The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Review

Aren't you glad we live in a world where XCOM: Enemy Unknown is treated with the respect it deserves? It just goes to show, really, that a tactical old-timer without a release in over a decade can still step up to the plate, knock all the trendy franchises into a cocked hat and show that there's still space in an industry of me-too action-laced design for a highly-polished cerebral strategy experience. Now 2K and Firaxis Games can sit back, release some DLC and bask in the warm glory of success. Or (edging surreptitiously closer to the actual game at the centre of this review) 2K could turn around, strain out a cover-based shooter and give the impression of a publisher that can't quite cope with the concept of XCOM being critically acclaimed. No, it's okay guys. We really liked Enemy Unknown, look at all the shiny awards it won. You don't have to pander to anybody with a shooter. You don't have to... oh, fine. Give that here, let's see if it's any good.

The Bureau opens its curtains on William Carter, a gritty Cold War-era agent with a hairdo full of Brylcreem, a larynx full of macerated paving slabs and a mysterious battered suitcase full of recovered alien technology bound for a meeting with the brassiest of the top brass in a remote military complex. Carter isn't initially entirely aware of the contents of the suitcase, but nevertheless quickly learns the truth when it explodes with enough force to toast an alien spy to a crisp and instantly heal the wounds Carter sustained in a confrontation with the aforementioned spy. Clearly this means that an underpaid drone in an extraterrestrial munitions factory somewhere was reading the wiring diagram upside down, but never mind that. The significance of what was in the suitcase is strangely unimportant to the introductory sequence, which sees Carter fight his way out of the stricken military base as it falls victim to a well-timed alien assault. XCOM is conveniently founded in a matter of hours - getting an impressive amount of hasty explanation dedicated to how that's possible, actually - and it's up to you and your selection of squadmates to save the world as we know it from the extraterrestrial threat - or at least, the world as the people of 1962 knew it.

In truth that little opening paragraph back there was just me ridding myself of a troublesome nodule of cynicism. The Bureau presents itself more fairly as a tactical cover-based shooter of the variety that won't be entirely unfamiliar if you ever played Mass Effect, although if you have a heavy blunt utensil to hand somewhere nearby I suggest you use it to quickly wipe that comparison from your mind before it endears some kind of positive connection. What it means in practice is that the combat is neatly diced into the humdrum shooting gallery routine and the faithfully X-COM-esque squad command feature with the ability to shift between the two granted upon Carter by dint of him being the only person who thought to replace his vocal cords with a hedge trimmer. Cover-based combat is everything you've come to expect from every other wretched game employing cover-based combat - take cover, wait for foes to pop their stupid heads up, shoot, repeat - which is fine as a connecting element, but you need something else for it to actually connect to, which in this case is the aforementioned in-depth squad command. Switching to command mode slows down time to a glacial crawl, bleaches all the colour from the environment and lets you manipulate your two AI squadmates, letting you move them around, give them priority targets and activate their special abilities. If you've been thinking along the same lines as me then you've probably been worried that this dichotomous gameplay is just an attempt to make some form of feeble connection to the X-COM franchise, but fear not: The Bureau's combat really is geared obediently around the tactical interface. Unfortunately, it happens for all the wrong reasons.

At the core of the issue is the squad AI, which couldn't possibly survive in the real world for more than ten minutes before walking aimlessly onto a six-lane highway and getting reduced to a pile of gibs with a trilby on top. It's almost as if The Bureau was so terrified that the strategy elements would become unnecessary that it rolled back your allies' IQs to the point where they're no longer self-sufficient. As a direct result you end up breaking up the action constantly, either to stop your squad-mates from tweaking the nipples of a twelve-foot-tall armoured alien colossus or to spray them with the game's equivalent of a Revive potion after they've choked on the aforementioned colossus's minigun fire. In another senseless nod to previous X-COM games your squad-mates will permanently die if not properly revived in time, which would have made for some very tense action if it wasn't for the fact that their utter lack of intelligence makes them impossible to care about in any significant capacity beyond that of a cardboard cutout on wheels. You can't even just leave them to die either since you've spent the last few missions levelling them up, and anyway, the alien hordes will quickly turn you to radioactive slag without somebody to draw their fire, so combat is largely just an endless slog of trying to keep your hateful dead-weight allies in line long enough to get to a checkpoint. Imagine trying to escort two unruly toddlers across the full length of the Western Front and you have an approximate analogue for the kind of pace-breaking micromanagement that's being asked of you here.

