The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is free on humblebundle

humblebundle.com/store/the-bureau-xcom-declassified

We have an xcom thread already up.

It's different if it's a free game though.

Oh god. Who would ever want THIS for free?

How's the game? I only played the first XCOM.

An extreme case of lost potential, still fun but nowhere near what it could - and should - have been.

its garbage
had a troubled development cycle and it shows

It's not an X-com game and suffers from no-one being sure if it's supposed to be ripping off of Bioshock, Mass Effect or new X-Com to the result of stealing bits off of all three but not doing any of them well.

So it's got Mass-Effect style game play but with randomly generated squadmates that can permamently die if you aren't careful but at the same time are so shit at shooting enemies and pathfinding that you're not going to give a shit about any of them other than to swear at them when they leave cover mid-firefight to follow you because you moved too far away from them or decided to sit on an alien grenade like a suicidal chicken.

Furthermore, there's no R&D in the game, instead you find weapons/backpacks (the only non-weapon collectible, you can only have one active per agent and they provide minor buffs) out in the field and pick them up to unlock them. Weapon drops are really fucking weird though and since your squadmates can only use one weapon type I recall having some soldiers with tier 3 weapons while one class only had access to their default weapon despite me picking up everything in every mission up to that point (not that it matters as your squadmates can't shoot shit). Backpacks suffer from giving you vague bonuses with no way of sticking a numerical value to them (is "increased accuracy" better than "increased headshot damage"? What about for my squadmates? What about this one that says it "greatly increases accuracy"?).

The story and writing is also schizophrenic, one minute people are talking about how they're successfully covering up the alien invasion from the general public, the next entire towns are getting wiped off the map and all the Bureau/XCOM can do is shoot a few aliens in the aftermath, then it's back to talking about how they need to cover everything up to avoid a general panic. In another mission the sole female operative in the game (who was probably supposed to be a party member back when they were making the game like it was Mass Effect) goes hunting a senior alien officer so she can kill him for killing/capturing-and-torturing her brother. You are sent to stop her because you need the alien alive to interrorgate it find out the aliens plans. When you eventually catch up to her and beat the alien in a boss fight your character just lets her shoot the alien in the following cutscene and no-one mentions that you were trying to capture it.

It also had a teaser trailer which had a more bioshockish tone (single player FPS, use a camera to research enemies, protagonist is in a nice town that went to shit because of reasons) but then dropped 99% of the things in the teaser early on in development leading to the "it could have been good" camp such as this user: .

Sometimes when I'm bored I go over in my head all the ways the game fucks up, it helps fill out time when I'm walking a distance alone or cooking food. I've started the game at least three times since I got it and never completed, most recently a couple of months ago I got to half way through the final level before getting bored and dropping it.

I have been adding games to these few Steam account ever since Sega gave away all those games like JSR for free sometime ago and now I have quite a bunch of useful "fake" accounts.

Just pirate it for fucks sakes.

???

If you ever did, you could add:
The ending pulls a 2deep4u plot twist that completely undermines your player character's development. The MC starts out depressed and probably suicidal asshole. He slowly develops into a likeable and responsible leader over the course of the game.

Turns out the likeable part was an ayylien parasite.

Oh, I got that far. It's the bit after when you're on the alien space station as a character other than Carter when I quit. I just couldn't summon up enough of a shit to pull through the last few fights, especially as the game didn't seem like it'd let me do a twist ending and conquer the Earth as the other aliens. I'll probably finish it someday, when I'm bored and feel the need to bitch about something, but for now there's a massive backlog of games I'd rather play instead.

Really mediocre
However the ending twist is pretty fucking neato when you're tricked into believing you're playing a 3rd person shooter, but you've actually been playing it in 1st person the whole time through the eyes of an ethereal controlling the main character

Honestly I blame the faggots who cried that it wasn't a TBS game.
I reckon those are the same faggots who think Enemy Unknown/Within/2 are at worst above average games.

Oh yes, the nostalgia faggots whining about muh TBS definitely killed it.

Not that I blame you, that final level's idea of difficulty was just keep tossing tedious waves of enemies at you from multiple directions. Even moreso than the rest of the game, that is. No new enemies or a unique boss either.

If I recall correctly, the last fight was just survive several bullshit enemy waves then make a dash for the objective. I don't really know if the final waves were infinite spawns, I just said "Fuck this, I'm out" after seeing more and more jetpack Mutons spawning from behind.

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This is some next level Holla Forumshipster bullshit, congrats user

I liked it, if only because by the end you're a girl in a 1950 sci-fi space suit shooting aliens with a plasma gun.

Reminder, IGN owns Humblebundle and will sell your information.

Did you also cry over Mario Kart not being a platformer back in the day?

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