the maps, their indoor sections, and the weapon models.However, some of the character models pulled me out of the fantasy far too often.
The flash hider on your AK-203 will have every little groove modeled to perfection, then you look up and someone is giving you that beautiful PlayStation 3 glare. Just don’t make eye contact, you say to yourself, and it’ll be fine.
The artistic decisions for La Quimera are sound, especially in its depiction of Nuevo Caracas (which should be Nueva Caracas, but more on that later). Your own little apartment at your PMC is a delightful mix of South American slum and hi-tech.
Red dilapidated hollow bricks and dirty tile walls are instantly recognizable if you’ve spent any time in a metropolitan area in the region, as are the scattered plastic buckets, or the stove hooked straight to the LPG bottle. It awakened fond memories of asking “do you smell gas too or am I crazy?” at least once a month.
One of my biggest qualms with the artistic execution is L.U.C.I.By her own words, an “anthropomorphic visualization of the combat interface”, she waddles about your dwelling, feeding you unnecessary remarks with an aggressively chirpy tone.
The holographic model is nothing short of jarring, and though it’s clear this is a play on both Cortana (Halo) and Joi (Blade Runner 2077), it just doesn’t work. A big part of that is because L.U.C.I. does not have a particularly captivating personality like the combat interface. If I find myself vaguely annoyed by her in combat, why would that change at home?
Nails On Chalkboard
Let’s start with the more decent parts, because the audio is where most of the issues pop up for me. The soundtrack is serviceable, if a little unremarkable, but that’s a matter of taste to some extent.
Weapons have some punch to their sound, but fall short of other contemporary games like compatriotSTALKER 2. The audio cues from the robots as they moved about trying to kill me in creative ways were well-executed, and helped keep track of the hectic battlefield.
Now, let’s talk voice acting for a moment. I’ll acknowledge that I’m picky about that, but La Quimera pushes it well beyond the boundaries of what’s acceptable.
This is a game set in Venezuela, with most characters being local. Which is why, of course, most voice actors are… Ukrainian.
The main NPCs chat in English with a weird put-on accent that doesn’t feel vaguely Venezuelan, or Spanish-speaking at all. The writing is quite rough around the edges, which doesn’t help their cause.
Where La Quimera really drops the ball is during combat sequences. You see, I know how a Ukrainian speaking broken Spanish sounds because of my parents. If you’re unfamiliar with that, just boot up La Quimera and get into a fight with humans.
Many lines come across rough and with translation issues, and it becomes abundantly clear that most of the actors do not actually speak Spanish but are working off of transliterations. It doesn’t help that you’re able to recognize the voices of the actors from other popular Ukrainian games if you play in Ukrainian or Russian.
I understand wanting to work with familiar faces, but sometimes you have to step out of that comfort zone for the sake of the game, otherwise you end up with whatever this is.
Private Military Confusion
Not to sound too dramatic or anything, but reviewing a game like La Quimera makes me feel a little bad. There are plenty of games which are phoned in and soulless, especially by AAA studios that care only about shareholder profit over artistry, but this is just not the case.
Every little bit of La Quimera feels deliberate, and you can see how much effort the team at Reburn poured into the game.Sadly, it’s just not enough to make it work.
Many elements in La Quimera are actually quite great, but most suffer fromawkward execution or design choicesthat limit their effect on making it a good game.
Only those inside Reburn have the exact reasons why that is, but it’s not hard to imagine that an ambitious debut title from a studio that’s working under daily Russian air raids will have some teething issues.
Closing Comments:
La Quimera would have benefitted from a few more months in the oven to smooth out some of the issues I found during my playthrough, but it also has a solid technical base that it could build on. The weapons, setting and world are outstanding, and while the combat feels like a chore in a lot of levels, it’s nothing that a balancing pass cannot fix in future updates. I don’t know what Reburn’s plans for the game in the future are, and while I can understand if they are ready to move onto the next project, it would be great to capitalize a little more on the strong points of La Quimera. New levels that make the story not feel as aggressively short would go a long way toward making it feel like a fully realized game. For now, this project has given us a taste of what Reburn is capable of, and I’m waiting for the company’s future endeavors to incorporate lessons learned from La Quimera’s failings. Hopefully, by then we won’t have to factor a war into the development process.
