Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a visually authentic representation of America at the height of the Cold War, viewed through a “What If?” scenario in which the country’s biggest threat isn’t Soviet subterfuge, but rather a global invasion of hostile extraterrestrial forces. At its best, it’s an entertaining, squad-based sci-fi shooter played against some genuinely creepy backdrops; at its worst, it comes across as a cynical cash grab designed to capitalize on the success of Firaxis’s recent XCOM: Enemy Unknown (a game I cannot possibly praise highly enough.) The Bureau isn’t a bad game, it just isn’t X-Com, and the level of enjoyment you get out of it will depend largely on your willingness to accept that fact.
My biggest problem with The Bureau is the way it takes narrative control out of the players hands — something that has always been at the heart of the best games in the series — and forces us to sit through hours of sub-Hollywood soap opera drama. Our central character, one Agent William Carter, is an alcoholic hothead we’re supposed to sympathize with because of his tragic past, yet Mark Hildreth, the actor who provides Carter’s voice, plays him like, well, like Christian Slater trying too hard to sound like Jack Nicholson. It’s sort of like Crypto in the PS2 classic Destroy All Humans, except not funny in the slightest. Listening to Carter speak made me want to skip entire story segments just so I didn’t have to listen to Hildreth’s voice, which is a shame considering the rest of the cast turned in excellent performances. Not that the story makes much sense when you are paying attention… probably because 2K Marin didn’t get enough time to playtest The Bureau’s branching dialogue system, which never seems to take into account whether players have actually been given the proper information they need to understand what anybody is talking about. Case in point: about halfway through the game, a central character contracts a non-fatal alien disease, and after speaking with the character in a hospital, Carter leaves, taking a drink from his flask and muttering a quick prayer that the infected character may rest in peace. Oh, so he died, then?
The ham-fisted storytelling isn’t the only sign that the developer simply didn’t get X-Com, but even taken as its own entity, most of The Bureau feels slapdash and incomplete. In classic X-Com style, you’re encouraged to find and train new recruits — that way, you’ll have a selection of second-stringers to choose from should one of your agents die. But there are two problems with The Burea’s approach. For starters, you can only ever bring two soldiers along with Carter on a mission, meaning any other characters you want to train will have to be sent off on dispatch missions that happen off-screen while you’re handling other business. There’s no risk/reward system at play, since you’re pretty much guaranteed to succeed as long as you throw enough agents at a dispatch mission. Second, it’s all a wash anyway, since even if one of your agents dies, you can just reload from one of the game’s frequent automatic checkpoints.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Despite these issues, the actual missions in The Bureau are fairly engaging, thanks to an interesting squad mechanic that has you issuing individual orders from a command wheel. When you bring up the command wheel, the action slows to a crawl, giving you plenty of time to place agents behind cover, flank, target specific enemies, revive downed agents, or utilize special abilities you’ve unlocked. In the beginning, you’re basically limited to pistols, shotguns and rifles that don’t do a whole lot of damage even to the base grunt units, but once you start picking up alien technology, you can fire lasers, lift enemies in the air, engulf them in flaming plasma, and so on. It’s all highly reminiscent of Mass Effect, which is a good thing, but again, it doesn’t really feel like X-Com at all.
The thing that most excited me about 2K’s decision to reboot the X-Com franchise was that it gave some pretty talented artists the opportunity to revisit some of MicroProse’s terrifying, but dated alien and set designs, bringing them in-line with the kinds of things that scare audiences today. And while Firaxis’s work on XCOM: Enemy Unknown was uniformly brilliant, 2K Marin’s interpretations come across as uninspired, uneven, and even a little hokey. Early missions set in eerily abandoned Main Streets and farms littered with dead livestock are quickly replaced by an abundance of robotic tentacles and cold, lifeless alien bases that look they were ripped wholesale from Crysis 3, while promising early enemy redesigns (with the hulking Muton behemoths being a standout) give way to endless variations on a single class (the sideways-mouthed Outsiders.) Also: whose idea was it to turn Sectopods into quadrupedal clown cars?
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It was obvious from the moment The Bureau was announced in 2010 as XCOM that this was not the series reboot X-Com fans were looking for, but with development being handled by the studio that brought us the criminally under-appreciated BioShock 2, I was confident that the game would at least be able to stand on its own as a gripping sci-fi adventure. Unfortunately, the best I can say about the final game is that at least it didn’t come out before XCOM: Enemy Unknown; had that been the case, it might very well have killed off enthusiasm for the franchise before Firaxis’s game ever saw the light of day. Hats off to 2K Marin for having the ego to completely re-write the X-Com formula; sometimes, it takes an unpopular idea to bring real innovation to the table. Other times, though, you just have to leave well enough alone. And that’s something I think most X-Com fans will want to do with The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The post The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Review – Choice and Consequence appeared first on Invisible Gamer.