I love the Firaxis XCOM games.
From Enemy Unknown to War of the Chosen, their
tactful take on translating the original XCOMs
strategy and management for the next generation
have made them some of my favourite titles
for the past few years. Granted, I put a lot
of my thoughts on this into an XCOM 2 review
almost two years ago, but for those who don’t
want to go video hopping (and don’t want
to see how poor my old production values were),
I'll summarise my points as so.
Working from the template of the original
UFO Defense, Enemy Unknown brought forward
the time worn push and pull of managing a
base with commanding soldiers on the field.
You pump money into research and development,
so your soldiers can pump bullets into space
monsters. The motivation for all these games
has been to win a war at all costs, but how
you do so is totally in your control; based
on what facilities you build back at base,
what soldiers you have in play, and much much
more.
There’s this delicious tension that comes
from keeping these plates spinning month by
month, especially in the face of an increasing
alien threat. The highs are dizzying, and
the lows are absolutely crushing. Losing a
soldier, a satellite or council member might
be the first domino towards defeat, unless
you can find a way to - as the subtitle suggests
- survive, adapt and overcome.
What’s most appealing about them is the
fact they’re a generator for war stories.
That challenge causes you to slowly fall in
love with the soldiers you’re commanding,
and with a wealth of customization options
you can even go to town making them look like
people you know or detailing their epic backstories.
When they pull off impossible shots or unlock
new ranks, you’re as proud as a parent on
school sports day. When they get killed in
the heat of battle, you often have to find
a dark corner to sit in.
All the new XCOM titles carry these elements
forward and improve on them, but there’s
something else. Where Enemy Unknown and especially
War of the Chosen succeeds over the originals
is in their timeliness. The fact that they
can be played with a controller on a home
console means that much of their presentation
and quality of life inclusions ensure that
anyone can pick up and play them, without
losing anything that made UFO Defense originally
a hit. It’s Bushnell’s Law in full effect:
Easy to Learn, Hard to Master. You may never
beat back the aliens the first time you play,
but that defeat isn’t off-putting - you’ll
know that next time you will. And then you
do, maybe in a few weeks. But then, maybe,
you’ll try to do it in a few days, while
slowly taking off stabilizers like quick saves
in till you’re playing the game on a knife's
edge.
This is the quintessential Enemy Unknown Experience,
tweaked to perfection in XCOM2 and then built
on for War of the Chosen.
It’s likely that Firaxis’ take on XCOM
will continue to develop on these great points
for years to come. It’s already reached
that much coveted accolade of directly inspiring
other games: Codenamed STEAM, Invisible INC,
Mario & Rabbids Kingdom Battle, all of which
have taken that new XCOM template and found
new takes on it.
However, there was a time that may not have
gotten Firaxis’ take on XCOM. Well, not
quite. Certainly, the title of XCOM: Enemy
Unknown might have been held by a different
game altogether. One that did not see the
light of day. At least, not as originally
intended.
Today - after spending 5 minutes talking about
XCOM Enemy Unknown - I want to talk about
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. The end of
those initial original Enemy Unknown experiments.
The result is now a nearly 6-year-old third
person shooter by the developers of Bioshock
2 that seemed to up and disappear without
much of a trace. Ironically, the game that
was meant to be the revelation of XCOM’s
secret history is pretty much doomed to become
secret history.
So why, especially as a fan of Firaxis’
take on XCOM, would I want to sell you on
it? After all, wasn’t this the game that
was created because of the supposed non-audience
for classic PC strategy games like UFO Defense?
The game that chased trends like third person
shooting and Hollywood presentation instead
of staying true to the core of the series?
The one that had… this marketing material
associated with it?
“Ahh… YOLO”
YOLO!
YOLO!
YOLO!
Well sure, but that’s not really telling
the whole story. There’s much more to this
strange historical relic of the XCOM franchise.
I want to explain why… well, it’s an underrated
gem. I’m not expecting to convert the hardcore
from one flavour of XCOM to another, but if
you want to appreciate a game that challenged
the core structure of an XCOM title and managed
to succeed in some places, then get comfortable.
