Um bom jogo. A história tem defeitos, como por exemplo a motivação do inimigo sendo MUITO superficial e o final meio confuso. Mas a jogabilidade é divertida, a possibilidade de fazer estratégias durante os combates é o ponto alto do game. A IA inimiga é super desafiadora, enquanto a IA dos seus companheiros de equipe é HORRIVEL. A jogabilidade boa e não previsível faz um ótimo papel mas que no fim te deixa um gosto amargo na boca por uma trama tão desconexa.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown was one of the best RTS games to come out in years. It had tightly coordinated tactical gameplay that packed a punch and kept you on your toes. The Bureau kind of keeps this idea while bringing you into the dice rolled battles first hand so you can control them. The game takes place after the Cold War where agent William Carter is tasked with helping save the entire planet from an alien invasion. That is one hefty mission, but you have squad mates to bring alongside with you.
XCOM is a third person cover based tactical shooter. It pretty much feels like a zoomed in more detailed Enemy Unknown. You will encounter some of the same enemies and the art style is even the same. You can snap into a cove and order your squad to do things like lift an enemy up, heal, revive, throw out traps like mines, sharpshoot and enemy etc. You can queue these up while time slows down and watch it all unfold. It’s a very powerful tool in this game and can get you out in a pinch. The shooting itself is mediocre. Weapons never feel all that powerful and somehow just feel off. Ammo runs out constantly and you can end up weaponless a lot of the times in a hot firefight. At least the level are well laid out enough for you to find adequate cover and plan your attack.
There’s really not much else to the game outside of shooting. You move from fight to fight pressing switches or finding the intel. The game is a bit on the cinematic side and the opening sequence is pretty awesome. Once your back at HQ you can walk around and talk to people, start side missions, and upgrade your squad and loadout. You get the same death penalty as in Enemy Unknown. A completely leveled up squad member can be lost in battle if you don’t revive them in time, however, the revive time is a way to quick to pass. It’s not enough time for someone to go to a battleground and save someone. This becomes frustrating since leveling up takes so long. When you do choose squad members you can choose from Snipers, close combat, medics, and various other classes. This mainly just determines their skill tree.
I also found it annoying that weapons are slow to unlock. 25% through the game I only found a few weapons and two alien weapons. There’s various other blueprints or tech you can find to turn into other things, but it’s not as deep as Enemy Unknown. What’s here is solid fun, but it gets repetitive and boring quickly. Every battle turns out the same, you get the occasional boss fight but it just gets so monotonous where there would be more substance. The game looks pretty good on PC but looks very dated on consoles. It’s nothing special, but the attention to detail on the Cold War era atmosphere is pretty awesome and engaging.
As it stands, The Bureau is a solid shooter that takes the tactical RTS gameplay and puts you in the driver’s seat. The atmosphere is well captured and the skill tree system makes battles easier, but the frustration of perma-loss when a squad member dies is excruciating. The overall combat can get dull and repetitive early on with nothing in between.
XCOM is a third person cover based tactical shooter. It pretty much feels like a zoomed in more detailed Enemy Unknown. You will encounter some of the same enemies and the art style is even the same. You can snap into a cove and order your squad to do things like lift an enemy up, heal, revive, throw out traps like mines, sharpshoot and enemy etc. You can queue these up while time slows down and watch it all unfold. It’s a very powerful tool in this game and can get you out in a pinch. The shooting itself is mediocre. Weapons never feel all that powerful and somehow just feel off. Ammo runs out constantly and you can end up weaponless a lot of the times in a hot firefight. At least the level are well laid out enough for you to find adequate cover and plan your attack.
There’s really not much else to the game outside of shooting. You move from fight to fight pressing switches or finding the intel. The game is a bit on the cinematic side and the opening sequence is pretty awesome. Once your back at HQ you can walk around and talk to people, start side missions, and upgrade your squad and loadout. You get the same death penalty as in Enemy Unknown. A completely leveled up squad member can be lost in battle if you don’t revive them in time, however, the revive time is a way to quick to pass. It’s not enough time for someone to go to a battleground and save someone. This becomes frustrating since leveling up takes so long. When you do choose squad members you can choose from Snipers, close combat, medics, and various other classes. This mainly just determines their skill tree.
