Looking at the modern gaming market, the AAA story-centric shooter seems to have been left behind by the bigger developers and publishers. Rather, while they have begun focusing more on multiplayer titles with live-service elements, single-player and co-op shooters have largely been left to smaller teams.
And while we tend to get plenty of titles from indie studios that will often combine great shooter gameplay with interesting stories, ones with high production values have been seemingly just left to some studios, like id Software. However, Reburn – formerly known as 4A Games Ukraine – wants to bring in some of its expertise in the genre from games like Metro Exodus with a new narrative-focused single-player and co-op title: La Quimera.
“La Quimera is, at its core, a linear shooter that has an emphasis on story.”
Throughout my time with La Quimera, one of the key things that stood out to me was that the game could definitely have used some more time in the oven for the sake of polish. A lack of polish felt like something of a running theme throughout the game. This extended all the way from how the story is told through its cutscenes, audiologs, and dialogue, to the mission structure and pacing, and even things that affect minute-to-minute gameplay, like animations and weapon swapping.
Throughout the game, there are aspects that feel rather lacking, giving the indication that the goals of Reburn with La Quimera may have been a bit beyond the time and budget that the studio was able to put behind its development. This feels like a bit of a shame, since almost everything about La Quimera is quite compelling.
La Quimera is, at its core, a linear shooter that has an emphasis on story. This puts it in line with games like classic Halo, albeit without the combat sandbox that Bungie’s seminal franchise is famous for. Rather, the combat scenarios in La Quimera are more akin to corridor shooters, where you follow linear paths into arenas where you then have to take out a bunch of enemies, before yet again following the next linear path.
Now, this is by no means a bad thing; La Quimera is clearly more interested in telling its story while still offering serviceable gameplay, and in that regard, there is little to complain about. Exploration isn’t a big factor in the game, and ultimately, the level design does its job of offering some fun scenarios where you get to blow things up. There is little to complain about here.
“La Quimera is, at its core, a linear shooter that has an emphasis on story. “
The core combat in La Quimera works well enough; guns feel good to use, and coupled with some of the exosuit powers you start getting as you progress through the game, it becomes very easy to start feeling like an unstoppable murder machine. Mobility is simple too; while you don’t get fancy jets or double jumps, you do get a quick dodge, a tall jump, and the ability to completely ignore fall damage. Unfortunately, none of the levels feel like they were designed to take advantage of any of these mobility options, and even the grappling hook you get early on is seldom used outside of cutscenes every now and then.
The progression feels pretty well done too. Taking on missions and finding collectibles will earn you cash, which you can then spend between missions to unlock new weapons and other tools. While far from being a radical new method of player progression, the system in La Quimera works well thanks to its simplicity.
You can carry two weapons at any given time: a primary and a secondary. Each weapon is also further divided into what kind of ammo it uses, be it regular ballistic ammo, or energy ammo. While the former is good for general-purpose shooting, the latter becomes useful to take down enemies that have shields. In gameplay terms, you use ballistic weapons for enemies with red health bars, and energy weapons for enemies with blue health bars. Things can get slightly more complex with enemies that have an energy shield that has to be depleted before you switch to doing damage with your ballistic weapon.
Ultimately, this ammo-type system doesn’t really matter much in the long run. Once you unlock powerful-enough weapons, you don’t really have to care about switching between your primary or secondary weapons. Rather, that decision will often come down to how much ammo you have left in which weapon. I personally found myself sticking to a single weapon regardless of what kind of damage was expected of me, only switching to my secondary when I ran out of ammo.
“Ultimately, this ammo-type system doesn’t really matter much in the long run.”
La Quimera is plagued with issues, ranging from random dips in frame rate, to poorly-animated cutscenes. While I first believed the dips in frame rates might be because the game might be too heavy for my relatively beefy rig – a Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, and a Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU – other, busier parts of the game still playing out fine with the frame rate staying well over 60 indicates that there might be some deeper optimisation issues. The early-game base you get is especially problematic in this regard; there is little in the way of gameplay elements in the base, and yet the frame rate often struggles to maintain a stable 45 FPS. Generally speaking, the overall poor performance, along with animations that often glitch out, feel more symptomatic of the studio not getting enough time to further polish the title.
The game also loves to constantly steal control away from the player in order to play out a cutscene that often feels quite unnecessary. Even the first level of the game is full of this; while it is supposed to be a tutorial of sorts, you seldom get more than two or three minutes of play time before yet another cutscene plays out. Sure, this sounds like a rather minor complaint overall, but when you add it all up together, minor annoyances start turning into major issues.
One department where La Quimera definitely deserves praise is its world. Its vision of a dystopian cyberpunk Latin American country is incredibly interesting, especially since Latin America is seldom represented in games in general. While we don’t really get to explore too much of Nuevo Caracas and its surrounding areas, the world still feels like one I’d love to check out more with future titles. While the story isn’t quite as good as it could have been considering the setting, some of the more mystical aspects also tended to add quite a bit of flavour to what is already shaping out to be an incredibly interesting setting.
“Its vision of a dystopian cyberpunk Latin American country is incredibly interesting”
Speaking of the story, the premise is quite interesting. You are a fresh recruit in a PMC (private military company), Paloma, that is constantly on the brink of bankruptcy. Luckily for you, your very first real mission puts the PMC in an awkward situation between the members of the upper class of Nuevo Caracas, a shady corporation that is not above partaking in unethical human experimentation for the purposes of war profiteering, as well as other PMCs that are trying to make a name for themselves. While the overall setup for the story is quite interesting, especially from the second mission onwards, the story feels quite poorly paced overall. Things often move along at what feels like the speed of light, and aside the time you get between missions, major plot beats rarely ever get the chance to breathe.
How the story is told also feels quite awkward. While there are a lot of cutscenes in La Quimera, they all tend to be quite poorly animated, and sometimes, even have incredibly weird-looking characters that tend to veer off into the uncanny valley. Dialog lip syncing is also terrible, with characters exaggerating the lip movements that one would otherwise expect from the words they are trying to say, and the game will happily play dialog from different characters over each other at the same time without caring about what is important plot information and what is just background banter between two unnamed NPCs.
Ultimately, La Quimera feels like a game that may have been too ambitious for the time that Reburn had to make it. Whether played solo or in co-op, La Quimera delivers the same story-driven, combat-focused experience.While there is a decent enough foundation underneath all of the problems that we could get a good game eventually, in its current state, the fact that La Quimera doesn’t overstay its welcome thanks to its short campaign (roughly 5 hours) is a good thing. The host of quality issues throughout the title would have made it quite difficult to recommend the game, were it not for its interesting world, serviceable gameplay, and short runtime.
This game was reviewed on PC.