It’s time to head back to 1962, to a time
before XCOM existed in our world and theirs.
Where a group of military men and women from
all backgrounds came together to face a threat
they weren’t expecting, and the story of
what happened next.
“Lights”
“We are at war and not the one we were expecting.
Our combined military forces have been routed,
comms have gone dark and the red phone will
not be ringing.
The Bureau was founded to coordinate resistance
forces in the event of a complete and successful
soviet invasion. That mission remains the
same, even if our enemy does not.
We now face an opponent from beyond our world
whose identity is yet unknown. But make no
mistake; this enemy has crippled us.
They have technology decades beyond what we
possess. We must make it our own. Their weapons
will become our weapons and when they do we
shall annihilate them.
I give you new orders; survive, adapt, win.”
“Welcome to XCOM”
I’d like to use a quote by the then head
of 2K games Christoph Hartmann. This was his
response to the feedback to the XCOM 2010
trailer; the one that had reimagined the dormant
strategy series as a First-Person Shooter
in the style of Bioshock. In it, he defends
a change in genre as a sign of the times,
and says this:
“I use the example of music artists. Look
at someone old school like Ray Charles, if
he would make music today it would still be
Ray Charles, but he would probably do it more
in the style of Kanye West. Bringing Ray Charles
back is all fine and good, but it just needs
to move on, although the core essence will
still be the same.“
As you might expect, this quote didn’t exactly
go over well with fans.
“BETRAYL!”
“What?”
“BE-TRAYL! Betrayed me!
This game…
SUUUUUCKS!”
If you don’t know the screaming man next
to a young Angry Joe; this is Noah “Spoony”
Antwiler, a dedicated XCOM fan. His reaction
is the most extreme of the kind of thing that
Christoph was attempting to respond to at
the time. And you know, I can’t really blame
him.
First Person Shooter reboots were the hot
trend of the late 2000s: Starbreeze’s reboot
of the strategy series Syndicate maybe being
the best example of that. It wasn’t immediately
apparent what if anything it brought over
from the original: it hadn’t adapted its
aesthetic, tone, setting or any of its mechanics.
To the more cynical out there, experiments
like this felt like they only shared the same
name to coast on a familiar IP - less of a
creative pursuit and more of an economic one.
On the surface, The XCOM 2010 reboot and its
transformation into the Bureau fits.
Gears of War in XCOM clothing isn’t the
most enticing idea. Hey, XCOM had already
tried to be a third person shooter back in
the early 2000s – in the dumbest way imaginable.
But the more I see that quote about Ray Charles,
the more I realize that he was right, though
maybe not in the way he anticipated. If XCOM:
UFO Defense is a Ray Charles sample, and 2K
Marin are Kayne West, then I guess that makes
The Bureau…
UHH SHETAKE MY-
Alright, just enough not to get flagged.
I don’t make this analogy just for fun.
Though I do do a bit of that as well)
The reason that The Bureau works isn’t because
it chops and skews XCOM to make something
popular: it works with it, takes the texture
of its design and extrapolates it into a full
composition. Things that might have been incidental
details in the original are instead put into
focus here. It’s respectful and reverential.
Maybe not in Enemy Unknown’s slavish adaptation
of its presentation and mechanics, but instead
in carrying that spirit into a new realm.
For Example
How did XCOM: UFO Defense become… XCOM:
UFO Defense?
Well it’d be easy to point at developers
Jullian and Nick Gollop, the publisher Microprose
and the popularity of PC Strategy titles at
the time and say that lightning struck just
at the right time. However, you don’t settle
on an extraterrestrial military thriller without
some inspiration.
To influence the look and feel of UFO Defense,
the developers went through a history of alien
pop culture. The Roswell Crash and its little
grey men. Bob Lazar’s upholstery of alien
technology. Gerry Anderson’s UFO - a British
sci-fi series about a military invention in
an alien invasion - provided much of XCOMs
mechanical and tonal flair. But more importantly
it had an entire catalogue of classic alien
invasion movies to base itself on. Things
like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob,
The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from
another world. Cinema that planted in the
public consciousness what aliens looked like
and their intentions for earth.
