La Quimera was supposed to be released on Steam on April 25, 2025. Instead of the game, players saw a note from the developers stating that the game was delayed at the last minute. No reason was given for the postponement, and no new date was given for a future release. The press still received a code for the game with an embargo date attached, and while we're also wondering why the game was delayed, we are hoping that some serious time is being spent working on just about every aspect of this title.

La Quimera takes place in a slightly distant future. Due to a combination of environmental and economic crises, the world has devolved into micro-states, and wars are fought with PMCs instead of full-on national armies. You play a nameless PMC recruit for Palomo, a group out of the fictional country of Nuevo Caracas. After proving that you can do the job, you go on your first mission, which goes awry but sees you getting involved in the country's affairs more than you would've expected.

The setup for the game is fine, albeit well worn by now, but the execution of the story is terrible. None of the characters seem fleshed out; everyone is one-note. The majority of the cast is unbearable to the point where you wish you could slaughter everyone so you can stop hearing their insipid dialogue about their painful decisions. The only motivations that are made clear are those made by the PMC you joined. The story tries to balance being a futuristic political thriller with some supernatural elements, but it plays out like a very bad soap opera, down to cliches like a forbidden romance. You can skip every cut scene, and while that is highly advisable, the long button presses make it a painful process.

From a gameplay perspective, everything is familiar if you've played any first-person shooter in the last decade. You have a regenerative health system to manage, but you'll mostly rely on health stims to stay alive. You'll always carry two weapons alongside some grenades, and you can melee attack foes. You can use ziplines, and you can dash and jump, but somehow, you can't clamber onto ledges. You eventually get some things like a manual shield and the ability to scan for enemies in an area, but those items are limited use, and you'll often forget that you have them.

Despite the lack of new mechanics, everything with the gameplay feels very off. Your weapons are designated as good against humans or good against robots, and while you're encouraged to switch to handle different enemy types, you don't need to because they both behave the same. You will need to scrounge for ammo often, as you never seem to have enough, and loading can be a real pain because the animations are so long that you're left vulnerable for long periods of time. That's especially painful, since your character is about as strong as paper when it comes to bullet resiliency, and this even applies when you acquire an exosuit. Enemy encounters are frustrating, since everyone seems to be deadly accurate when shooting at you, and grenade throws by them always hit the mark. It's a big annoyance when everyone frequently throws grenades. The balance is so off that you'll want to play on the easiest difficulty level, and even then, the game remains annoying due to its tendency to throw enemies behind you or have explosions and gunfire go beyond cover, ensuring that you'll always get hit.

The attempts at making the gameplay feel diverse also feel fake. Once you get past the prologue, there are only three distinct levels in La Quimera. However, when going through the chapters, the game splits up every firefight into their own sections and passes those off as levels. With about half of those firefights taking place in what can be best described as monster closets, the act of doing a split like this feels like an egregious method of list padding. It also doesn't help that none of the environments feel diverse. Despite the promise of fighting in an office building and the jungle, each place is simply another set of war-torn ruins with a slightly different coat of paint.

The biggest knock against the title is that several aspects feel incomplete. You can purchase new weapons, but there's barely a reason to do so when your default layout is fine. Almost every single-story thread is left incomplete, as you don't know why visions keep happening or why any of the characters do what they do. It's almost as if everything is merely set up for a sequel that may or may not exist. Worst of all, beating the final level produces no end credits sequence, so there is no sense of resolution. What you're left with is a wholly unsatisfying romp through a game that takes three hours to beat because the difficulty level is so uneven.

One part of the game we did not get a chance to try was multiplayer. The game offers online multiplayer, so you can play missions with up to two other players, and you get the feeling that the game was originally tuned for a three-man fireteam with no tweaking for solo or duo players. While games are usually more fun with multiple players, it feels impossible for this title when you consider the scant number of stages available. Unless you want to unlock every last bit of gear, there's no reason to go through a stage multiple times.

Graphically, the game is mostly fine — at least initially. The character models look decent, but that breaks down when you notice how dead the eyes are for anyone who isn't important. The animations are also fine until you see characters warp around and have exaggerated mouth movements when speaking. The environments are OK until you notice that some particle effects devolve into large squares. The frame rate is good when using top-of-the line hardware — until it tanks for no apparent reason.

While the graphics have some issues here and there, the sound is awful all around. The effects are dull, with a good chunk of them not playing at all. Get to a critical health level, and don't be surprised to hear absolutely nothing, since the game defaults to total silence. Sometimes you'll die because you don't know that an explosion happened right next to you or because enemies came in from behind, since you can't hear that play. The music is barely there, so you'll never notice it beyond cut scenes. The voices are awful, as the delivery is often stilted with misplaced accents. Those voices all tend to overpower one another; people speak at the same time, and sometimes, the voices come from phantom sources. The voice of the protagonist is perhaps the worst of all. He always sounds disinterested, and his dialogue always plays at the lowest volume compared to everyone else.

Those hoping to give the game a go on the Steam Deck will find the experience to be uneven. While the game runs at the device's native 1280x800, the frame rate is low enough to make the game barely playable. You may hit around 30fps at times, but with all of the action and particle effects going on, you'll average around the 20fps instead, and the number gets even lower during cut scenes. This is with every graphical setting at its lowest, and using the Deck's built-in FSR doesn't improve the performance or visuals. Worse yet is the fact that the game drains the device's battery life, so you'll almost hit 90 minutes of game time on a full charge with the system fan going at full blast.

There's no getting around the fact that just about every aspect of La Quimera is bad. From the story to the gameplay to the presentation, there's barely anything that seems to work as expected. Even the game's short runtime is tarnished by the fact that it abruptly ends. Unless the game gets a major overhaul when it eventually gets released, steer clear of La Quimera and play almost any other first-person shooter instead.

Score: 2.5/10