I wish I could Erase the Truth about the PC Version of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, but what appears to be a very good port given all the menu customisation options, sadly does not prove to be the case. The game sports a lot of PC specific customisation options like Ambient Occlusion, Tessellation, Antialiasing, Anisotropic Filtering, Ambient Occlusion and A Field of view Slider that goes from 65 to 100. Nvidia card owners can also enjoy the PhysX effects for cloth and particles, which seem to be available to AMD card owners as well. It also has an inconspicuous looking setting called Screen Space Reflections. And it is this setting that can make the game crawl with agonisingly low fps in the smallest of areas like an empty corridor on high end cards like the Titan. Turn it off if you wish for somewhat smooth gameplay.
While PhysX can be turned on irrespective of having the hardware to support it, it is advisable for the Red brigade to turn it off unless their rig packs a really meaty CPU. This can cause slowdowns in combat parts which are heavy with particle effects.
The first sign of the game being a rather bad port job comes from the 720p prerendered cutscenes, which look heavily pixelated and lacking Antialiasing especially on higher resolutions like 1080p. The game looks better rendered in-engine on the lowest settings than these cutscenes. And since the assets used in them are already in the game, one wonders why the developers chose not to render all cutscenes in-engine instead of the few that they do.
The next problem is more of a design oversight rather than a porting issue. The Game boasts a customised command interface for the PC’s input devices, the Keyboard and the Mouse instead of the controller wheel. There are neat looking bars showing the abilities of each agent with a hotkey indicator that can also be selected with the mouse. And that is what causes the most trouble. Mousing over an Agent’s Bar puts it in focus enlarging it over the others, so you know exactly whom you’re commanding. However the game prefers to focus on the agent in whose third of the screen you cursor is residing. And this can delay your ability to issue commands even if you use the hotkeys, which is annoying when the game is slowing down the action instead of pausing it. The focus change can also cause trouble when choosing abilities positioned near the ends of the bars as the mouse skips over the transition zone. It might have been better if the bars had been static with a simple glow indicating which one was in focus.
The game is rather poorly optimised since it faces frame drop issues in the oddest of areas like a narrow corridor with few details but can run smoothly on complex outdoor scenes. It can be extremely annoying when one of these frame drop areas is also the location of a combat sequence. The author tested the game on an ATI HD 5850 running the latest stable driver and found that the DX9 version runs slower than the DX11 version on all settings.
The XCOM Moniker does bring high expectations from the Bureau which makes it’s rather average presentation feel even worse. It does show that the XCOM setting can be exploited for a Third Person Shooter experience but it lacks a clear vision as to what game it aspires to be, resulting in a mess that is worse than all the preorder bonus 2K Games offered with it. In short, if you are looking to play XCOM on PC, Stick to the brilliant Enemy Unknown or get hyped for the Enemy Within expansion. The Bureau might as well not exist for you.
