The Bureau: XCOM Declassified on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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The year is 1962 and the Cold War has the nation gripped by fear. A top-secret government unit called The Bureau begins investigating a series of mysterious attacks by an enemy more powerful than communism.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a action, tactical and sci-fi game
developed by 2K Marin
and published by 2K.
Released on August 22nd 2013 is available on Windows and MacOS
in 8 languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean and Russian.
It has received 11,786 reviews of which 8,277 were positive and 3,509 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.9 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 19.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 0.84€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified The Bureau: XCOM Declassified into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at The Bureau: XCOM Declassified through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows Vista Service Pack 2 32-bit
- Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4 GHz / AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: DirectX9 Compatible ATI Radeon HD 3870 / NVIDIA 8800 GT
- Storage: 12 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
- Additional Notes: Incompatible with Intel HD 3000 Integrated Graphics
MacOS
- OS: Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.7.5 or higher
- Processor: Intel Core i series processor
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD HD4870 / NVIDIA 8800GT / Intel Iris Graphics or better
- Storage: 15 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Keyboard and 3 button Mouse or Logitech Dual Analog Stick Gamepad
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I know it's largely forgotten amongest the XCOM fanbase but i dunno i still very much find it's style of gameplay enjoyable and fun but i guess that's largely because i enjoy having control over my actions instead of relying on rng. Not to say the other titles are bad for that, i'm just less interested in them because of that. Even if we don't get another XCOM like it i'm hoping to find more games that take this games ideas and improve upon them.
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Still a fun and Casual X-com game experience. loved the lore and graphics, game play was okay. If you enjoy the lore side of games, a must get when on sale.
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BETRAYAL! - Wait no. This isn't that bad This game was never going to be a runaway success, It’s design as a tactical action shooter left it firmly in the shadow of the unreleased X-com: Alliance. An FPS Squad shooter slated for 2001. But releasing this near simultaneously with Enemy Unknown was a detrimental mistake that buried this game. Which is a shame, because its not bad- despite a few questionable design choices. This doesn't make the best first impression Ahem. If you check out the steam discussions many will complain the AI is underwhelming, which it half-true. The companions are lobotomised, until you get them to level 5. Then they become responsive and more importantly have enough health to not immediately keel over & die to every encounter. Any orders you direct to your squad are immediately carried out, they even change texture to illustrate they’re following your commands. Their actions are queued and each class has their own set of unique abilities all designed to synergise. Support casts Disrupt, you use the ability levitate, then Recon uses Critical strike. Congrats! You just killed everything except for a Muton or Sectopod. If you time it right. Commands are done through a proto Fallout 4 VATS system where time slows down, and there is even a mass effect dialogue wheel for interacting with characters. It’s neat. The squad is limited just to three which sucks since the player counts as a unit. Mind control is a late game action which really adds tactical variety. Deployable drones, Turrets and Silacoid’s all work surprisingly well. The combat is satisfying once you level up your roster of companions. Don’t worry about the permadeath, you can simultaneously send new recruits off to do automated missions as you play which levels them up. A Total party kill is easily replaceable with no disadvantage, just customise the new squad to look like the old. By the mid game I didn’t need to micromanage my companions anymore, they could tank most things, the AI automatically avoids grenades to the point they’ll never be hit. It’s nice… You just have to get them to level 5 because the starting health pool and their lack of abilities really screws with the AI’s capability to dynamically react. These soldiers were lobotomised in the early game, they do get better. The difficulty is meaningless You will never fight more than two mutons until the final level, you will only encounter a maximum of two Sectopod’s, only a handful of optional side missions have Sectoid’s swam you on mass and the Outsiders and all their variants can be managed systematically. Difficulty has no bearing on the mechanics. It just nerfs your abilities and turns everything into a bullet sponge if you raise it. Whilst I completed it on Commander difficulty, I did replay a little bit on novice and the early game was more enjoyable. The spawns didn’t change, only the enemie’s health. Call me old fashioned but a Muton shouldn’t have more health than a Sectopod, quadrupedal tank. But on commander oh boy they do. There is no intended difficulty unlike in classic X-com or Enemy unknown. Play around with it. Find a comfortable balance between your damage output and the enemy’s strength. It has the spirit of X-Com It's no secret that a bunch of X-Com fans rejected Two & Chimera Squad because it betrayed the core themes of the franchise. The indomitable human spirit adapting and overcoming Alien, Lovecraftian and interdimensional threats. A rag tag group of rainbow resistance warriors isn’t X-com. The idea that we’re in waters so uncharted that despite have an entire facility, bureau, military or even a full-on megacity at your disposal. And you’re still on the backfoot is X-Com. It’s the best of the best having to rise beyond their limitations to save humanity. It shouldn’t be a