I also found it annoying that weapons are slow to unlock. 25% through the game I only found a few weapons and two alien weapons. There’s various other blueprints or tech you can find to turn into other things, but it’s not as deep as Enemy Unknown. What’s here is solid fun, but it gets repetitive and boring quickly. Every battle turns out the same, you get the occasional boss fight but it just gets so monotonous where there would be more substance. The game looks pretty good on PC but looks very dated on consoles. It’s nothing special, but the attention to detail on the Cold War era atmosphere is pretty awesome and engaging.
As it stands, The Bureau is a solid shooter that takes the tactical RTS gameplay and puts you in the driver’s seat. The atmosphere is well captured and the skill tree system makes battles easier, but the frustration of perma-loss when a squad member dies is excruciating. The overall combat can get dull and repetitive early on with nothing in between.
Good plot twist
Third person cover-based shooter with some attempts at innovation that are unfortunately pointless. Companions are customisable, upgradable and suffer permadeath in classic X-com style but the fast paced shooting provides little time or incentive for tactical planning. The AI is competent enough that permadeath doesn't happen too often. Story is uninteresting aside from one good plot twist and many details are inconsistent with the other X-com games so it doesn't appear to even be set in the same universe.
It's ok. Unfortunate that it's tied to the XCOM intellectual property, since as an original it would be much better liked.
budget mass effect
I played the first mission and was just completely uninterested to play any more of it.
Esto no es XCOM ;-;
This review contains spoilers
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
I started out hating this game. Not only did it seem like a more shallow version of the already-lackluster Mass Effect 2 combat from 2010, the story was nothing to write home about either. And yet I did write about it, so what changed? Well first of all, I have to acknowledge that the aesthetic is very well done. In terms of fidelity the game isn't amazing, but it has a very cohesive retro-futuristic look mixed with a weird XCOM 2 alien structure design, and it works for some reason. They feel appropriately out of place next to each other, like you have been invaded by a technologically superior race. Bravo. Second of all, and this is where it gets good, at some point after the halfway point I realized that this aesthetic of a 50s sci fi B movie was not just surface level. Rather it translated into the writing, the acting, and the story itself. Now obviously I can't know if this was intentional or not, but it certainly feels exactly like the corny stuff you'd expect from those productions. Certainly the art assets are made this way intentionally, and it would take really, really awful writers to come up with the stuff unintentionally, so my gut feeling is that it was on purpose. And while that may not make for a great game, it makes for a great concept for one.
Let's talk about the story for a minute. It starts off very predictably with the standard tropes of an in medias res by way of an alien attack on the government facility where you work as Special Agent William Carter. He literally looks like the family man you'd see in a Fallout poster which itself parodies 50s American propaganda. And the story itself follows suit; it is a clear allegory for a Cold War for a long while. The aliens are the Soviets, complete with infiltrators, sleeper agents, and a hivemind with no room for individuality. The main characters are, of course, the main characters; Americans who patriotically and heroically sacrifice their own lives for the country, and by God they look good doing it! Only, in the background and left unsaid for much of it is a more sinister undertone. For example, on the main base in the campaign there is a shooting range, as is customary in these types of games. At the start of the campaign this is a standard operation, you push a button, the targets line up, and you can shoot their heads or whatever you want. After a few missions, however, when you push that button little grey aliens show up. And then the game becomes not about shooting the stationary targets but about shooting a defenseless creature that, as you later come to know, is actually just a slave to the system, forced to build structures and only shooting at you in self-defense. Furthermore, Carter (the main character) slowly becomes fed up with the system and his (yours) boss, Faulke. Becomes of the way the chain of command works, he doesn't get to know all the information, and that often leaves him in the dark on missions.
