The Bureau: XCOM Declassified review

What is The Bureau: XCOM Declassified? 

Reviewed for Xbox 360 also available on PS3

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a predictable reaction to the successful reboot of XCOM Enemy Unknown in 2012. It takes that game’s alien invasion setting and elements of its strategy gameplay, and bungs them into a more conventional action game.

It’s what X-COM Enforcer did 12 years ago and, just like that game, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified doesn’t entirely work. But it could have been far worse.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified – Setting and Style

Rather than a strategy title like its father, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a third-person action game where each mission is some form of encounter during a US-wide alien invasion. You control a squad of troops, but do so from the perspective of a single commander on the battlefield, rather than a god-like figure abstracted from it, looking down from above. 

Keen to give The Bureau: XCOM Declassified its own style, the game owes as much to B-movie horror films of the 50s and 60s as XCOM Enemy Unknown. Its ‘vanilla’ alien characters are the greys of Area-51 cliché, its male leads wear sharp suits, tie pins and hats. And its female characters in power have to withstand the light derision of an unenlightened patriarchy.

It’s like Mad Men, with aliens. Sort of.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s setting is charming enough, but its story is poor. In many respects, this is a seriously incoherent game – a patchwork of styles and elements that fit together awkwardly.

For a game with a poor story, there exposition is laid on thick – there’s a lot to wade through. Levels are littered with criminally uninteresting notes from anonymous characters about the invasion. And when not on a mission, you spend an awful lot of time rambling around your anti-alien defence force’s base talking to the various uninteresting characters, or listening to dull audio recordings from people you care even less about.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s Earth is not one you’d feel too bad about being destroyed, were you not stuck on it. And, when a B-movie setting seems a perfect bed for referential humour, we were dismayed to find the Bureau an entirely humour-free zone.

The whole pulpy 60s premise is a great one, but the execution is faulty. And whoever wrote the thing appears to have little-to-no idea about how to pace a narrative.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified – Gameplay

Forgetting the finer elements of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified for a minute, a 60s setting makes a great backdrop for the action. Abandoned farms and ravaged little mid-America towns have much more personality than the grim and grey modern cityscapes we could have ended up with.

That the game is set across the Unites States means that the missions are somewhat atomised, but they all follow along the same lines.

You start each with up to three troopers. You always control agent William Carter and without taking control of your teammates into consideration, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified pootles along like a fairly standard cover-based shooter. Hide behind hay bales, shoot alien until he dies, repeat.

You can’t forget your team, though. Not only can you not generally survive without them, but they will certainly die without your help.

Once out of health, they fall to the floor like a baby tipped out of a pram. And if you don’t get to them in time to revive them, they die. For good.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified - Strategy

Entering the command mode slows down action massively, letting you make decisions without hopelessly watching your squad members die while doing so. You can tell them where to go, who to shoot, and what abilities to use.

You need to as well, because your fellow troopers are idiots. A wilful disregard for their own safety and a seeming inability to amble a few steps away from a grenade mean you need to micro-manage their movements to avoid them dying. And even then you’ll fail frequently. Given how many squaddies we got through it seemed almost comical that you can customise and name them when recruiting at your base.

What makes this an irritation rather than the workings of an intense battle system is that fighting feels clumsy a lot of the time. AI is pretty poor across the board, the workings of the cover system are occasionally laughably clunky and the difficulty level is occasionally poorly managed.

Still, there is fun to be had. As your character (and any troop members who don’t bleed out onto the grass) levels-up, you earn new abilities. Some are quasi-magical, making little sense within the relatively low-tech game world, but these are the best of the lot.

You can lift enemies into the air, making them helpless and so vulnerable that even your idiotic squad members will be able to hit them, or knock them over with a power blast – hints of the Mass Effect games are in evidence here.

The combat excels in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s minor missions - shorter alien encounters that add a pleasant punctuation between the game’s longer (often slightly laborious) story missions. The longer type often too clearly distils into a repetitive series of encounters, strung together by not all that much.

However, even this becomes less of an issue once you’re tuned into the rhythm of the game. Mastering The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a little like learning a broken instrument. You’ll spend a while angrily thinking “this bloody thing’s just broken” as you encounter the game’s many wonky bits. But when it clicks into place, there’s still much satisfaction to be had.

Should I buy The Bureau: XCOM Declassified?

After 10 hours or so of blasting and listening to your colleague’s dull ramblings, you’ll be done with The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. However, this isn’t a game you’d want to hang around with for a great deal longer.

It’s a curious, dysfunctional game that those who don’t play every AAA game under the sun should probably avoid. Its successes happen in spite of itself, but there are deliciously unhinged parts that remind of something like Earth Defense Force 2017 (even if The Bureau has nothing of that game’s sense of abandon).

Verdict

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is an odd action game that borrows style and gameplay elements from a host of sources, and doesn’t join them together particularly well. However, the battle system is eventually enjoyable, making it worth a look for alien obsessives who have already played the mounds of better games released this year – not that many, then.

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