Nevertheless, it wouldn't be fair to draw attention to unlikeable characters without giving honourable mention to Carter himself, who I theorise is the result of some kind of twisted experiment to create a singularity of generic gritty hero tropes. Oh, he might dress like a dashing gentleman of the sixties but don't be fooled: Beneath that roguish exterior, William Carter is an out-of-place space marine. His emotional range spans all the way from cold frustration to barely-contained rage and his dialogue contains all the warmth and humanity of a Cease and Desist. Efforts are made to explain his character with the usual tragic back-story - wife and kids died in an accident, heavy drinker, gets nightmares - but it predictably falls flat on its face and leaves us with a man who could only be less relatable if he had the face of a zergling. Come to think of that, there's definitely something wrong with Carter's face, although it might just be permanently scrunched up from all the concentrated angst.

Between missions you can hang around XCOM's newly-created headquarters, chatting with the various scientists, guards, engineers and clerks - who apparently have plenty of time to spare loitering in the hallways - or hunting down audio recordings and other scraps of paper, all of which give the game a nice sense of optional back-story. It has to be said that I really quite enjoyed wandering around the twisting labyrinth, drinking in the sights and obsessively listening in on other peoples' conversations, but there's really nothing gameplay-related to do. About the only thing you can do is pack your squadmates' lunchboxes full of your choice of weaponry before you head off on a mission, but it hardly seems to justify the enormous sprawling base full of laboratories and offices. It's padding, that's what it is: a way to break up the pace and keep you distracted from the game itself. Really nice padding, mind, but still padding.

Let's take a detour off Criticism Crescent so that they can wash all that bile into the gutter. One thing that The Bureau does well - well enough to stand head-and-shoulders above most sci-fi titles and even, I hesitate to say, the other X-COM games - is aesthetics. The jarring juxtaposition of 1960s small-town America with contemporary science fiction elements gives birth to some environments that actually have a modicum of atmosphere and variety about them, though it does take a hit when you enter the some of the alien-dominated areas that look like they were assembled entirely out of the same three or four prefabricated panels. Colour me impressed though, because creating immersion like this in a game where you spend most of your time staring at the back of your character's head while traversing arenas with suspiciously high quantities of convenient chest-high walls is no small achievement. I even caught myself doing that thing that press demonstrators do at game conventions - you know, where you stop and look around in big slow sweeps every now and then during peaceful segments to show off what the art team did with the skybox.

Chances are that unless you use Adblock (tsk tsk) you've probably seen a great deal of advertising material for The Bureau, and you might've also noticed that the censorship snail has left its rectangular black trail all over most of that aforementioned material. This is the central theme, if there is one, to The Bureau's plot: trying to keep the alien invasion under wraps even while it threatens the entire human race. It's a nice idea in an X-Files sort of way, but it just seems to be there to give some substance to the opening and closing cutscenes without really becoming involved in the gameplay in any significant manner. You don't go around shooting troublesome press photographers, you never have to deal with a confused mob of refugees or a stack of sensitive paperwork - perhaps mercifully, since a bureaucracy minigame would ironically only serve to add to The Bureau's issues - and it becomes doubly dubious when entire towns are wiped from the map without anybody in the general populace noticing. It was only after going back to playing Enemy Unknown for a bit (you know, so I could remind myself what a good X-COM game looks like) that I struck upon an explanation for this curious incident. Nobody in the X-COM contemporary setting knows about the alien threat, you see, until they actually start flying down and terrorizing citizens, so presumably this is the first time in recorded history they've invaded. According to whatever passes for canon in the X-COM universe, The Bureau's events cannot exist, so the fact that it does smacks strongly of an exercise in shoehorning, though there is a small mercy in that this means that at least the ending actually has some closure for once, rather than a sequel-tempting cliffhanger. It's like a piece of fanfiction where the writer inserts themselves as the main character's best friend and spends most of the plot explaining how it happened and why it's okay.

And that's The Bureau's problem in a nutshell, really: it's trying so achingly hard to be part of the X-COM club, with the strategy elements, the micromanagement, the permanent ally death and the canon-rending ingratiating plot, but it just ends up tripping over the ill-fitting elements like a pair of oversized trousers and falls face-down in mediocrity. You know what? If The Bureau could have just polished its AI, made Carter less of a scowling tosspot and stopped clinging to X-COM like a needy lover, it would have been a perfectly adequate - if a bit shallow - cover-based shooter that would have earned a gentle slap before I pushed it out the door. As it stands now, however, it feels like little more than an unwelcome tie-in, sacrificing its individuality so it can use the shiny badge of an existing franchise. And to what end? To have your tentative new venture judged on the same terms as its successful forebears? Because believe me here, 2K: that's the last thing you want.