La Quimera PC – Early Access Impressions

This is not a review but Early Access Impressions

I’m no stranger to those “direct to video, streaming and dvd” style of movies and while I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a fan, friends and I have made a bit of a drinking game out of a lot of these. They often descend into chaotic, but very fun and entertaining nights, where we make a set of rules, and if any are triggered, we take a shot. La Quimera had strong B-grade FPS vibes from the start, that’s not to say it’s a bad thing, there’ve been many a game/movie that fit into those categories and genuinely surprise me in how good they are. Some might say that some of them even punch beyond their B-Grade roots and out perform even some A-Grade.

Sadly, this is not the case for La Quimera at the moment. For all its interesting settings, themes and gameplay. The game unfortunately fails to find a true identity, rife with bugs, repetitive gameplay, lack of coherent vision, average at best acting talent and terrible story. La Quimera manages to be both, laughably broken and frustratingly confusing at the same time.

At first glance, one could mistake La Quimera for another Call of Duty clone. Set in a South American dystopian, cyberpunk-y futuristic city called Nuevo Caracas. It’s got a drug cartel meets corporate big shot written all over it. The city itself might look like a technological marvel, but the world around it has gone to hell. During the 2030s and 2040s, several natural and man-made disasters devastated the world and reduced countries down to city states. Within their walls are warring corporations vying for power and territory while poverty wreaks havoc among the lesser fold. Beyond the city walls, is a vast and wild jungle. No longer home to just natural wildlife, but wild AI drones. Vicious and ready to kill anything that they come across.

You, a man down on his luck, join a failing PMC to earn a quick buck. And on your first mission with the Palomo PMC, get caught in a power struggle between two of these warring corporations. With stolen tech in hand, you’re all put in a tough position. Go bankrupt and disband, or accept a deal to become guinea pigs for the stolen tech. Tech that is revealed to be a new kind of neural netork device that promises to make you into a highly trained death machine compatible with the latest Exosuit technology. From here though it’s all downhill as you start having strange hallucinations and one botched job after another, ending in what can only be described as what I think an acid trip would look like and an ending so abrupt that it feels like an unfinished video suddenly reaching the end of polished content.

Gameplay

La Quimera plays like any other FPS game. Primary and secondary weapons, grenades and gadgets. Point, shoot, use gadgets, take cover, repeat until you complete your objective/level. Where this game differs from some others, is that there are two weapon types in the game. Energy and kinetic weapons. There are also two types of enemies you’ll encounter, those mechanical in nature and those of flesh and bone. One can already see a pattern here; energy weapons for drones and shielded soldiers, kinetic weapons for those unshielded fleshy bipeds. It’s a trope that isn’t unique to this game either. Plenty of games have multiple weapon types, in fact, it seems quite a lot of games are trying to tap into the potential of Cyberpunk themes. And who can blame them? It’s a cool concept and one I wish I would live long enough to see come to fruition in the real world someday.

You don’t start out with the exo-suit of course, but it doesn’t make a huge difference to the gameplay when you do get it anyway. Once you complete the tutorial mission, you’re loaded into the “Hub”. Really it’s just an apartment your PMC has set up for you, but it’s here where you’ll access the mission interface. Here you can invite friends to play along with you in the co-op campaign, buy and change your equipment and later your exosuit parts for better combat power, before selecting one of the linear missions or previously completed missions to jump in and play.

There’s not much to this “Hub” either, it’s basically just an apartment with a terminal in the middle to continue the game. There are some interactable objects around the room that provide some small humour or intrigue. But beyond this, it’s essentially a giant, if somewhat pretty, empty space, with which to progress the story. Or rather, lack there of one. The developers would have been better off simply sending you into the next mission with some sort of briefing serving as the initial loading screen. Instead we get a loading screen, into the Hub, only for us to immediately pick our next mission and then into another loading screen for the next mission. You earn currency from completing these “jobs” but in your first playthrough, you won’t have enough for even half of the better gear and the game is easy enough with just the basic kit, so it’s a system made redundant even before it’s available to use.

