The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is an interesting hybrid between a traditional third-person shooter and a strategic game, with elements of role-playing game; but the impression is a game crippled by a troubled production. If you are in search of a different action videogame, maybe The Bureau is the game are you searching for.
The game is really nice. The game is a very good quality game even on bad graphics cards. I like the game in every way. It's a fabulous production. Beautiful!
1st review - Oct 19, 2013 / Score - 7
Boring, unlogically created plot, boring main hero, boring missions. Boring, boring, boring, boring. And ending is also boring... I am really sad I've preordered this nonsense.
The only thing I relly liked fighting/leveling system, but this game is really mediocre and I am pretty not sure I will replay it soon enough...
2nd review - Dec 25. 2015 / Score - 10
It took me 2 replays with half a year and 1.5 year periods to re-estimate the game completely =) Also I bought all DLCs =)
Hangar DLC is good for those, who'd prefer to spend more time shooting without extra dialogues in The Bureau, and also it's quite a good prequel to the main story :)
Game's replay-ability is fine (as you can see I had re-played it 3 times already, even that I didn't like it on my first round) :)
Advice: replay games that left unsure impression after a long period of time, you may really change your mind =)
OK, so The Bureau is different to what XCOM fans would be used to, but does that make it a bad game? As a squad based shooter, The Bureau is reasonably good.
2K Marin has done their best with the almost impossible task to create a narrative rich, tactic driven TPS that justifies the name of "XCOM". The result is a decent and professional effort from a team that could have done better without being tied to that name.
For all that The Bureau get’s wrong, it is at least a passable tactical shooter with a novel, well-realised setting. If you love the golden age of science-fiction, there’s something here for you. Just don’t expect it to ever get truly interesting, because XCOM Declassified never captures what XCOM is all about.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified desperately wants to be liked, but by failing to satisfy in any direction, all it succeeds in being is a disappointment. It wants to be a strategy game without being a strategy game, it wants to be a shooter without being a shooter, and it wants to be XCOM without being XCOM. As such, it is nothing. It's an inconsequential waste of time that does nothing for anybody, and saying that makes me feel guilty because its cloying pleas to not be hated are worthy of pity.
XCOM DECLASSIFIED = IS A COMBINATION OF THE FOLLOWING: 1) XCOM ENEMY WITHIN (GAME PLAY) 2) INFAMOUS (POWERS OF WILLIAM CARTER) 3) LAST OF US (SLEEP WALKERS) 4) CALL OF DUTY (WAR BETWEEN MAN & ALIEN TACTICAL SHOOTING) 5) L.A. NOIRE (1962 CLASSIC TIME SETTING) ---------- IF YOU ARE A FAN OF XCOM GAME THIS IS THE GAME FOR YOU!! ------------ The Bureau is a third-person shooter with an emphasis on squad-based tactics. The player controls the agent William Carter and commands two additional agents in each mission. Carter has his own unique abilities, but other agents are divided into the Commando, Engineer, Support, and Recon classes. By entering "Battle Focus Mode", which slows time significantly, the player can order their agents to move to strategic positions and activate class-specific abilities. Agents have customizable outfits, weapons, equipment and abilities. As in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, soldiers will suffer from permanent death and if Carter is unable to revive agents who have taken too much damage, they will die (variable difficulty levels also determine whether or not it is possible for downed agents to become battle-ready when revived, or if replacement agents will appear during a mission).
While not your traditional XCOM style of game, I thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough of this game and the story told within it. Trying out the different powers and weapon combinations was also a lot of fun for me and game was enjoyable enough to play through a second time a few months after my first run through.
It is novel to use alien weapons and has a good sense of blow when using weapons. but Both allies and enemies have terrible A.I. The game is not bad, but I recommend buying it at a discount.
Recuerdo cuando supe de este juego; leí de él en una revista hace algunos años donde aún ni sabía de XCOM ni cuándo iba a salir. Después de un cierto tiempo fue como si este juego desapareciera y nunca volvía a saber de él, asumí que el juego había sido cancelado, hasta que recientemente leí nuevamente del juego.
No fue bien recibido, tiene problemas, tiene demasiados problemas que se han exacerbado con el tiempo.
Técnicamente no tuve problemas con el juego, pero en términos de diseño, este es un juego que no sabe decidir si ser un juego de disparos en tercera persona o alternativamente un juego de estrategia similar al titular XCOM. Idealmente hubiesen separado este juego y se hubiese preservado esto como un juego aparte y único, en cambio, se intento mezclar la experiencia, pero de formas bastante poco constructivas.
Entonces se tiene un juego que no tiene mecánicas bien implementadas o desarrollaras de juegos de acción de disparos en tercera persona, con un sistema extraño y confuso de estrategia que no se acerca a la calidad de los juegos de XCOM.
Una pena por que el concepto del juego parece bastante bueno, es tan solo la ejecución lo que lo acabo.
From a technical standpoint this game has some serious issues, because even in 2019 using an RTX 2060 you still get hard fps drops down to 15-20 fps when you play with activated PhysX. You also have to MANUALLY put an up-to-date PhysX runtime library into the game's working folder to stop it from crashing on Windows 10.
The game itself has some interesting ideas to stand out from the classic Xcom games but everything is executed so mediocre that while I really tried to like it, I just didn't. Besides the really boring gunplay and imprecise movement controls it was mainly the absolutely awful character dialogue and childish storytelling that finally made me stop playing after about 3 hours. Wasted potential.
SummaryIt's 1962. John F. Kennedy is the U.S. President and the Cold War has the nation gripped with fear – but a far more viscous and insidious enemy than communism is threatening America. Known only to a scant few, a covet government unit called The Bureau begins investigating and concealing a series of mysterious attacks by an alien enemy. A...