The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Review

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.