La Quimera

The year is 2064. You are a nameless, hairless, personality-less, lawless, pointless, vapid, clueless recruit who joins a squad of private military consultants who are called out at a moment's notice to carry out deadly missions in the lawless zone just outside the future utopia of Nuevo Caracas. The world is a dangerous place in Metro 2033 defectors Reburn's acclaimed debut feature. Drones, robot dogs and artificial soldiers with perfect aim patrol the lush green, overgrown death zone and it's your job to keep you and your mates alive through one rescue mission after another.

At first glance, La Quimera looked like a modern mix of Killzone and Crysis but it doesn't take long to realise that the previews had us all fooled. This is more akin to Free Radical's reviled Haze than anything else, with typical Unreal 5 graphics and corridor-thin environments characterised by invisible walls galore. The enemies have been borrowed (in whole or in part, depending on which part of the game we're talking about) from Guerrilla Games' Horizon games and the gameplay really only revolves around two things - shooting robots and scavenging for ammo.

To sharpen the manoeuvre around which La Quimera is built and to sharpen the storytelling, dialogue and characters, the developers have reportedly enlisted the help of Drive/Valhalla Rising director Nicolas Winding Refn, which in retrospect feels almost bizarre. This is because the story is an outright display of stereotype-drenched, trope-based predictable boredom, which includes ridiculously shrill extremes as characters and dialogue that feels so forced and silly that I burst out laughing on many occasions. When a Latin American diplomat's daughter pinned between two enemy forces calls in to PMC Inc, asks for your help and when you arrive (via flying drone bus) screams "Ahh! I'm going to fuck you in every hole, you pajuo tragaleche puta madre fucks!" it's hilariously hard not to laugh your arse off. If it is the case that Nicolas Winding Refn helped with this dialogue, I sincerely hope he did it in the most ironic of ways.

The story in La Quimera is terrible. Downright miserable. Reburn has borrowed from Killzone, Crysis, Elysium and Haze and chosen to spice it up with as little real originality as possible. There's nothing here we haven't seen a thousand times before, there's no finesse, no characters that feel believable, human or successful and the way the story is allowed to take place through bursts of lousy cutscenes is reminiscent of 20 year old action games rather than something from 2025.

The action parts are equally lame, sadly. The weapon feel is so generic and so lacking in weight and recoil that many of the guns are more like pneumatic tools than powder kegs. Throwing grenades almost feels as if the developers never quite finalised the function, as a limp backhand sort of whisks the bombs away while the feeling of being an 'extremely deadly soldier' never materialises. It's not helped by the fact that the enemies are dumb and regardless of difficulty (there are four) always hit you square in the face with every shot - not unlike the hired henchmen in Kane & Lynch. It never feels as if the enemy soldiers or robots (the drones as well as the dogs) are equipped with some kind of artificial intelligence, but more as if they are set with magnetism, towards the player. They move towards you in a straight line unless they're in pre-set locations, and fire with a pinpoint accuracy that even in "Easy Mode" seems like one of the most frustrating things I've ever encountered.

However, La Quimera is not particularly difficult, it is mostly about moving all the time and shooting the hovering drone robots as soon as they appear. Trying to play defensively, backing up and shooting from a protected position is almost pointless as the enemies will always hit you regardless and their shots are often homing. Taking down hovering drones and galloping robot dogs isn't something I like either, especially when they're coming at you in droves and all behaving exactly the same.

In addition to these parts of a game that demonstrably doesn't work very well, I've encountered a huge amount of technical issues during my hours of testing with La Quimera. The game deleted my save file twice, initially, which of course caused a lot of annoyance, and has since failed to save where I saved - for a number of rounds, too. It has frozen several times and the amount of graphical glitches that cause things to render in low resolution or not at all, has also been quite substantial. It's true that today's big games are rarely released in perfect condition, but this is just too bad, even though I tested La Quimera on a brand new HP Omen 16 Max with a 5080 in it.

As much as I like Metro 2033 and as much as I wanted La Quimera to be a "new Crysis" or a "new Killzone", there's no getting away from the fact that in my world this is more like an asset dump in the Unreal engine, crammed with poor design choices, useless enemies, generic gameplay and a lousy story. In other words, you can skip this.