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Many years back, before Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within was even conceived, 2K Games decided to shoulder the burden of rebooting XCOM. Unfortunately, that turned out poorly. Extremely. Fucking. Poorly. Perhaps because Mass Effect was popular at the time, but they decided to go with Third Person Shooter game play with pausing and issuing commands to your squad. For starters, that ran contrary to XCOM at the soul. XCOM was supposed to be a turn based tactical/strategy game. An extremely troubled development cycle didn't help either. At first they wanted to emphasize the investigative aspects of XCOM. You're an agent sent out to investigate anomalies and incidents across the US, document your findings, and turn them in for research when you get back. Then they scrapped a year's worth of development and began anew as a shooter with lots of alien blasting. More info on it here: http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/19/4614410/xcom-the-bureau-development-2006-2013 When the game was first announced, a lot of fans flipped their shit. 1950s? Shooter? Yup, definitely not XCOM. The funny part is that backlash gave Jake Solomon the opportunity to develop XCOM Enemy Unknown to recreate the old games in modern fashion. That one had its own troubled development of sorts, but a far cry from The Bureau's/XCOM Declassified's. But I took the plunge and played through The Bureau. I ended up really liking it. I like XCOM in general and the lore of the XCOM universe. The game's story wasn't anything unique nor profound, but what appealed to me were the tiny little details. In true 2K and Bioshock fashion, you had to go around to look for bits and pieces of the minutiae that put together the story. Sure, there was a big narrative and some important plot points happen in cutscene, but everything else was up to the player to find. Also, mixing the clothing and technology of the era with XCOM material in general did make for some unique art designs. All the screenshots for the playthrough have already been done. Now it's just posting them here so you can take a look. Many people haven't played it due to its reputation, but it's worth the bargain bin price. The Bureau is also confirmed to be a canon prequel to XCOM EU/EW and XCOM 2. In EU/EW, a certain research file refers to redacted files from the 1960s, which is what happened in the Bureau's ending when the council of Earth decided to erase everything that happened in order to avoid a public uproar. Link to my XCOM Enemy Within Playthrough: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=44271 Link to my XCOM 2 Playthrough: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=59276 Let's begin. I didn't originally plan on posting it here so things might seem to have some gaps, but rest assured I screenshotted a lot of the important things and I'll fill it in with what I remember. I don't feel like playing through it again.