The origin of the Alien Invasion story might
be H.G Welles’ War of the Worlds, however
that kind of paranoid b-movie alien invasion
of late 20th century cinema is rooted in far
more modern American history. The post-war
hysteria of the Red Scare.
In his book, Transforming the Screen, Peter
Lev writes:
“Invasion films were common in the 1950s
featuring a variety of aliens portrayed as
superior to earthlings both in intelligence
and technology. In these films, aliens represent
what some Americans feared about the Soviets.
Sometimes the invaders use the strategy of
infiltration, taking over the minds of the
people, making slaves of them, or appropriating
their bodies thus making war unnecessary.
The result of infiltration is loss of free
will, loss of identity, and disintegration
of the family and community. The takeover
represents what many Americans believed would
occur in a Communist invasion.”
Following the end of the Second World War
and the dawn of the atomic age, the relationship
between the western superpowers and the soviet-union
had turned tense. This cold war wasn’t fought
exclusively with weapons, but it was waged
on political, economic and propaganda fronts.
The biggest of these fronts was the space
race between the USA and the USSR. A means
to capture not only the publics imagination,
but to show the industrial prowess of their
respective countries. That rocket technology
that destroyed so many cities could feasibly
send a man to the moon. The first country
to pull it off would be considered the superior
power.
You can understand why the United States could
be a paranoid wreck in these trying times.
Not only was the USA trying to keep the communist
from its doorstep, but they were trying to
keep them out of the stars too. The Soviets
weren’t just gunning for space, but to the
average American they might as well of been
from outer space. Hollywood, feeling the pressure
of communist investigations in their own ranks,
managed to translate those anxieties into
the most popular medium of the time: Motion
Pictures.
It’s unsurprising then that the original
XCOM would co-opt much of this xeroxed paranoia,
even if it wasn’t totally intentional.
Which is why intentionally setting The Bureau
in 1962, the year John Glenn orbited the earth
and the Cuban Missile crisis kicked off, was
such a masterstroke. This wasn’t XCOM just
riffing on material - now it could be a part
of it. It could add details like making XCOM
once a defense mechanism against a Soviet
Invasion, and not an alien one. It could give
you a main character that, fittingly, was
a paranoid G-man now shaken further by these
events.
Like the cold war itself, The Bureau wasn’t
entirely about fighting back through firepower
alone. It was also about keeping America in
the dark. Blacking out communications and
rounding up those affected. It was about putting
spin on moments where the earth was minutes
away from utter annihilation.
It's a subversion of the usual second layer
to XCOM. Both games are firstly about fighting
back aliens directly, seen only through the
eyes of those back at base and the soldiers
in the field. But whereas say War of the Chosen
will then have you create propaganda to inspire
earth’s population to fight back, The Bureau
actively destroys this information where it
can. The most apt example of this is maybe
in the game’s final moments, where the pitch-black
reality of the situation is revealed. After
the day is “saved”, all that alien technology,
all those infected, were dismantled and destroyed.
It’s not all bad though.
For its development on XCOM as a technical
facility, the developers could look at the
American military’s history of space travel.
The Lead Writer of The Bureau sites Tom Wolfe’s
book The Right Stuff as a major inspiration.
An account of the US space program from the
postwar rocket experiments to the mercury
project. You can see it laminated through
the final work. They’re both stories about
American’s working under pressure to solve
a cosmic task. How it needed to find people
with the titular right stuff to push beyond
210% of effort. It's just that 2K Marin’s
tale has a lot more shooting in it.
Best of all, The Bureau leveraged the aesthetic
strength of its time by trading the cold,
skeuomorphic presentation of the older games
for something warmer and more tangible. This
is low-fi sci-fi, rendered in all the attention
to detail the developers showed in their Bioshock
work. This military base isn’t just abstract
representation, it's a warm and smoky theater,
with enormous reel by reel computers and glorious
laboratories. An ashtray on every desk, a
hat on every stand. Even when compared to
its peers at the time, as an Unreal Engine
3 game it holds up incredibly well, especially
in scenes where art direction is fully at
the wheel. Tying it all together is a soundtrack
by Bioshock composer Garry Schyman, that trades
the rousing military sound of Enemy Unknown
for tense jazz percussion.