So far, the game is also very unstable, I had a crash within the first 30 minutes of playing. And graphical glitches up the whazoo -which I’ll go into later- made it hard to really connect with the game. And that’s not the only reason I struggled to connect with the game. The story is weak at best, it has some interesting ideas, I’ll give it that, but it fails to implement or capitalise on any of them. Instead being a confusing mess of ideas from different sci-fi and action games/series’ that make the game feel like it doesn’t really have an identity of it’s own or that it even knows what to do with these ideas. Around the second mission, you get a neural implant in you. It’s never really explained what it’s meant to actually do, but it’s supposed to just make you good at killing things. You hear snippets of failed experiments, people going crazy after receiving the implants and sure enough, not long you get yours. You start having nightmares, these eventually turn into full blown hallucinations and by the final mission, it straight up made me feel like I was on high on drugs or something. These sequences are so far removed from the story and the gameplay, that it literally feels like your character is going insane. Even your Palomo PMC chums don’t experience anything like it, there’s only one moment where your commander mentions you staring down an empty hallway and that’s the only recognition your team gives you about any of this. They don’t have their own moments, it’s like it simply doesn’t exist to them. They barely even acknowledge the people going crazy before your eyes even before you got your implant.

Graphics

Again and for not it’s bad, there’s really no two ways about it. As I mentioned before, the game crashed on me in the first 30 minutes. And I had several graphical glitches which killed what little immersion I was able to find in this game. Sprinting, jumping, mounting, all of these actions are janky. Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but generally when I’m mounting or climbing obstacles, I need to put what I have in my hands away and use both of them to vault over, climb up or crawl under my environment. The fact that something as basic and crucial as this isn’t even animated in the game is pretty poor showing if you ask me.

Textures can pop through other surfaces or they can disappear entirely as they fail to render. I tried playing with settings at both ends of the scale, lowest and highest. And the game still found ways to break itself. And what graphics are there, really feels like a mid to late era PS3 game. I’d even go further and say that a number of those older games hold up better than this newly released game. It’s very clear they took a lot of their inspiration for the exo-suits from the Crysis series. You even get a stealth module called camouflage, that renders you almost completely invisible.

The one gameplay gimmick I did enjoy, but made the game far too easy. Is that some weapons can penetrate way beyond logical amounts of walls and material to be able to kill enemies on the other side. This goes hand in hand with the other Crysis inspired gadget; the scanner. As it paints red silhouettes on your HUD so you can track and eliminate foes in real time through ungodly thick material. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and while I found it very helpful for tough situations, even found it initially very fun, the novelty quickly died and it became yet another thing that ruined my immersion with illogical abilities such as these.

There is a silver lining of sorts that I will give the developers credit for. The last mission in the game as it stands, has two themes that I think it nails visually, even despite the graphical glitches. The first area is a junkyard, jungle swamps, the space between the walls and the two warring city states. Lots of junk, scrap, decrepit buildings, overgrown with flora. In the dead of night and raining, the vibe here really shows the state of life outside the cities, where people fight over the smallest scraps. This leads into the next zone where slaves are being strapped to exosuits and the onboard AI is controlling them. It’s never really explained why human hosts are required for these suits, but it presents an interesting idea. These slaves live in slums, are pitted against each other for sport and used as free labour to maintain the wall between the two warring cities and the devastated jungle that the scavenger’s call home. It’s thematically an interesting level that I would have appreciated more time to flesh it out, or lore to explain more about it. The bone wall itself as a construct of urgency, desperation and fear is such an interesting concept that I wish the game did a better job of explaining.

Audio

Is, dare I say it, even worse than the graphics. While the design of some weapons, armor and missions have at least some redeeming qualities, even if they’re not totally original. The audio does not even have that.

