X-COM Franchise Retrospective (Part Five)

By Patrick S. Baker

Part Three

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

Released on 20 August 2013, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is technically a prequel and spin-off of Enemy Unknown, not a direct sequel, as it was under development in 2006, before Enemy Unknown was, but the development was both lengthy and fraught with difficulties.

The game started as a collaboration between two of 2K Games development studios, one in Marin County, California and the other in Canberra, Australia. The game was conceived by the 2K Australia team as a combined mystery game and first-person shooter. Tn the game the player was tasked by a secret government agency with photographing mysterious aliens and then researching what they are and what they were doing. However, the Marin team wanted a third-person shooter that focused on teamwork with more tactical elements. 2K Australia was removed from the project because of the disagreements between the two studios. The Marin team renamed the game, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, and moved forward with their ideas.

Set in late 1962 at the height of the Cold War, the player takes control of Agent William Carter, a field agent of the Bureau of Strategic Emergency Command assigned to defend the US from an antagonistic alien force known as the Outsiders. The player recruited agents in the headquarters from one of four different classes: commando, engineer, recon, and support.

Each class of agents has different abilities and weapons. All the characters gain experience during missions. While in the battle mode, the player also gave commands to two other agents accompanying the Carter character. The aesthetic of the game was inspired by the 1951 movie The Day The Earth Stood Still and the TV show, The X-Files in what was called a: “period-accurate retro-futuristic atmosphere.”

The game’s reception was mixed, tending toward the negative. The game’s inept artificial intelligence was a popular subject of disapproval, mostly because of the demands it placed on the player to control their squad, making the tactical play very awkward. GameSpot said the game was entertaining, but lacked depth and engagement. Reviews were mixed on the story with many thinking the recruited agents “lifeless and boring.”

Many XCOM fans rejected the game because they did not consider it an XCOM game at all; looking at it much like they had done Enforcer. In PC Gamer, Julian Gollop made the point: “The XCOM genre is something special … and diverging too far from its fundamental design pillars results in something less than satisfactory… The Bureau looked like it could be an interesting game, but it just wasn’t XCOM … the reaction from XCOM fans wasn’t very favorable.”

2K Games learned a harsh lesson from the failure of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. The game’s history from the 90s would not repeat itself; when a poor grasp of what XCOM was and what to do with the franchise doomed it. Now XCOM games would focus on the tactical and not dilute the brand by calling games in other genres by the XCOM name.

XCOM: Enemy Within

An expansion pack forXCOM: Enemy Unknown called XCOM: Enemy Within was released in November 2013 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The expansion pack preserved the core storyline of Enemy Unknown, but adds a wide variety of content, including some new weapons, special missions and the capability to enhance soldiers through genetic engineering and/or cybernetics. Both of those options use a substance called “Meld” that can be attained during battles.

XCOM 2 

Given the troubled development history of the franchise, especially when it came to the various sequels, the creation of the first full sequel of the rebooted game went very smoothly. There were no shadow cancellations, no time wasted on failed prototypes, no different sections of 2K Games battling for creative control. Simply put, XCOM 2’s development went well and focused on the elements that made Enemy Unkwown successfully, but with some nicely surprising twists.

XCOM 2 (no subtitle) was released 5 February 2016 as a PC exclusive. This decision allowed Firaxis to concentrate on high-end graphics and modifications support, rather than dispersing efforts for multiple platforms.  Playstation 4 and Xbox One versions were released in September that year.

The game takes place in 2035, some 20 years after the aliens win the first game, making losing XCOM 1 (Enemy Unknown and/or Enemy Within) canon. XCOM is now a resistance force fighting against the totalitarian regime of the aliens and the Advent, the alien’s puppet Earth government. Like in the other games in the series, gameplay was divided between turn-based tactical combat and strategic level where players manage resources and missions from the Avenger, an alien ship that is used as a mobile base for the XCOM guerilla force.XCOM 2 was much more than just a reskin of XCOM 1. The Firaxis team took into account comments and suggestions from the fan base, adding procedural generation of maps and mod support to the game. They introduced new features and redesigned some enemies. For example, to push players to play more aggressively, the developers created time-based objectives to speed up the game’s pace. Further the difficulty was ramped up to make the game a challenge for those players that had “beaten” XCOM 1. Also, XCOM 2 is more story driven than its predecessor.

XCOM 2 got rave reviews with an aggregated positive score of 88/100, just one point lower than the first game. Not that the release was trouble free. Numerous computers had issues running XCOM 2, as it wasn’t correctly optimized for many types of graphics cards. Most of these issues were resolved with patches in the following the release of the game.

The huge success of XCOM 2 encouraged Firaxis to continue developing more expansion packs and other new content within the franchise.

Patrick S. Baker is a former US Army Field Artillery officer and retired Department of Defense employee. He has degrees in History, Political Science and Education.  He has been writing history, game reviews and science-fiction professionally since 2013. You can find some of his work at , and Armchair General.