'The Bureau: XCOM Declassified' Is the Sears Roebuck Catalog of Alien-Invasion Period Shooters

I’ve never played an XCOM game. I have no love for the franchise, no vested fandom to flame. If you’re an old time fan, I think 2K themselves have clearly pointed to last year’s XCOM Enemy Unknown as the true heir to your sequel gripes. This game mixes and matches some of the old with mostly new AAA conventional designs to create The Bureau, a prequel to the franchise proper.

This didn’t phase my enjoyment of the game, but unfortunately I don’t particularly care for aliens, shooters, strategy games, dialogue trees, bland characters, or steep learning curves, or any combination thereof. And yet somehow, despite the game's best efforts, I still enjoyed The Bureau.

2K Marin formed as a studio, having spun out of Boston’s Irrational Games. Irrational alumni headed west and combined forces with 2K Australia after Bioshock launched in 2007. Their first proper release was 2010's Bioshock 2, a sequel that both fans and critics alike claimed to have not wanted. In many ways, I found Bioshock 2 to be superior to the original in terms of gameplay, but found the story to be lacking, a strong selling point for the original. XCOM also suffers from story, but I found the strategic elements of the game’s battles interesting enough to keep my attention. I prefer 2K Marin’s sequel to Irrational’s, so I hope history will be more kind to 2K Marin in the wake of Irrational’s return to the franchise.

Anyway, this year 2K Marin is back with the heavy burden of making another sequel out of another beloved property, albeit one they did not create themselves: The (1994-99) Microprose/Hasbro franchise X-COM, relaunching late last year with sister 2K studio, Firaxis (of Civilization V fame)’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown. While Enemy Unknown was true to the original’s gameplay mechanics of strategic military RTS gunplay, The Bureau aims to bring the tactical gameplay of the original together with the contemporary genre that is third-person cover shooter. It does this so with just a pinch of Bioware’s storytelling branches and a healthy dose of squad-based tactics in a no-nonsense MIB Cold War era romp through Golden-Age America.

On paper, this sounds horrible to me. And mostly it is, but perhaps my predisposition to disliking these types of games, which in turn caused me to not play the likes of Gears of War, Mass Effect 1 or 3, or anything Tom Clancy besides Splinter Cell, allowed me to see the gameplay mechanics in this game to be somewhat refreshing. While the seeds are great, the fruit that surrounds it is a little bitter.

At its heart, XCOM is a sci-fi videogame. As such, it is plagued by genre hallmark technobabble: “In your language my name would be XIOLYTHROP” type bullshit, pseudo-science, mentioning string theory before it existed, and aliens who, gosh darn it, just need to learn what humanity really means, as if we apemen aren’t the apparent cockroach of the universe.

The aliens have “superior technology” like shotguns, rifles, and SMGs that use energy and lasers instead of BULLETS and EXPLOSIONS. Their weaponry is said to be more powerful than the human weaponry, but a standard issue pistol is just as effective as the elusive "Laser Pistol" you find in the alien arsenal. The weaponry is bland and sad, with the American forces relying mostly on the staple shotgun-pistol-sniper combo, with the occasional grenade and military-issue rifle.

As for the setting, there are large traces of things we’ve seen before. Human-body harvesting a la Half-Life 2, repetitive alien hivemind architecture a la Halo and Half-life 2, a small band of human resistance a la Resistance, or Half-life 2. At first I mistook the alien grunts/greys as the same character models from 2005’s Destroy All Humans.

In XCOM you play as William Carter, a typical 2K protagonist. A G-Man with a broken heart, Carter has a shadowy past, a drinking problem, a dead family, a handsome jaw, and an impossibly gruff voice. I Googled, and turns out it’s not Troy Baker from this year’s Bioshock Infinite and Last of Us. But the fact that I had to double check should give you an idea of his delivery. He’s like Don Draper meets Agent Mulder, with Draper’s style and Mulder’s…“warmth”?

In the game's prologue, Carter has the smallest wrists I’ve ever seen on an A-frame man’s man. His arms and wrists look like dual pencils drawing hands. This of course is covered up as you start recovering alien weaponry, which you can control by having a circuit breaker turned wristwatch wired by the same aluminum tubing in your basement to the vintage Big Chill refrigerator backpack you recovered from alien schematics, the result being a circa '62 Sears Roebuck catalog rendition of the equipment used in Ghostbusters.

