The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
Skip · Shooter · 2013
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $3.99.
- Length
- 10.6h
- Value
- $0.38/hr
- Reviews
- 70% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, DirectX9 Compatible ATI Radeon HD 3870 / NVIDIA 8800 GT, 12 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
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.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2014 is where it bottomed out, at $3.99. It has been discounted 89 times in the 13 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today's $3.99 at 80 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
Take the discount away and it is a 22. With it, 27.
It is pricier than 79 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 69 percent. Among the games that feel like it, STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ II ($9.99, scores 50) beats it on value, while it beats LOST PLANET® 3 ($24.99, scores 8).
Steam's global achievement data says about 3 percent of players ever finish it. On a 10.6-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 592 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 39 percent of the 596 reviews written there were positive, against 70 percent overall, and those are 12 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (finite spend, unlock); the score docks it lightly for that.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 10.6 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
54% start to 3% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 10.6-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
15 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I'm enjoying this game. I guess I must be lucky - it's working out of the box for me. But I'm enjoying this game. The AI is smart enough to get out of the way when there's a grenade, smart enough to try and heal you you when you're down. The only real issue I've ever had with allied AI is that your guys will follow you when you don't want them to, you have to force them to sit in the position that you want them to...
Probably one of the best bad games ever made. Aliens vs. 1962 FBI mass effect clone is the only thing that can save this weak writing and stupid gameplay with no research mechanic.
So, this isn't actually a negative review by any stretch of the imagination, but if you're going into this expecting any kind of cohesion in the "XCOM CANON" then you are going to be fairly disappointed. The story is...weird for reasons I won't spoil and the gameplay loop definitely isn't going to be satisfying for everyone. No, I don't recommend this game, but I also don't hate it? Kind of a weird bag for me.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified scores 27/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/65930/the-bureau-xcom-declassifiedThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.