plucky underdog story. It’s a war of attrition between the best & brightest and the horrors of the uknown. The Bureau, X-Com declassified gets this. It understands the necessity of having an established facility which is impressive considering there is zero research or base management. Everyone around you is a highly trained professional from various background selected to defend humanity. It’s X-Com with a little more personality and a stronger than average narrative. Is it a good narrative? Eh, it has major pacing issues. There are only 7 mainline and 7 optional missions. But it doesn’t playout as predictably as the classics or Enemy Unknown does, someone was having fun writing this and whilst its brevity takes away from the intended emotional impact… It has more going on than most 7th gen shooters. The none existent technical hic-ups A lot of people state this game doesn’t run on windows 11. I have the dreaded 24H2 build and it runs perfectly. First time booting the game did take several minutes but every start up afterwards was immediate. I’m running an Integrated RTX 3050 4gb, hardly cutting edge stuff for the 2020’s and the game ran with out a single crash. The cutscenes are pre-recorded in 720p with some terrible compression. It looks bad. There is full controller support right out of the box, plays well with my 3rd party Xbox One controller. No issues. The texture work is surprisingly great, you can read almost all the chalkboards, posters and graffiti present in the environments. It adds to the conspiracy latent atmosphere the game is striving for. It’s well worth it when on a sale For $2 of $5 it’s a fun little distraction, it’s hardly the betrayal Spoony [Godspeed my sweet prince, find the help you need] led me to believe it was back in 2012. It’s far from the worst entry in the franchise. Sure, if Alliance was playable this would be a redundant entry (Unless you really liked the cold war aesthetic) but as some one who brought this after sinking 150+ hours into Enemy within in the space of two weeks, yeah this has the X-Com spirit I yearn for. 10-15 Hours of gameplay, if you get the DLC then I could see 20 at a push. There is no new game plus or randomly generated missions everything in this game was purposely designed which is something of a lost art now-a-days. I will add the marketing for this game did it no favours, like seriously. This isn’t a bad game it’s just that everything surrounding it, including its marketing absolutely betrayed it. Heh. I guess there was betrayal after all.
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Firstly make sure to turn off the PhysX settings as they cause lots of crashes, once I disabled those it was smooth sailing, I want to put down my thoughts on the game while I'm still fresh from finishing so sorry if this comes across as a little disjointed. I did really enjoy playing the game, it's sort of a Mass Effect style with more emphasis on abilities and fine control of your squad mates. But beware the first two missions are by far the games weakest as you get used to the controls and you start getting enough abilities to reliably deal with situations. There's some good weapon variety and most weapons have some sort of niche throughout the game and enemy variety is even better though sadly the more specialist ones are rather rare to fight, though with good reason as they easily affect the entire firefight with their abilities. There's about 7 main missions each of which has decent length with a single exception that have around 100 enemies and about an equal number of side missions of much shorter duration but still decent with I'd say an average of 40-50 enemies. Avoiding spoilers, story wise there's a good plot there but I have to wonder how many problems there were in development as I think some bits of exposition got forgotten about and are later referred back to regularly. There are multiple endings and your choices are sometimes called back to but the deciding decision is much later on and think very carefully on it unlike me who got the worst one by seeing the good in someone. Ending does feel rather rushed though. I just feel like the games story would of went better with a little bit more buildup in the beginning or a better sense of how long events have been happening to give a better sense of scale or urgency.
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For anyone wondering, this game still works on a modern PC. The game is pretty fantastic, if you like Men In Black, games set in old fashioned times. Excellent world building and story. Don't compare it to XCOM, it's not even the same game type. EDIT: I lied, it can still crash a fair amount for an old game. But at least it runs. It's a valuable game to experience though
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Frequently Asked Questions
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is currently priced at 19.99€ on Steam.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 19.99€ on Steam.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified received 8,277 positive votes out of a total of 11,786 achieving a rating of 6.90.
😐
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified was developed by 2K Marin and published by 2K.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is playable and fully supported on Windows.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is not playable on Linux.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a single-player game.
There are 3 DLCs available for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Explore additional content available for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified on Steam.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified supports Remote Play on TV. Discover more about Steam Remote Play.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 09 June 2025 04:12 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 11 June 2025 01:38 |
| Steam price | 14 June 2025 20:43 |
| Steam reviews | 13 June 2025 07:51 |
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- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck The Bureau: XCOM Declassified compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
15
Developer
2K Marin
Publisher
2K
Release
22 Aug 2013
Platforms
Remote Play
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