BLUE IS THE NEW BLACK

The Bureau drifts in and out of several aesthetic choices. There is the 1960’s government office building, which carries over onto the boxart, covered up by marked redactions and carefully Xacto-desensitized photographs. There are downwardly-tipped fedoras and three piece suits. It is present in the loading screen’s government slide projector, the clicks and whirling fan aiding the ambiance. It all had me believing the game would play with the ideas of government cover-ups, cold-war technology, and secret warfare.

This threshold of expectations is promptly forgotten in the RGB world of in-game tactical menus in web-friendly, tightly-kerned sans serifs. That, and the monotony of genre-staple Space Invader architecture and technology, followed by the questionable choices houseware designers of the early 60s made regarding household products, and the freakish hybrids you’d come to expect from any pulpy sci-fi media.

This Googie kitsch aesthetic caresses every fibre of The Bureau, as if in the six months before the game took place, everyone on the planet simultaneously lost both good taste and fiscal responsibility and decided to buy a new version of everything. The cars are all the same year, if not the same model. The barns are cartoon red with white trim. Picturesque diners, Southwestern signage, even the fictional brands; they only exist for this moment, like a Tim Burton “ain’t I a stinker for totally nailing keeping up with the Jones’s mentality” suburban film set.

Speaking of blue filters, get used to playing the Bureau through Instagram, as the entire world looks not like an old photograph, but a representation of one. Every aspect of the game has this heavy-handed style, but somehow it doesn’t feel horrible. That's in no small part to the human character models which, aside from small wrists, feel right for the setting.

However, something has been lost here in this game’s peculiar visual evolution, as the geometric, selfless design of the alien creatures from its 2010 E3 showing stand out in my memory. Yet it combines these Mondrian pseudo-lifeforms with your classic greys and run-of-the-mill ectomorphic martians all “willy-nilly” in a hodgepodge assortment of threats you’d come to expect from enemies in a Super Mario title. It’s clear that 2K Marin really liked the work they did on the geometric creatures, as they appear occasionally throughout the campaign, but the team was unable to bring any sort of cohesion to the enemy hordes.

Part of me likes the idea of humanity teaming up with sentient chimpanzees and invading other worlds, which is how I have felt about the aliens in many videogames. The dimorphism of the invaders is probably explained in one of the conversations you have in-game with the many scientists inhabiting the secret headquarters of XCOM. I must have missed it.

I also missed what XCOM stands for. This dry, Bethesdian way of fleshing out the in-game world is one of the most tiring things about videogames. The lore is left to be discovered in discarded diary pages, or in hidden conversations with characters whose names you can't remember, and are never very compelling or comprehensive.

There are these beautiful little cinematic moments throughout the game. A short staredown with a deer while a DINOSAURS RULE THE EARTH banner falls to the cracked streets below; a tense fjord through a stream I was sure would have enemies, only to turn the corner to discover a trainwreck overhead, escaping a mountain as it collapses in an ethereal glowing; a scientist, who looks like an Australian Eugene Levy, discovering interdimensional lightspeed travel. These little vignettes are the subtle moments I appreciated the most.

THINGS AE BLEAK

Every G-Man you in meet The Bureau looks like someone your grandpa used to work with. Their porous, sweaty skin is heavily textured, which in real life should make you consider your smoking habits.

You’ve seen them in discarded professional portraits in the stairwells of your ancestral homes, the background ghosts of today’s estate sales. These horn-rimmed portraits, themselves riddles of the people they represent, are equally unknowable. Everyone is a veteran. Everyone speaks joylessly in monotone. Maybe the Greatest Generation’s biggest failure, aside from Baby Boomers, is our collective inability to imagine these people as anything but stoic moral pillars, with flares of casual racism, occasionally with drinking problems, their values now exclusively attributed as Midwestern.

