The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

Considering, that it's not a canon story, it's pretty solid alternative story within XCOM lore. Cool visual style of 60's America merged with alien buildings.
I had fun playing it and I'll definitely replay it someday

Story is weak.
Spoiler: Interrogation of an infiltrator is so pathetic, he changes opinion in 3 sentences from "Mosaic will crush you" to literally "omg you have freedom, my people want to have freedom from Mosaic too".
Such a disappointment.

Woof. I don't know why they did this to XCOM, but it didn't deserve it. Only play this if you're into grey-brown-em-ups or if you're a curious masochist.

It's a really different take on xcom but i enjoyed my time and liked the old aesthetic.

I know it's largely forgotten amongest the XCOM fanbase but i dunno i still very much find it's style of gameplay enjoyable and fun but i guess that's largely because i enjoy having control over my actions instead of relying on rng.

Not to say the other titles are bad for that, i'm just less interested in them because of that.

Even if we don't get another XCOM like it i'm hoping to find more games that take this games ideas and improve upon them.

peak game top 5 all time argue with my dick

It was very enjoyable after the first intro alone, may i have suggest give those games a try?
Maybe, but if you really wanna play the third-person shooter RPG set in 1960's by a alien invasion trying to kill you.
That all means go for it! Kinda.
7.1/10

Still a fun and Casual X-com game experience. loved the lore and graphics, game play was okay. If you enjoy the lore side of games, a must get when on sale.

4/5 star

good game probably my favorite xcom

This game takes the tactical, high-stakes gameplay of XCOM and throws it into a very standard third-person cover shooter with squad commands. The result? A game that isn’t terrible, but also doesn’t stand out in any way.

The biggest issue is how dated and generic the gameplay feels. If you’ve played any cover-based shooter from the late 2000s to early 2010s (Mass Effect, Gears of War, etc.), you’ve played this. The shooting is serviceable but lacks impact, and the squad mechanics, while functional, never feel as deep or rewarding as XCOM’s turn-based strategy. The AI is also spotty—both for allies and enemies—making some encounters feel more frustrating than challenging.

That said, the game’s story and setting are decent. The Cold War-era alien invasion backdrop is a cool concept, and there’s an effort to blend noir and sci-fi that gives it some personality. The narrative has some interesting moments, even if it doesn’t fully stick the landing. The problem is that the actual gameplay rarely matches the intrigue of the premise.

Overall, The Bureau is a very by-the-numbers third-person shooter with a bit of XCOM flavor. If you’re a hardcore fan of the franchise, it’s an interesting curiosity, but don’t expect anything close to the depth or replayability of the main series.
5/10 (Average)

10/10
The characters' premise fits my needs of perspective.
This might not mean anything, and I apologize if this isn't misleading.
I don't leave bad reviews, all efforts are a perfect score.

Chest-high wall third person shooter. Difficulty only gives enemies more HP and damage, which sucks when the frequent boss fights come around early game. Bonus points for skippable cut scenes and dialogue.
Good for turning your brain off.

They tried making it a realtime strategy 3rd person shooter copying out of X-com - enemy unknown, but it failed. The feeling isnt there at all.

Could be better but i love XCOM, and this game is good 6.5/10

It crashed on the final mission but i fixed it, good gameplay but they could have deliver it more.

GG

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Really bad dialogue. I thought I'd be able to ignore it and just enjoy the gameplay, but there are big sections of dialogue where the characters are rude to their coworkers and allies for no reason. They're not rude in a funny or entertaining way, just randomly mean.

World and story is decent, but the gameplay is just boring and dated now.

Is fun game

It's not a bad game. The story is set in an alternate timeline to the mainline games, and you get to experience the conflict from another perspective. Too bad we don't see all the enemy types, and the forced squad management is more annoying than helpful, but it's not a complete disaster.

Do note, that there are technical issues with this game on modern hardware: PhysX tanks your performance even when it works, high frame rates will make you stumble on level geometry, some triggers may fail to trigger, so you'd stuck and will have to restart from a checkpoint.

it took me like 10 years to get to this game and I don't regret I did. That adds up nicely to XCOM atmosphere and made me a little nostalgic of the times I fist time played Enemy Unknown

I'm still really like it. Underrated gem.

solid 6/10 game wouldnt play again

One of the best games of all time. The story, the characters, the atmosphere. Amazing. But I can't really recommend this on PC. I beat it on PS3 and got all the achievements but on here... you have to set your game to German language the first time you launch. And then it crashed again 3 minutes in.

BETRAYAL! - Wait no. This isn't that bad

This game was never going to be a runaway success, It’s design as a tactical action shooter left it firmly in the shadow of the unreleased X-com: Alliance. An FPS Squad shooter slated for 2001. But releasing this near simultaneously with Enemy Unknown was a detrimental mistake that buried this game.
Which is a shame, because its not bad- despite a few questionable design choices.

