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 less on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified The Bureau: XCOM Declassified into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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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.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a game caught between two worlds, and it shows. From the very beginning, it presents a concept with undeniable intrigue: a tactical third-person shooter set during the height of Cold War paranoia, reimagining the origins of the XCOM organization amid a secret alien invasion in 1962. This backdrop is more than just aesthetic dressing—it becomes the game's strongest asset. The art direction leans heavily into period authenticity, with diners, government bunkers, small-town suburbs, and military installations painted in saturated mid-century tones. Radios hum with era-specific broadcasts, typewriters clack in dimly lit offices, and the early stages of America’s technological and political anxiety are palpable in every scene. This grounding in retro Americana infused with science fiction lends the game a unique identity that helps it stand apart visually, even when the mechanics struggle to match the same level of polish. Where The Bureau starts to show cracks is in its gameplay. The core experience is a third-person shooter with tactical elements—essentially, a hybrid between Mass Effect's squad control and XCOM’s high-level strategy, but without the refinement of either. The game encourages you to pause combat using a radial menu called “Battle Focus,” from which you issue commands to your two AI-controlled teammates. These squadmates come in various classes—engineer, recon, support, and commando—each with its own skill tree and battlefield abilities. The idea is solid in theory: combine real-time shooting with tactical decision-making. In practice, though, the system is bogged down by AI inconsistencies, clunky interface design, and the constant need to micromanage underperforming allies. Instead of feeling like a capable field commander, you often feel like a babysitter, struggling to keep your squad alive rather than orchestrating complex strategies. The combat encounters themselves are uneven. Early missions tease the potential of the system with some tense engagements and decent pacing. However, the repetitive enemy types, predictable patterns, and limited tactical variety eventually cause battles to blur together. There’s a loop that grows stale far too quickly: enter an area, set up cover, deploy a turret, issue a few commands, repeat. It doesn’t help that the enemy AI behaves erratically—sometimes overly aggressive, other times passively waiting for you to dispatch them one by one. As a result, firefights lack the kind of urgency or creativity that games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown or Mass Effect 2 handled so well. The lack of permanent death for agents (outside of optional difficulty settings) further removes any tension that might have made you care about your squadmates. They’re disposable in more ways than one—not just in gameplay, but narratively too. The story, despite its strong setting, is a missed opportunity. You play as Agent William Carter, a brooding, emotionally wounded operative burdened with a mysterious past and a knack for yelling at subordinates. Unfortunately, Carter lacks the charisma or emotional complexity to carry the narrative, and most of the supporting cast is similarly underdeveloped. The dialogue system offers choices that occasionally affect the outcome of missions, but these moments feel superficial and rarely influence the overarching plot in meaningful ways. While there’s an attempt to weave in mystery and intrigue—complete with a twist involving consciousness transfer and alien manipulation—the game never fully earns its more ambitious narrative beats. The emotional stakes feel hollow, not because the story lacks big ideas, but because it fails to ground them in characters we care about. That said, The Bureau does manage to deliver occasional moments of genuine atmosphere. The base hub—XCOM’s early command center—is dense with period detail, and wandering through its halls, eavesdropping on scientists and military personnel, can be surprisingly immersive. There's a sense of mounting dread as the alien threat escalates, and the game’s use of environmental storytelling does a decent job of reinforcing that feeling. Audio logs, newspaper clippings, and overheard conversations help flesh out the world in ways the main story fails to do. These quieter moments, oddly enough, often feel more engaging than the action sequences themselves. Technically, the game runs smoothly on modern systems, though its visual fidelity has not aged particularly well. Character animations are stiff, facial expressions are wooden, and some textures are noticeably flat. The voice acting is serviceable, but rarely exceptional, and the soundtrack—while fitting for the tone—fails to leave much of a lasting impression. There are also a handful of bugs and glitches, though nothing game-breaking. It’s clear that this was a game with an ambitious scope but perhaps not the time, resources, or clarity of vision to fully realize its potential. In the end, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a flawed but fascinating experiment. It tries to reimagine XCOM through the lens of a story-driven shooter while still holding onto its tactical roots, and in doing so, ends up pleasing few. For fans of the XCOM franchise, it lacks the strategic depth and emergent storytelling that defines the series. For shooter fans, the gunplay and squad mechanics feel sluggish and constrained. And for those drawn by the premise and setting, the thin character work and uneven pacing may prove disappointing. Yet for all its shortcomings, there is something admirable about its ambition. The Bureau doesn’t quite succeed in what it sets out to do, but it’s hard to ignore the charm in what it tries. It's the kind of game that some players might love in spite of itself—a misfire, yes, but an interesting one. Rating: 7/10
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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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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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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 14 September 2025 00:20 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 09 September 2025 12:06 |
| Steam price | 15 September 2025 04:46 |
| Steam reviews | 15 September 2025 05:57 |
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Game modes
Features
Online players
22
Developer
2K Marin
Publisher
2K
Release
22 Aug 2013
Platforms
Remote Play
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