It all forms
together to form what is essentially an XCOM
period piece, fitting for its more story driven
approach.
Being a Period Piece works out in another
way fitting for the franchise. Because it
is set in the 1960s, it must have the cast
be somewhat normative for its time and place.
Those in-charge are older American men, including
your main character and much of his squad.
But that additional cast of characters that
surrounds you are much more subversive. There’s
the female agent Angela Weaver, the African-American
pilot Leon Barnes, closeted homosexual scientist
Alan Wier. This isn’t diversity for the
sake of it, it establishes the XCOM of Enemy
Unknown that took on all genders, races and
orientations to fight in their war. Importantly
for The Bureau, their different backgrounds
give a more nuanced perspective into this
world of XCOM then it would be just through
your character’s eyes.
In trying to stay too faithful to the original
UFO Defense, Enemy Unknown and even much of
War of the Chosen misses the opportunity that
setting this story in another time could have
achieved. Again, it riffs on the material
but never really digs into it like The Bureau
does.
But I get it. This is salad dressing. Without
something substantial for it to support, it
might as well be postcards. What are you doing,
and why are you doing it?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
The developers didn’t need to put in the
level of detail of its 1960s setting but considering
the change in camera angle from an overhead
management game to an over the shoulder shooter,
it makes sense. Bringing things to ground
level makes things more personal and requires
extra detail.
But in changing that camera angle, it changes
the type of game this is. Although Enemy Unknown
and War of the Chosen might present its action
and even base much of its design language
on the third person cover shooter, it is still
a turn-based tactical game, with the addition
of base management to back it up.
The Bureau doesn’t have that base management
side; rather, much of the work of research,
development and appealing to the top brass
is done through traditional cutscenes, dialogue
sections and incidental world detail. It’s
a much more immediate kind of adventure, and
your successes are less reliant on every plate
spinning and instead making sure you can navigate
your main character to success.
By that token then, you would think that the
strategy side of XCOM has also been simplified
for The Bureau? Well, fortunately not. Although
you do have a main character to worry about,
he is always joined on mission with two other
squad members and keeping them alive is absolutely
necessary.
Although they are capable enough of taking
care of themselves, you’ll get so much more
out of directing them. That’s why The Bureau
adapted the command bar of Enemy Unknown into
a radial menu called Battle Focus.
Instead of the point and click of the mouse,
it’s the more intuitive point and pull of
a third person shooter. You’re still given
all the cover data of the enemies on the field
and given a lot of different options to deal
with them, so it’s not a step back at all
in depth. More interestingly, employing the
command menu doesn’t stop time completely
- merely it buys you a breath to place your
soldiers and set their commands. It feels
the closest games have managed to adapt the
notion of keeping a cool head during a firefight.
It’s one aspect the game needed to get right
to appeal to the strategy fans of XCOM, and
I’d argue it does so excellently. It’s
intuitive to use and it doesn’t skimp content.
It adapts a core XCOM tenant and makes it
fit in the template of a new genre.
Best of all, The Bureau didn’t even need
to reduce the scope of its level design to
make it work. In fact, by having a character
driven interface, the developers made arenas
more natural in their cover placements and
shapes, unlike the strictly cubic formations
of Enemy Unknown’s environments. Again,
The Bureau is not afraid to break from slavish
recreations of UFO Defense if it’ll improve
the quality of the product, which this does.
It brings back the recognizable antagonists
of UFO Defense and Enemy Unknown but gives
them more shape through this change in perspective
and engagement. The best example I can think
of might be the drones, who are a small annoyance
in Enemy Unknown, while in The Bureau they
are attention grabbers that require you to
keep an eye in the sky. It’s not just the
number challenge of taking out enemies as
is the case in Enemy Unknown, but a coordination
one too.
When the game veers into more interesting
mechanical opportunities is when things get
most exciting. There is a boss fight that
subverts your reliance on cover. It’s not
much, but considering the game is already
relying on you to use the entire breadth of
the Command Menu to coordinate combat, it
only reaffirms that this isn’t just your
run of the mill Third Person Cover Shooter.