All the above is fine and it could certainly make for an interesting experience if developed. But it's not. Instead after like half the game the allegory is dropped, the aliens are no longer Russians, now they're just regular aliens again. And Carter's outspoken dissatisfaction with the system morphs into something else. Throughout the game you find out that the main bad guy, the one that you must kill to turn off all the other aliens (because of course), has a telepathic bond with the entire rest of the alien species and gives them commands that way. When you finally confront him, he calls you Prisoner, as he has done in the past, and tells you that he actually doesn't care about you, he cares about your demon. It turns out that the reason Carter is special and has these abilities to overlook the battlefield in the way that forms the main mechanic of the game, is actually because he has an Ethereal living inside of him. Basically they're telepathic ghosts. Carter then promptly kills the bad guy and seals away the bad guy ghost in his arm (roll with it). They then return to base and lock it away in a giant tube of green gas that they conveniently had lying around. From this point on, Carter hears more and more voices, and he speaks out explicitly against them. This all comes to ahead when, after the base has been attacked for a second time, he faces the camera and speaks directly to you, the player and the ghost. He says he is done being a slave to the system, he has his own free will and he would rather die than be a puppet to someone else. So he gives you an ultimatum; he sets down a bomb and gives you 30 seconds to decide if you want to stay with him and be killed or detach yourself from him and leave the situation alone. The guy you've been controlling the entire time gives you an ultimatum. And you actually do have 30 seconds to decide. Incidentally it's not really a choice because if you choose to stay with him for the entire duration of the countdown, the bomb really does blow up and you get a game over screen. Instead you must detach yourself from him. And then you choose. Throughout the game there have been 3 minor characters; Director Faulke as mentioned before, the scientist Doctor Weir, and a hot female agent named Angela Weaver. Now you must choose one of them to possess, and you thusly play the last mission as that character. Not only that, the character you chose saves you from being assassinated by Carter, and so he is now an anti-hero in the story! You then proceed to go into space and kill the bad guy (again but for real this time I promise), and you have to choose whether to kill Carter or not. On one hand he threatened to kill you multiple times, and he has become a liability to the sytem, on the other you just spent something close to 10 hours playing as the man. This feels a bit like Mass Effect 3's ending choice of reprogramming the machines for your own benefit or destroying the system and breaking free will but at a severe cost to your progress. Except here there is no choice. You made your choice already. You chose to leave Carter, the only person who could've stopped the system, and instead you invested in Weaver, Weir, or Faulke. It doesn't matter who because they're all The System, they're all the same, there is no individuality between them. And so you dutifully step into the chamber from which the enemy army is controlled, and you take over. And then, and here's the good part, you order them to systematically slaughter each other. You don't just genocide the fuck out of them, you force them to genocide the fuck out of each other. Then, even though you EXPLICITLY FOUND A CURE FOR THE BODYSNATCHER DISEASE WHICH THEY INFECTED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WITH EARLIER IN THE GAME, you genocide anyone who has been "compromised", anyone who was a victim, and you wipe out their towns, their cities, their entire histories. All to preserve the lie that there was no alien invasion. Everything gets redacted, every person who knew about it is either forced to work for XCOM or they're assassinated. And that's why I had to write about it.
I started out hating this game. Not only did it seem like a more shallow version of the already-lackluster Mass Effect 2 combat from 2010, the story was nothing to write home about either. And yet I did write about it, so what changed? Well first of all, I have to acknowledge that the aesthetic is very well done. In terms of fidelity the game isn't amazing, but it has a very cohesive retro-futuristic look mixed with a weird XCOM 2 alien structure design, and it works for some reason. They feel appropriately out of place next to each other, like you have been invaded by a technologically superior race. Bravo. Second of all, and this is where it gets good, at some point after the halfway point I realized that this aesthetic of a 50s sci fi B movie was not just surface level. Rather it translated into the writing, the acting, and the story itself. Now obviously I can't know if this was intentional or not, but it certainly feels exactly like the corny stuff you'd expect from those productions. Certainly the art assets are made this way intentionally, and it would take really, really awful writers to come up with the stuff unintentionally, so my gut feeling is that it was on purpose. And while that may not make for a great game, it makes for a great concept for one.
