The Bureau: XCOM Declassified review

[Administrator]

"Strategy games are just not contemporary." So said 2K Games boss Christoph Hartmann back in 2011, when discussing the push to reboot the beloved X-COM series.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is born of this lack of confidence in the past. It has all the things modern gamers are supposed to want. A growling hero with a dark past! Moral choices! Conversation wheels! Cover-based shooting! Let the geeks have their turn-based strategy, it seems to say, and we'll get busy with the sticky grenades over here in the big boy pool.
Except, despite being "just not contemporary", last year's turn-based XCOM game, Enemy Unknown, was both brilliant and popular - which leaves this spin-off feeling surplus to requirements. Reconfigured late in development from a first-person shooter to a more tactical third-person squad game, The Bureau is an almost effective hybrid of modern blockbuster tropes and more interesting ideas hastily reintroduced from its supposedly outdated predecessor.
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