The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Review – Retconning a Personality

What is The Bureau? It's XCOM. It's a third-person shooter. It's tactical strategy. It literally contains role playing. Is Mass Effect but with squadmates who are not self-sufficient, channeled through scifi television, and channeled again through 1960s media in general.

It is not for everyone. Some people don't like tactical shooters. Some people don't enjoy depictions of '60s character archetypes. Some people don't like XCOM games that aren't exactly like other XCOM games. If you count yourself among any of those groups of "some people," you may not like The Bureau. That's totally cool.

But if you find yourself in that specific subculture of people who are down with what The Bureau is doing, as I did, then you'll find much joy here.

The Bureau is nominally the story of a short-tempered man named William/Will Carter who wears a fedora and looks like Michael Fassbender, and who thanks to a close encounter with a foreign object can self-heal and think inhumanly quickly. He is caught up in an alien invasion of the United States in 1962, and is recruited into a secret organization called, duh duh duh, XCOM, which was built to counter the seemingly inevitable advances of the Soviet Union but turned out to be pretty good for dealing with True Outsiders. You know, extraterrestrials.

XCOM is lead by the Bill McNamara-esque Faulke, who loves to argue with Agent Weaver, who will not let her insight be ignored, damn it. Meanwhile, we've also got a scientist with real personality, rather than the traditional video game moron scientist personality. Said scientist is voiced by Alan Dale, who it turns out is awesome at not being menacing. Who knew?

When it's time to fight, you'll take a couple bros with you. These bros, despite coming from the recruit-an-NPC XCOM mold, are characters. They'll talk to you during missions, for example, even outside of battle. So when Carter observes that the aliens are poisoning the water, a bro might comment that he's sticking to bourbon from now on.

Combat itself is a pretty interesting animal, in that it's an attempt to implement XCOM EU-style scenarios in which you have control from the ground. The controls seem wonky at first, but that's more due to them being unfamiliar than crap. Plus, how many folks eschewed micromanaging your squad abilities in Mass Effect because it slowed the pace of battle significantly? That wasn't a flaw in the game, just a thing that clashed with some players' preferences, and BioWare accounted for that.

But The Bureau's doesn't account for that preference. Sorry. These fights tend to exist on a pretty large scale, and you can't beat them without micromanaging, as your squad is not going to use their abilities if you don't tell them to. And while “micromanagement” might be an unappealing term to be used in association with an action game, you should relish the ability to slow time to a crawl in order to assess your situation and issue the commands that will dictate whether you live or die.

The result is challenging and tense and really exciting, with the inclusion of class abilities like auto-turrets and air strikes and combat drones putting The Bureau's combat on a different level from most tactical shooters. I've long grown impatient with samey video game combat we're fed most of the time, but the sight of an elite muton in The Bureau just made me salivate. And you don't want to know what my reaction to two elite mutons entering the battlefield at the same time was.

Eventually, it becomes clear that The Bureau is almost a reinvisioning of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, down even to the plot scenario. It may be hard to swallow that fitting into the new continuity, but we're nerds and should be able to deal with retcons by now. But taking the XCOM scenario and transplanting it to the 60s and putting in real characters lends the experience an actual personality. You won't see me complaining about an injection of personality any time soon, but thanks to the game's smart dialogue that injection becomes something worth praising.

I might just give The Bureau another go this weekend.

P.S. The historical setting also provides fun naming possibilities. My final squad included Don Draper and Andy Warhol. RIP Jackie Robinson, who took down 46 foes before being felled by a burst of plasma.

Final Verdict

8 out of 10

A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.