The Bureau: XCOM® Declassified™

Everyone will tell you why they don't like it so you can read theirs. Frankly I found its first person real time tactics about the best I've ever played. This was developed back when Mass Effect was big, successor in a sense to the KOTOR games, both of which had three person squads, and ME introduced cover mechanics. This does that way better than any of those games ever did and if you can get past the reasons people disliked it (the bulk of which is it not being a real XCOM game) and judge it on its own merits this was actually a pretty good hidden gem. The gameplay itself is awesome imo. I enjoyed it a lot, even though I dislike FPS mechanics and am a fan of XCOM games. It's also way more challenging than XCOM believe it or not. Set the difficulty above easy and you'll see what I mean. The DLC in particular is a massive challenge. I would recommend this. The biggest problem I had with it was introducing pretend ME like dialogue wheels which go nowhere and affect nothing, clearly showing it being another bandwagon on something popular while also running over budget and out of time so seemingly they had real RPG-esque dialogue trees in mind but cut them. Shame. The gameplay itself ended up great though, it's a hidden gem, and it will also give you a different take on some of the really mysterious stuff the Elders say to you in XCOM EU and XCOM2 which Firaxis seems to have deliberately put in as nods to this being at least semi-canonical.

It looks way old but it is awesome ! I love it .

The game is OK. Nothing great, but nothing terrible either. I think a lot of the hate this game got was related to the purely marketing-related use of the label XCOM. Which isn't really fitting. The only property it shares with XCOM is, that it is about aliens. There is no base building, no resource management, no research etc. So it's not a XCOM game. But what is it? It's something in between a third-person shooter and a tactic shooter. It tries to be both, unfortunately. It would work very well as pure shooter with just the main character. It would also work as pure tactics game with a bigger team (you are limited to two team-mates) and with more actual tactics in it. It only offers a few commands per team-mate and an 'adrenaline mode' to issue them, which slows down the game, but doesn't pause it. Here again it tries to be two things at once: tactical pause and bullet time. Only that you can't shoot in bullet time and you don't have the time for actual tactical planning, because the time is still running. Even if slowed down. So in the sum, The Bureau is a game that takes a lot of good ideas and combines them into something mediocre. Especially towards the end it starts to show that the devs ran out of time/money. So the endings are quite unsatisfying. In conclusion: most of the game is still entertaining, but I never could shake the annoying feeling of 'it could have been so much more'!

Nice and simple, the game was a pleasure after both XCOM and XCOM2, 1960s is a very good time period for the story. Gameplay is responsive and somewhat fast, story and lore parts are entertaining, got tons of fun. There's even some rpg elements (I mean the actuall "role playing" part) and the forth wall is still in shambles. Niiice one :3

Wow, what a wonderful game. Due to some negative reviews I expected nothing. In former times I started to play one of the dos titles of x-com but I couldn't get into it. In this game you are right in the middle from the beginning to the end. I was sticked to the screen, you mean to feel the heart and soul of the programmers. The atmosphere is brilliant. I admire the graphic style and the setting in the fifties. The characters are persuading. I paid full price and it is worth every single cent. I had to repeat some of the missions again and again and even that brought extremely fun in comparison to most of the today games. The pure game mechanics work. The different attack styles of the crew members are fascinating. There are minor issues like to hear a lot of boring dialogues in the base. Would have been better to have this in text form instead. Nevertheless it has a nice story plot at all. I can't understand why republic commando was lavished with good reviews, in my opinion this tactical sci-fi shooter was much better. I wish they could progam a 3D fantasy game in this tactical action style.