Let's talk about the story for a minute. It starts off very predictably with the standard tropes of an in medias res by way of an alien attack on the government facility where you work as Special Agent William Carter. He literally looks like the family man you'd see in a Fallout poster which itself parodies 50s American propaganda. And the story itself follows suit; it is a clear allegory for a Cold War for a long while. The aliens are the Soviets, complete with infiltrators, sleeper agents, and a hivemind with no room for individuality. The main characters are, of course, the main characters; Americans who patriotically and heroically sacrifice their own lives for the country, and by God they look good doing it! Only, in the background and left unsaid for much of it is a more sinister undertone. For example, on the main base in the campaign there is a shooting range, as is customary in these types of games. At the start of the campaign this is a standard operation, you push a button, the targets line up, and you can shoot their heads or whatever you want. After a few missions, however, when you push that button little grey aliens show up. And then the game becomes not about shooting the stationary targets but about shooting a defenseless creature that, as you later come to know, is actually just a slave to the system, forced to build structures and only shooting at you in self-defense. Furthermore, Carter (the main character) slowly becomes fed up with the system and his (yours) boss, Faulke. Becomes of the way the chain of command works, he doesn't get to know all the information, and that often leaves him in the dark on missions.
All the above is fine and it could certainly make for an interesting experience if developed. But it's not. Instead after like half the game the allegory is dropped, the aliens are no longer Russians, now they're just regular aliens again. And Carter's outspoken dissatisfaction with the system morphs into something else. Throughout the game you find out that the main bad guy, the one that you must kill to turn off all the other aliens (because of course), has a telepathic bond with the entire rest of the alien species and gives them commands that way. When you finally confront him, he calls you Prisoner, as he has done in the past, and tells you that he actually doesn't care about you, he cares about your demon. It turns out that the reason Carter is special and has these abilities to overlook the battlefield in the way that forms the main mechanic of the game, is actually because he has an Ethereal living inside of him. Basically they're telepathic ghosts. Carter then promptly kills the bad guy and seals away the bad guy ghost in his arm (roll with it). They then return to base and lock it away in a giant tube of green gas that they conveniently had lying around. From this point on, Carter hears more and more voices, and he speaks out explicitly against them. This all comes to ahead when, after the base has been attacked for a second time, he faces the camera and speaks directly to you, the player and the ghost. He says he is done being a slave to the system, he has his own free will and he would rather die than be a puppet to someone else. So he gives you an ultimatum; he sets down a bomb and gives you 30 seconds to decide if you want to stay with him and be killed or detach yourself from him and leave the situation alone. The guy you've been controlling the entire time gives you an ultimatum. And you actually do have 30 seconds to decide. Incidentally it's not really a choice because if you choose to stay with him for the entire duration of the countdown, the bomb really does blow up and you get a game over screen. Instead you must detach yourself from him. And then you choose. Throughout the game there have been 3 minor characters; Director Faulke as mentioned before, the scientist Doctor Weir, and a hot female agent named Angela Weaver. Now you must choose one of them to possess, and you thusly play the last mission as that character. Not only that, the character you chose saves you from being assassinated by Carter, and so he is now an anti-hero in the story! You then proceed to go into space and kill the bad guy (again but for real this time I promise), and you have to choose whether to kill Carter or not. On one hand he threatened to kill you multiple times, and he has become a liability to the sytem, on the other you just spent something close to 10 hours playing as the man. This feels a bit like Mass Effect 3's ending choice of reprogramming the machines for your own benefit or destroying the system and breaking free will but at a severe cost to your progress. Except here there is no choice. You made your choice already. You chose to leave Carter, the only person who could've stopped the system, and instead you invested in Weaver, Weir, or Faulke. It doesn't matter who because they're all The System, they're all the same, there is no individuality between them. And so you dutifully step into the chamber from which the enemy army is controlled, and you take over. And then, and here's the good part, you order them to systematically slaughter each other. You don't just genocide the fuck out of them, you force them to genocide the fuck out of each other. Then, even though you EXPLICITLY FOUND A CURE FOR THE BODYSNATCHER DISEASE WHICH THEY INFECTED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WITH EARLIER IN THE GAME, you genocide anyone who has been "compromised", anyone who was a victim, and you wipe out their towns, their cities, their entire histories. All to preserve the lie that there was no alien invasion. Everything gets redacted, every person who knew about it is either forced to work for XCOM or they're assassinated. And that's why I had to write about it.
Why did I play The Buraeu? Cause I ran out of money for other games and I thought the 1950s aesthetic was cool. I regret my decision immensely
Game was lame and ran like shit. May play it again to see if I'm too harsh on it though
xcom but it's mass effect and more generic