The Bureau XCOM Declassified

 What once styled itself as the shiny new face of alien invasion now finds itself a background story to last year’s successful, unexpected resurrection of the turn-based strategy genre, which we’re pretty sure presented itself as first contact at the time. With XCOM’s long-term fans sated thanks to Enemy Unknown’s tactical charms, The Bureau can freely be its own game.

 Without Enemy Unknown’s management and base building, The Bureau’s HQ occasionally feels like a hangover or, worse, a limitation. When you do talk, there’s Mass Effect’s dialogue wheel but none of its relationship building. Every now and then you can perform an ‘Investigation’, an anaemic errand-boy quest within the base, one of which was so laughably simple we couldn’t quite believe it. Sent to search for a secret compartment in an AWOL agent’s office, we strolled into their workspace only to be confronted by a gleaming painting, highlighting its sudden interactivity. The code to the safe was on the shiny picture tacked to the opposite wall.

It’s an atmospheric space filled with incidental touches all the same: engineers work in hallways, radio operators smoke cigarettes to the stub, new recruits can be a bit sexist, and everyone’s face is lined with Cold War tension and topped with period hair detail. The base also contains the mission select menu, which does in fact feature some strategy. Alongside main missions – drawn-out, cutscene-heavy and crucial to the story – you can take agents on optional missions that usually offer experience alongside some technological rewards, and even send squadmates not currently in your party on missions of their own. This is as strategic as The Bureau gets. Each of these side-missions has a points value that the combined level of the agents you send must be equal to. It’s a little less complicated than the Assassin’s Creed games’ assassin management, but it successfully provides a layer of asset control to the game while also conveying that very XCOM-feeling that there’s more going on than you can handle alone.

To be fair, protagonist William Carter can handle a great deal alone, and even more with two other agents by his side. What 2K Marin has done here is taken Mass Effect’s cover-heavy, squad-power-based combat and built a tactical shooter around it, handing over finer control of party members to the player. You can queue instructions: sending an engineer into a specific position to summon a turret, for instance, before using a commando to taunt an Outsider Elite into its killzone. You’ll need to make use of these power combinations too, since aliens pour into arenas with alarming frequency. 

It’s challenging, then, but often not particularly tactical. The Bureau’s most dangerous foes aren’t the Sectoids and Outsiders, which try to use cover, but things like Mutons and Sectopods, which effectively charge at the player while soaking up ammo and all the powers you can throw at them. Equally reticent to stay in position are your very own teammates. One moment they’ll wander away from the flanking position you suggested; the next they’ll stare a Muton defiantly in the eye while making a suicidal last stand.

The Bureau’s focus on squad management and abilities gives it a rhythm distinct from other thirdperson, cover-based shooters, and combat provides a solid, often intense and engaging core on which to hang 2K Marin’s terrifically well realised ’60s America.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is released on August 23 in the EU, and is out now in the US for 360, PC and PS3. PC version tested.