The music is practically non-existent, and what is there, is so bland and boring it’s hardly even noticeable at all. The only parts that really had any noticeable music were some of the cutscenes and even they didn’t do anything to enhance the moments. There’s a recurring cutscene that plays when the player has their hallucinations and this sort of tribal hymn plays. But it neither adds or subtracts from the scene, it just kinda blends in with no real contribution to the moment. There’s very little rise or fall in any of the tracks to support moments of heightened action or tension in the game. So these moments that should be amped or hyped up, just fall really flat and dull.

But probably the most egregious thing would be the voice talent. The game would have been far better off with less voice dialogue and more written lore. Something like dossier pages or something, early in the game you put on a pair of high tech contact lenses that can scan people and provide info on them. This in hindsight is a neat feature and I would have liked it if they made a menu for this. Explaining people, enemies, locations etc. But instead we get dialogue so bad it’s cringeworthy. Not in a “so bad it’s funny way”, rather so cringey I found myself physically recoiling at some of the dialogue. It’s laced to the bone with colourful obscenities, and audio so poorly mixed, it’s hard to tell if it was real voice talent or some form of AI. The dialogue is just that robotic.

I don’t necessarily blame the voice actors, they may be inexperienced or it could just as easily be a result of the script itself. But the writing is bad and the voice talent can only do so much with what they have.

Final Thoughts?

La Quimera is in early access and has a long way to go because at the moment, it’s not looking good. The story doesn’t make a lot of sense, it goes from a straightforward rescue mission, to dangerous and experimental augmentations, to drugs like hallucinations and finally ending so abruptly that I had to do a double take just to make sure my game didn’t just glitch out and soft crash to the main menu. The game answered none of my questions at all, in fact it only left me with more.

It’s clear that La Quimera struggles to find its own identity. Taking cues from a lot of other games and movies and cobbling them together into something they hoped would come across as workable but instead just confused me as to what message the game was trying to present before me. The “Hub” is a useless feature that serves no purpose, it would simply have been far easier to have the game load a new mission after the previous one and present the lobby and armory options as part of the intro sequence instead of making it a whole level on its own. It comes across like they planned for collectables to feature in your hub, perhaps they also planned for multiplayer content and side missions to be accessed from the terminal but as it stands, the Hub just pans out play time and not for any good reason.

The combat is also really repetitive, there’s almost no other objectives apart from clearing a room, opening the door forward, rinse and repeat. There’s no incentive to go off the beaten track to collect audio recordings when the voice dialogue is so bad I can’t stand to listen to them. You can also collect money along the way, but you can only collect so much before your pockets are full, after that there’s no point at all to find more money. Reply the earliest mission to provide collectable currency once or twice and you have enough for the best exosuit and weapons. After that point, any replay is so easy there campaign can be speedrun in half the 4-5 hour original completion time. The limited options for upgrades means you’re basically stuck picking the objectively best exosuit and whatever weapons and gadgets that best suit your playstyle.

It’s incredibly hard to justify asking for over $40.00AUD for a game in such a state as La Quimera. I’ve played dozens of games that are not only cheaper, but are actual complete games with hours and hours of content to enjoy. I can’t even really give them the benefit of hiding behind the Early Access tag. The pricing seems absurd for a game in early access, the writing is cringe worthy, the acting is borderline abysmal and the content is loop repeat. It’s the perfect example of how great marketing and reveal trailers can bait you into playing a game that ultimately disappoints you. The trailers show the best bits and legitimately had me intrigued about what this game had to offer. Sadly, those best bits are all the game has to offer. I hope from here that the developers are able to add more tangible content that actually explains the premise of the story and clears up the confusion of what’s there. Unfinished best sums up my early access experience!

Game Details

Game Genre – First Person Shooter, Action
Developers – Reburn
Publishers – Reburn
Rating – MA
Year of Release – 2025
Platforms – PC (Steam)
Mode(s) of Play – Single player, Co-op

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