The First XCom game I played was enemy unknown which turned out to be one of the games I enjoyed so much I played over and over again even tho I never completed it mainly due to losing the team you built up and came to love. losing one of them is the worst thing ever knowing you built them up for a recruit to major only for them to fall and then you are stuck with a recruit again only to find they are not good enough later in the game, ah well lets start over.
The Bureau Tried to put a new spin on things by having the game as a third person shooter instead of the traditional turn base we came to love from the set of games.
You play as a special agent called William carter in the 1960’s who was given a case what contained an unknown item that needed delivering when all hell starts to break loss as you are attacked by an unknown intruder who gets evaporated upon opening the case.
The game feels more like mass effect when you playing more than anything else, the whole way how you can slow down the action in order to give orders to your team (Movement, what target to attack and what ability’s to use) unlike mass effect tho if your main man goes down you have a chance for a team mate to revive you before you bleed out. the full control system to control your men are very clunky indeed. The slightest movement of your mouse while you are hitting the key to use ability’s will make you jump to a totally different ally than you where trying to give orders to, making you panic in tight combat areas when you don’t need to.
Carter him self can level up to level ten gaining special ability’s as you go up, from being able to call in a combat drone to using a alien blob to fight for you, your team however can only go to level five and with only four classes to recruit from (recon, support, commando and engineer) your options are limited and you will find you will use the same classes thought out the game. On the mission map you are able to send your spare team out to do missions by them self’s in order to gain XP and over useful items, exactly like you can on assassins creed.
The AI how ever is as most use as a chocolate fire guard, there random movement and change of positions made it hard to lock down a area to defend against many enemy’s. In one of the levels I played one of my team went down in the pen after going on a crazy run to no where and ended up getting downed. but instead of my second team mate helping take out what remained first he ended up going by himself to “help” revive him and all he ended up doing was causing more hassle. he managed to get him up but upon this he was downed and then the revived one started to get the other guy up and he went down again….. well this is fun until we ended up getting killed due to the insane AI. this happened a couple of times making some areas a complete nightmare to get thought.
Unlike the rest of the XCom games you could not improve your base or research new items, A Massive part of the game in my eyes was missing there alone, the only way you could get new weapons was by picking them up in levels. Biggest part of the fun of XCom is the ability to decide what you wanted to unlock and when but this was taken away from you.
All in all The Bureau is not the worst game I have played but then again, no where near the best. some people say “change is good” and some say “dont fix something that is not broken” and for me XCom was never broken.
