Serious Agents, Silly Aliens
This might land me in a lot of hot water but I am not a big fan of XCOM. The series is well known for its system of soldiers whom you can name, nurture, love and bring with you from battle to battle, only for them to permanently die at the hands of the unforgiving random number generator that comes up with a hit despite them being in 90% cover.
Whilst this iconic mechanism is one of the reasons people love it, my brain could never accept and absorb the defeats. It’s just incompatible with this and for that I am sorry, but The Bureau is not a standard XCOM game and so there was a chance I could like this one.
The XCOM fan base is a passionate and vocal one and so when a studio dares to take the name of this beloved series and apply it to something so different, it should have known it was playing with fire.
One of the primary issues, and partly why so many studios don’t like to reveal anything about their game until they are ready, is that an early trailer released at E3 with the title XCOM showed a different game to what The Bureau ended up being. (link video embed?) This game was set slightly earlier, was first person, had stronger horror elements and X-Files like influence.
If the resulting game was exceptional then no one would have cared, but as The Bureau didn’t quite live up to exceptional levels, many fans were disappointed about the game as it could never live up to the trailer and the game they thought they were going to get.
What we did get was a bit of a mixture, it is mostly a 3rd person shooter, an almost over used genre by the time of release, sprinkled with some squad based mechanics. The original XCOM titles use a turn-based system, and the studio attempted to weave the two together by allowing a time slow down ability in order for you to issue commands to your squad.
Now that the dust has settled and we can revisit these games I think people were too hard on it. I think the graphics are quite good, I think some of the world building elements and alternate history is fun to explore. Although I will say the story started out with potential and quickly went off the rails.
I found myself having fun with the combat when it opened up. Some of the squad’s abilities are great and you need to think of clever ways to combine squad member abilities for maximum impact. Enemies are varied and require different tactics to help take down effectively.
I think it’s still quite a divisive title to this day. I can’t help but wonder if the XCOM name did more damage to it than good. Overall I think people were too hard on it and there are some good things to say about it. It’s also cheap to pick up so I would say if you are interested in a 3rd person cover based shooter with sci-fi elements then this definitely might appeal to you.