Occasionally, the internet takes a break from being its friendly, nurturing and open-minded self and dons its grumpy hat instead, becoming quick to anger and predisposed to oppose anything that does not neatly align with its expectations. Unfortunately for 2K, the day it announced it was developing an XCOM shooter was one such day. The internet, perturbed by its suspicion that 2K might be trying to shoehorn a beloved franchise into an ill-fitting FPS mould, was immediately wary.
Since that day in 2010, we’ve seen the XCOM shooter shift from a first to third-person perspective as BioShock 2 developer 2K Marin assumed full development responsibilities. But for a while it looked like the XCOM shooter had disappeared entirely, prompting concerns the project had been cancelled and causing the internet to furrow its brow deeper still. Happily, the shooter recently resurfaced under the moniker of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified and brought with it an evocative live-action teaser, depicting the origins of the XCOM organisation some 50 years past.
Did you spot the Sectoid? It’s there, brazen as you like, standing under the tree in the opening seconds of the trailer. Creepy.
Having recently played The Bureau: XCOM Declassfied, I can advise the internet to unclench its jaw and relax a little, for here is a third-person XCOM shooter with genuine promise. It’s a tactical, cover-based shooter, with a three-person squad. The ability to issue orders to each team member on-the-fly via the Battle Focus radial menu is reminiscent of Mass Effect.
A key difference here is that squad management is a necessity rather than a nicety. You directly control the movement of one of your agents, and ordering your AI team-mates to use their abilities is secondary to coordinating their movement on the battlefield. Positioning is important in order to maximise your squad’s efficiency and to take advantage of elevated positions or flanking opportunities. Indeed, if you leave them to fend for themselves for too long they’ll start to bleat that their position is under threat and that they require orders.
Fans of both the franchise at large and Fireaxis’ excellent turn-based strategy, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, will be pleased to hear that The Bureau retains numerous visual and mechanical elements from the other games in the series. For example, when assessing where to order a member of your squad, the level of cover offered by your chosen position is represented by the familiar shield icon, which takes account of line of sight and the effectiveness of that cover. Elsewhere, weaponry follows the familiar upgrade path of bullets-lasers-plasma and parallels can be drawn between The Bureau’s agent roles of Commando, Recon, Engineer and Support and the soldier classes of Enemy Unknown.
Most of The Bureau’s strategic considerations stem from the abilities offered by these roles and the combination of their effects. You can have one agent lay a mine while another uses the taunt ability to lure an enemy into blast radius, or a turret can be set by one agent and levitated by another to fire over cover. All of these abilities are managed via the Battle Focus menu, and while accessing it slows down time it never stops it completely, so you’re always thinking on your feet. In truth, Battle Focus plays more smoothly than it looks and flows better than its stop/start nature suggests.
While most of The Bureau’s identity and gameplay is linked to this battlefield management, it does retain some of the key micromanagement elements from its heritage. At The Bureau’s HQ, the science lab can research new weapons and backpack schematics. The HQ can also be used for agent recruitment, which is necessary to ensure that your 8-person roster remains full.
As is XCOM tradition, agents who die in the field are gone for good, and so it’s necessary to ensure that every member of your roster is trained up enough to fill any gaping holes. The final area of the Bureau’s HQ is the Ops room, where you’ll be able to view the missions available to your agents, be they dispatch missions (you can send agents out on these to gain XP while you take other agents into the field), optional side missions, or story missions.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a tactical third-person shooter that draws on many of the franchise’s more traditional tactical mechanics. Its 1960s US setting is conveyed convincingly, but the scant few environments that I saw looked a little bland, so it will benefit from some polishing ahead of its August release.
It also bears mentioning that, like many live-action teasers before it, The Bureau’s has oversold certain elements of the project. There’s little opportunity to “erase the truth” by way of information suppression or media manipulation, for example. Instead, your job is primarily focused on managing battlefields across the US as your squad of ordinary agents struggles with the extraordinary occurrence of Earth’s first contact event. Overall, though, it appears that the internet needn’t have worried: The Bureau: XCOM Declassified looks to be shaping up just fine as a tactical third-person shooter.
Stace Harman is a freelance contributor to IGN and is convinced that zombies will one day inherent the Earth. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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