Granted, destructible cover across the board
would have been fantastic, but hey.
Is this better than War of the Chosen? Well,
it’s different. Combat in a game like that
is more like setting up a mousetrap - you’ll
put one guy into overwatch, and another in
slashing distance, so that one shot from a
character all the way over here will trigger
the other two. It’s satisfying in the same
way the rest of the game is: it’s throwing
a hail mary early on and seeing the results
payout in glorious fashion. It’s like calling
your shots and pulling them off.
The Bureau is a game where you're still making those plays but you’re not doing it to set traps with your chess pieces,
but instead because the situation changed
a minute ago and you need to react. It’s
a war that feels… well, more like a war,
where although you’re given all the tools
needed to achieve a victory, you’re often
not given enough time to do so. It’s sink
or swim. While I wouldn’t want it in every
XCOM game, I love it here; it fits the smaller
and more personal nature of the setting and
the story.
What ties this all together is a plot that,
although seems a little light on the surface,
manages to subvert the expectations of the
audience in a way that digs right into the
heart of its setting and even the nature of
XCOM.
I would say that if you haven’t played this
game, I would maybe skip this section and
find out for yourself. That said, considering
you’re probably watching this either because
you played it or never intended to… uhh,
you have been warned.
The story itself is… exactly what you would
expect from XCOM. Aliens invade, you stop
them. It’s not your story to rewrite, but
instead you’re the soldier pushed through
set-pieces with the intent of getting to that
final alien defeat. You see the size of this
threat not from the drone footage presentation
of the older games but from this soldier’s
eye view. The developers don’t shy from
the ramifications of that: you see loved ones
rendered to ash, streets filled with bodies,
monolithic towers floating feet above placid
suburbia. It’s XCOM as horror, and not just
in its difficulty. Between these shock moments,
you’ll make some friends, lose some. You’ll
even get to ride around in XCOMs awesome flying
saucer. Did I mention XCOM built a flying
saucer?
No, it’s not the main plot of The Bureau
that is interesting - though it is a wonderful
vehicle for great levels, squelchy spooks
and 60s decor. Like those tales of epic headshots
and coming back from the brink of death, this
is a character driven one - the character
of William Carter.
Although touched upon previously, a reason
needs to be given for why there’s not a
lot of management in this XCOM, and why it
is more in the form of a third person shooter.
That’s because you’re not playing the
XCOM Commander - that’s this guy, Myron
Faulke. Instead you play as William Carter;
an ex-CIA agent with a tragic past. He can
shoot, he can take orders, and he can certainly
give orders too. William Carter is kind of
your typical hero of the time: he sounds like
Lego Batman, and he looks like your Grandad.
"We work in teams here, it seems you're more accustomed to working alone."
"Yeah, well I'm also accustom to the enemy being Human."
He doesn’t play well with others, and boy
he sure hates those aliens. The kind of guy
you can put on the box art with a big robot
arm and hope it sells!
But throughout the game we begin to grasp
that he’s not exactly who he says he is.
His actions in the field are incredibly lucid
for a stunted alcoholic who’s been sitting
behind a desk for the past few years. Plus
if he really is such a bad team player, why
is he a trusted commander? Is Ludonarrative
friction rearing its head? Rather, in the
game’s climactic moments, we learn that
we were never really William Carter all along.
Well.
William Carter the character exists, with
his own defined personality and traits, but
we were only commanding him. We never got
a choice to customize him like a soldier nor
really influence much of his decisions, and
this was intentional. The developers wanted
to write a game where an XCOM soldier had
their own identity and explore how they would
feel being commanded by a higher being.
The being in this case being an Ethereal who
acts as a neutral party between the invaders
and the earthlings. One that at the beginning
of the game hid in a briefcase and bound itself
to William Carter to save his life. One that,
as you’ve probably figured out by now, allowed
William Carter to have the level of tactical
knowhow he would of had to have waited 32
years in till 1994s UFO Defense to get.