This doesn't make the best first impression

Ahem. If you check out the steam discussions many will complain the AI is underwhelming, which it half-true. The companions are lobotomised, until you get them to level 5. Then they become responsive and more importantly have enough health to not immediately keel over & die to every encounter.
Any orders you direct to your squad are immediately carried out, they even change texture to illustrate they’re following your commands. Their actions are queued and each class has their own set of unique abilities all designed to synergise.
Support casts Disrupt, you use the ability levitate, then Recon uses Critical strike.
Congrats!
You just killed everything except for a Muton or Sectopod. If you time it right.

Commands are done through a proto Fallout 4 VATS system where time slows down, and there is even a mass effect dialogue wheel for interacting with characters. It’s neat.

The squad is limited just to three which sucks since the player counts as a unit.
Mind control is a late game action which really adds tactical variety. Deployable drones, Turrets and Silacoid’s all work surprisingly well.
The combat is satisfying once you level up your roster of companions. Don’t worry about the permadeath, you can simultaneously send new recruits off to do automated missions as you play which levels them up.
A Total party kill is easily replaceable with no disadvantage, just customise the new squad to look like the old.
By the mid game I didn’t need to micromanage my companions anymore, they could tank most things, the AI automatically avoids grenades to the point they’ll never be hit. It’s nice… You just have to get them to level 5 because the starting health pool and their lack of abilities really screws with the AI’s capability to dynamically react.
These soldiers were lobotomised in the early game, they do get better.

The difficulty is meaningless

You will never fight more than two mutons until the final level, you will only encounter a maximum of two Sectopod’s, only a handful of optional side missions have Sectoid’s swam you on mass and the Outsiders and all their variants can be managed systematically. Difficulty has no bearing on the mechanics.
It just nerfs your abilities and turns everything into a bullet sponge if you raise it.
Whilst I completed it on Commander difficulty, I did replay a little bit on novice and the early game was more enjoyable. The spawns didn’t change, only the enemie’s health.
Call me old fashioned but a Muton shouldn’t have more health than a Sectopod, quadrupedal tank. But on commander oh boy they do.
There is no intended difficulty unlike in classic X-com or Enemy unknown. Play around with it.
Find a comfortable balance between your damage output and the enemy’s strength.

It has the spirit of X-Com

It's no secret that a bunch of X-Com fans rejected Two & Chimera Squad because it betrayed the core themes of the franchise.
The indomitable human spirit adapting and overcoming Alien, Lovecraftian and interdimensional threats. A rag tag group of rainbow resistance warriors isn’t X-com.
The idea that we’re in waters so uncharted that despite have an entire facility, bureau, military or even a full-on megacity at your disposal. And you’re still on the backfoot is X-Com. It’s the best of the best having to rise beyond their limitations to save humanity. It shouldn’t be a plucky underdog story.
It’s a war of attrition between the best & brightest and the horrors of the uknown.

The Bureau, X-Com declassified gets this. It understands the necessity of having an established facility which is impressive considering there is zero research or base management.

Everyone around you is a highly trained professional from various background selected to defend humanity. It’s X-Com with a little more personality and a stronger than average narrative.
Is it a good narrative?
Eh, it has major pacing issues. There are only 7 mainline and 7 optional missions. But it doesn’t playout as predictably as the classics or Enemy Unknown does, someone was having fun writing this and whilst its brevity takes away from the intended emotional impact…
It has more going on than most 7th gen shooters.

The none existent technical hic-ups

A lot of people state this game doesn’t run on windows 11.
I have the dreaded 24H2 build and it runs perfectly. First time booting the game did take several minutes but every start up afterwards was immediate.
I’m running an Integrated RTX 3050 4gb, hardly cutting edge stuff for the 2020’s and the game ran with out a single crash.
The cutscenes are pre-recorded in 720p with some terrible compression. It looks bad.

There is full controller support right out of the box, plays well with my 3rd party Xbox One controller. No issues.
The texture work is surprisingly great, you can read almost all the chalkboards, posters and graffiti present in the environments. It adds to the conspiracy latent atmosphere the game is striving for.

It’s well worth it when on a sale

For $2 of $5 it’s a fun little distraction, it’s hardly the betrayal Spoony [Godspeed my sweet prince, find the help you need] led me to believe it was back in 2012.
It’s far from the worst entry in the franchise.
Sure, if Alliance was playable this would be a redundant entry (Unless you really liked the cold war aesthetic) but as some one who brought this after sinking 150+ hours into Enemy within in the space of two weeks, yeah this has the X-Com spirit I yearn for.

10-15 Hours of gameplay, if you get the DLC then I could see 20 at a push. There is no new game plus or randomly generated missions everything in this game was purposely designed which is something of a lost art now-a-days.

I will add the marketing for this game did it no favours, like seriously. This isn’t a bad game it’s just that everything surrounding it, including its marketing absolutely betrayed it. Heh. I guess there was betrayal after all.

Game is great! If only I could get pass selecting a squad?

I met one of the writers of this game at a festival, and said I quite liked it. "But," he protested, "that's the *bad* XCOM!"

