It would be somewhat unusual if you had never heard of The Bureau, even in passing. The game has existed in at least some manner of corporeal form since 2006. Statistically by now, you should have been at least mildly aware of its existence. In 2007 when it was originally rumored that XCOM would be revitalized fans cheered with joy. In 2010 when it was formally announced that it would be revitalized in the form of a shooter that excitement died down a bit or in some cases turned to hate. The last time the XCOM franchise had attempted to burst into the shooter genre the results were polarizing at best.
Things would get trickier for The Bureau as during its extended development cycle the folks at Firaxis came along, developed, and completed an entire XCOM game that remained relatively true to the source material and won over most skeptics. I think it’s relatively safe to say that XCOM: Enemy Unknown casts a nasty shadow for The Bureau to live within.
The game follows Agent William Carter, a gruff CIA agent who has resigned himself to traditional desk work after a terrible family tragedy. In between glasses of bourbon he finds himself delivering a briefcase to CIA Director Myron Faulke. It doesn’t take long for your delivery to go south as you’re attacked by an alien invasion force. You’ll navigate the opening battle with a couple of red-shirts before you’re finally deposited in Director Faulke’s newly established XCOM base. It’s at this point that you’ll be tasked with heading out on field operations and repelling the invader forces.
I do have to say the sixties setting is a really interesting one. The environments are fun to look at and the concept of a much less technologically inclined human race trying to repel advanced invaders from outer space could have made for a compelling story. It’s a shame this game can’t live up to its concept.
Here’s a fun XCOM drinking game for you to play at home. First get out the gnarliest bottle of rye whiskey you can find, I’m talking bottom shelf and coated in a healthy layer of dust. Once you’ve popped the cork start playing The Bureau. Every time Carter views destruction and utters that whoever was involved “never stood a chance.” do a shot. You’ll be dead before hour number two.
The game’s setting is very unique and fun. It’s a shame the story and characters hung on top of it are so uninteresting.
Gameplay in The Bureau is essentially 2K Marin doing their best impression of Mass Effect. Although the game’s original E3 appearances demonstrated a first person shooter The Bureau has since shifted to a third person, cover based setup. You head into battle with two squad mates to whom you can give orders at any time by pressing a button to enter what the game calls Battle Focus. This mode does not stop time, it simply slows it down, which can be frustrating, especially early on in the game while you’re still figuring out how exactly to navigate the somewhat cumbersome battlefield and you still have your first batch of recruits that can be cut through like tissue paper.
Controlling your AI teammates works most of the time, but when it doesn’t it’s usually a major source of frustration. When anyone on your team (including you) loses all their health they will fall to the ground and need to be revived before they bleed out. You can go and revive people yourself, or you can order your teammates to do it. I ran into a number of situations where I or a teammate needed to be revived and the person I gave the order to couldn’t figure out the pathing and wound up going the opposite direction. I shit you not, sometimes my agents were right next to me and when I’d go down they’d start to do a full circle around the battlefield to get to me before I bled out.
You’re allowed to carry two weapons of your choice. Reloading, picking up a different weapon and interacting with doors and objects are all mapped to the same button. This means that you’ll very frequently find yourself going to reload and instead swapping out your gun for a generic plasma pistol an enemy dropped. How is this still a problem for some games? I’m pretty sure we solved control issues like this in shooters over a decade ago.
Here you can see agent Carter selecting his target right before he unintentionally swaps out his weapon.
The game has a lot of hold-overs from XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Most of the features feel like they’re only there because “it’s XCOM”. Unfortunately when you adapt a strategy game into a shooter a lot of the mechanics don’t hold up. Permadeath serves as a great example. If a squadmate falls in the battlefield and bleeds out they will be permanently removed from the game. The thing is that even on the highest difficulty you can just restart your last checkpoint and get your team member back. You’ll never really have any kind of incentive to sacrifice one of your members. In fact because your team mates level up so slowly you’ll actually probably never even bother swapping them out for other people in your roster.
One of the game’s biggest failings as an RPG is its lack of choice. Your squad mates can grow by five levels. Every time a team mate levels up you can select a perk for them. Sometimes there’s only one perk to choose from, but generally you can pick between two different options. The problem is that while Carter can go all the way up to level 10 your team mates can’t go past five. This means you’ll have them completely maxed out before even the halfway point of the game, leaving nothing to do with them but give commands.
The dialogue wheel from Mass Effect makes an appearance, but it’s never really used for anything aside from deciding what order to ask questions of people. There are no relationships to maintain, and there’s never any reason to avoid saying something in a dialogue tree, they’re simply there to distribute information. In one mission I was given the choice to offer to save a group of survivors or tell them they were on their own. It doesn’t matter what you tell them, it has literally no effect on the game. It’s either an illusion of choice or an unfinished feature and either way it doesn’t work. The game does have four different endings, and you are given some choices as to how to obtain them but they all take place within the last hour or two of gameplay, everything you’ve done up to then doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
You don’t even really have any choices when it comes to navigating levels. Generally maps are composed of linear corridors that occasionally let out into a small battlefield. Sometimes you’ll see an offshoot hallway that you can go down, but there’s ultimately no reason to do so. At best heading off the beaten path might grant you a “backpack” which is the only type of gear upgrade in the game. Generally most offshoots will just dump you into a dead end, but sometimes they’ll provide an audio log or note to read.
Logs and notes are scattered throughout all the levels but there’s almost never anything interesting contained in them. Every log can be summed up as “what the people in that room were doing when the invasion hit” one riveting example features two men watching machinery go haywire. Once their measurements return to normal they just mention how weird it was. Oooh spooky. You can’t take the logs with you or even walk away while they’re playing, so if you want to hear them you simply have to stop in the middle of the level and sit there while they go. None of them are interesting enough that I would suggest you spend your time doing so.
The Bureau spent a long time in development hell and unfortunately it shows. When it works it can be fun, but generally the whole project just feels half finished and ultimately nothing like its namesake. Normally I suggest fans of the series pick up a game even when its not as strong as other entires, but here if you’re a die hard XCOM fan this game might actually just make you more angry than anything else. Save your money for the Enemy Unknown expansion.