“Sometimes the invaders use the strategy
of infiltration, taking over the minds of
the people, making slaves of them, or appropriating
their bodies, thus making war unnecessary.
The takeover represents what many Americans
believed would occur in a Communist invasion.”
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is your typical
alien invasion story on the surface, and then
it becomes a very atypical one. You were the
alien invader. You took over the mind of this
one soldier to win a war… not for the other
alien invaders, but for the humans.
Going back to that setting, and its need for
a normative character. William Carter is a
paranoid control freak, the kind of wound
up government man you’d have as the antagonist
in a family-friendly alien movie. Many of
the clues were just out of frame. The fact
his tragic loss haunts him is because their
deaths were out of his control. The moment
that it’s revealed that a symbiotic alien
has been the reason for his prowess on the
field, he isn’t enlightened… in fact,
he rigs the base with explosives to oust the
alien from his body. This is the kind of story
that can only work in the medium of video
games: a postmodern battle of character vs
author, or in this case controller.
Often games have heroic characters turn heel
but you’re usually fully in-control… rarely
has a game had the main player character turn
on you in the final moments.
The thing is that your story doesn’t end
there. Having the main character turn on you
in the final moments is just a plot twist.
The developers wanted to make a point of the
commander/soldier relationship. When William
Carter gives up control and returns to his
base self - you now have the option of taking
on a new host. Brilliantly, they’re two
of those subversive characters: the scientist
and the agent, those who looked at the world
with a more hopeful attitude then Carter.
The third character? Myron Faulke himself,
the XCOM commander. The man with the vision
to work collaboratively to overcome this threat.
If the question is how could you fix a character
like William Carter, they are the answer.
They’re willing to fight with alien technology
against alien technology - retro as hell space
suits and all - for the greater good. When
the freed Carter goes against orders and begins
to wreck the final mission, you’re given
a choice to slaughter or spare him. It’s
asking what you want from this soldier. Does
he deserve retribution, or instead do you
leave him as a relic of the past, paving the
way for the all colors future of XCOM Enemy
Unknown.
The Bureau could have been a player driven
war story game, but it could not of had a
story reveal like this.
It’s why I’ve been thinking about this
game since the first time I played it; this
strange follow up to Enemy Unknown that zagged
where that zigged. It didn’t try to recreate
UFO Defense for the modern age through the
latest design trends and technology, but instead
transformed it through a little introspection.
What does it really mean to be in XCOM, to
be commanded? Why are the aliens a threat,
and how do you feel about that? It investigated
those little square rooms of the base and
pondered not just how they looked but how
they felt.
Often, adapting a franchise to a new genre
falters either by trying to be too faithful
or not enough. There’s a fine balance in
trying to service fans of the original while
also making the most of whatever medium you’ve
moving into.
I can see why many would say The Bureau was
bad because it was too radical a departure
from XCOM: UFO Defense. Especially when compared
to Enemy Unknown, the two have very little
in common.
But this is a great thing. Those three pillars
of The Bureau: Its setting, its systems and
its story would not have come out a more faithful
adaptation. The developers couldn’t have
dug into what an alien invasion really means
from a historical and mechanical perspective
if it stuck to computer monitors and pointer
driven commands.
It kept the spirit or UFO Defense and let
it soar. Upwards, and twirling, always twirling,
towards the future.
The Bureau doesn’t need a sequel: It is
a self-contained story, one that told the
tale of XCOM before Enemy Unknown. Updating
it for the 80s Cold War era would just be
riffing on what came previously. There is
plenty that could have been improved with
a second pass, but without the right vehicle,
it just wouldn’t feel right.
But, as an example of what happens when XCOM
goes on a genre vacation, It proved the viability
of translating this franchise beyond remaking
and retooling UFO Defense. An XCOM Visual
Novel could deepen that on base interaction
and dark military bent without the need to
facilitate other aspects. An XCOM First Person
game could finally deliver on that horror
that’s only hinted at here. An XCOM racing
game… could be good?
Whatever the future holds for this franchise,
I hope that they can learn from some of the
successes of its past to forge a new path.
After all, XCOM is at its best when it follows
its own advice. Survive, Adapt, Win.