Firstly make sure to turn off the PhysX settings as they cause lots of crashes, once I disabled those it was smooth sailing,

I want to put down my thoughts on the game while I'm still fresh from finishing so sorry if this comes across as a little disjointed. I did really enjoy playing the game, it's sort of a Mass Effect style with more emphasis on abilities and fine control of your squad mates. But beware the first two missions are by far the games weakest as you get used to the controls and you start getting enough abilities to reliably deal with situations. There's some good weapon variety and most weapons have some sort of niche throughout the game and enemy variety is even better though sadly the more specialist ones are rather rare to fight, though with good reason as they easily affect the entire firefight with their abilities.

There's about 7 main missions each of which has decent length with a single exception that have around 100 enemies and about an equal number of side missions of much shorter duration but still decent with I'd say an average of 40-50 enemies.

Avoiding spoilers, story wise there's a good plot there but I have to wonder how many problems there were in development as I think some bits of exposition got forgotten about and are later referred back to regularly. There are multiple endings and your choices are sometimes called back to but the deciding decision is much later on and think very carefully on it unlike me who got the worst one by seeing the good in someone. Ending does feel rather rushed though. I just feel like the games story would of went better with a little bit more buildup in the beginning or a better sense of how long events have been happening to give a better sense of scale or urgency.

Game does not launch, gets stuck "updating executable" then just stops. Used to be decent but looks like it has been abandoned now

2K is trash, always has been with few exceptions. This game is no longer playable, even though everything on my end is up-to-date. Marin was closed, so the responsibility falls on the publisher.

Nope

Crashed all the time til I disabled Phys X. And yes people are having issues with it not running. Set the Executable as administrator and just keep hitting play til it goes, it sucks but that's the only way to play. Wish I could give a neutral review but, there's too many issues for it to be enjoyable. Thanks 2k

love it. wonderful fulfilling, masculine experience bro's

I was drawn into this game when I first saw the alpha and beta teaser trailers in 2008. I was intrigued by the setting, the Cold War, and how it was like a mix of Bioshock and Xcom. When the game finally released and I had played through it in its entirety, I was left disappointed. Unresolved plot elements, story segments that felt rushed and unfinished. It definitely wasn't the Bioshock/Xcom mashup that I had first seen. I really didn't like that fact that I had to micromanage my team in combat, let alone plan for one thing in real time just to have the enemy do something entirely different. I feel Brothers in Arms executed this a little better as the mix of having to plan, micromanage my team, AND have to fight left me overwhelmed.
To be honest, I really wanted to like this game. One of my turn offs to the regular xcom games was the strategic elements. I thought this one-off was going to try something new and different. The live-action trailers definitely had me hooked. This is just me though. You'll have to try it out for yourself.

its basically an xcom themed mass effect game. as long as youre clear on what to expect, it's a good game. keep in mind it's 11 years old.

Game does not run on Windows 10, simply does not start, no error or anything.

Like all older 2K games, it is currently unplayable ever since the 2k launcher was removed. Will change review when its fixed!

they try to make real-time 3rd person shooter and keep tactical control of a team like in "regular" XCOM. It just does not work.
if the time would pause for the tactical choices (like in other games) it could work. It does not, it just slows down. it is very difficult to do the tactical combat since there is no zoom out overview. it is necessary to run around in 3rd person view to recon the battlefield with time running, slowly at best, but running. And people shooting at you.
does not work for me. poor 3rd person shooter and even worse tactical combat. cool setting though.

Wow, this game is amazing. I'm hooked!
XCOM Doesn't disappoint!!!!! Major soft disclosure (super on the nose)

I enjoyed this FPS take on the XCOM world. It could have benefited from more of the back end research/strategy that makes xcom so fun but overall a really decent entry into the XCOM world.

decent game, cool story. ties in well to the turn based games

For anyone wondering, this game still works on a modern PC.

The game is pretty fantastic, if you like Men In Black, games set in old fashioned times. Excellent world building and story.
Don't compare it to XCOM, it's not even the same game type.

EDIT: I lied, it can still crash a fair amount for an old game. But at least it runs. It's a valuable game to experience though

Hoppin' mad Bureau owls,
Hootin' 'bout interstellar immigration.

Fun game and would be a thumbs up to get on sale, but does not work on modern PC's and there are no clear fixes. Game simply won't start.

like xcom frist person shooter. maybe if i thought i was getting a frist person shooter. but wtf this isnt even close 2 a xcom game,
action not planning no thinking just shootum uppick up bullets like old school zombie game

This is a dated but somewhat fun 3rd person shooter. The 1960s alien invasion aesthetic is always fun, however, this is definitely a failed attempt at capitalizing on XCOMs name.

I enjoyed the story enough and the missions were very straight forward but there were enough abilities with the squad mates that it made the combat fun.

Get this on a sale or not at all.

I used to LOVE this game. The 60's vibe with Aliens is so cool!
Wish my PC would run it in 2024 though!
If you can play it, it's a great game!

This reminded me of a mix of Gears of War (with the cover system) and LA Noire (setting) with some XCOM lore thrown in. I don't think this game is cannon, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It's fun and I'd recommend catching it on sale.