I know this world is under attack by technologically-advanced aliens who all have some hybrid between Skynet and Google Glass, but not once did I see an emotion portrayed by the characters. If the voice actors nailed it, as they do so occasionally throughout the game, it was cleverly hidden by the lackluster rigging of the characters' facial animations, or in the total miscasting of voices and models. Once there was this beautiful raspy old-man doctor voice coming out of a labcoat who couldn’t have been depicted as more than 35 years old.

In four separate missions during my playthrough, the characters stopped talking completely. To the game’s credit, this had little bearing on what I knew I had to do. I now know it was a glitch (solved by reloading the last checkpoint), that I was supposed to be hearing the characters converse and talk about their partner who is infected with alien mascara tears, but I did not notice this missing puzzle piece upon my initial run through.

I don't really "get" what's going on in The Bureau. Before you remove the shrink-wrap, you've got all these ideas about government agents covering up, redacting, maybe even, you know, declassifying some hidden documents. The world seems to have a communication breakdown, jammed by the alien invaders, even though it doesn't apply to your particular secret government agency. Missions have you ship out to fairly large towns that have been completely destroyed by aliens who have brought giant warships, terraforming the earth itself to accommodate their bizarre fortress-like structures, and the harvesting of what is presumably millions of American civilians.

There is no way, no way in Hell, that the events of this game wouldn't be the most significant moment in human history. Imagine the events of Independence Day, but switch Will Smith from ID4 with the Will Smith from Men in Black. You are lead to believe that no one on Earth knows that the entire planet is being torn apart by aliens. One character, Officer Chulski, whom you interact with only once, is charged with the government cover up of the greatest war in the history of mankind. It is simply unbelievable. These sorts of confusing, mixed signals from the game's fiction that carry onto both the packaging, marketing, and title of the game, are interesting, albeit ignored and illogical themes.

MODERN WARFARE

I found The Bureau to have a pretty steep learning curve. At first, I blamed myself. I'm admittedly terrible at games like this, but insisted on playing on Veteran mode, this game's third toughest difficulty level. The game allowed me to change to Easy or Normal, which I had to do during the second mission of the game.

After getting over that first challenging area, the rest of the game was a breeze. Perma-death did not take any of my squad agents, and I was able to complete several of the big boss battles through panic and sheer force. What gives? My theory is that this is the latest victim to the AAA practice of wowing players in the first mission. Instead of being paced into playing the game, I was funneled through elaborate set pieces dressed to impress, using wild ideas or scenarios that don't really play into the core mechanic of the game.

In the first two hours of The Bureau, up to about the first recognizable "stage" of the game, I saw an army base being ransacked and destroyed, an on-rails train escape from a collapsing mountain. I also saw a large battlefield laid out on a college campus, where I had a squad to command, and enemies spread out in a real-time battle where I flank or be flanked. I had no idea what to do or how to play.

QUESTIONS UNANSWERED

Why won’t Chulski look me in the eye? Why is her entire purpose the only integral tie to the game’s subtitle? Why does my helicopter pilot constantly second guess my commanding officer? Why is Carter such a cliché?

By the end of the game, I enjoyed the battles, which do require you to think and plan your attack strategy. It's really a marked improvement from other similar shooters, the proverbial chess to Mass Effect's checkers, albeit without the hook of story or intrigue. While the two series could learn a lot from each other, The Bureau has a ways to go in terms of storytelling, character development, and polish, both aesthetically and in the designed flow of the game.

As a second effort, this is a strong enough title from 2K Marin. They have the stuff to become a flagship studio in the 2K armada. I only wish a more focused vision for this game had been executed; the ghosts of The Bureau's various E3 showings over the last several years tacked on to this game as vestigial limbs seem to have added more weight than their worth.

I will say that the story does get a bit more interesting at the end of the game, but unfortunately you’ll have to drudge through 10 hours before you get to anything special, just as the curtains close. There’s even a nice meta-narrative about videogames, another jab at the Bioshock “a man chooses, a slave obeys,” but you’ll probably give up on paying attention that far into the game. It’s just not enough.

I don't think XCOM will be 2K's answer to Mass Effect, which feels like their direction to 2K Marin. But I would happily play another strategic shooter from this studio, if only they can craft a more exciting, cohesive world for me to play in.

@scallopdelion