The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, is an underrated TPS, but it can't decide to be XCOM or not and is very expensive.
This game is based on gameplay, and everybody who buys it should be buying it for the gameplay. Thankfully, gameplay is definitely the strong suit of The Bureau. The game is played from a third person perspective, which actually works fairly well in the XCOM scheme of things. It allows you to defend your squaddies while they move in to flank your opponents. This is incredibly fun, getting the angles and using good abilities to do so is the name of the game. I haven't played much, but one of the rare things that didn't get old was flanking to aliens, having my support boost our attacks, magically lifting an alien out of cover while my support shot at it frantically and my recon caught the other aliens of guard. Tactics feel very smooth, possibly even smoother than Enemy Unknown, due to the fact aliens react as they should (I guess I really don't know that, but still) and combo kills are fun to pull of. Thankfully, the Bureau's TPS controls such as vaulting and cover work well enough without being fancy, which is something which many TPS fail to pull of.
Beyond shooting in third person and using radial menus to control your squaddies, the game really falls apart. I feel like the developers were to scared to eliminate the signature HQ entirely, so they had to reduce it in order to fit the TPS genre. This causes a completely useless thorn in the side. It causes way to much running around looking for people to talk to for no good reason. The only use of the base is customizing your squad, which has fatally too few options. There are only four classes, and each class has way too few upgrades which means if you keep your squad alive for a long time you stop gaining an advantage. This is a shame, because who knows how fun the tactical combat would have been with more options at your disposal. The base has many other areas to explore, which once again XCOM, if you want to get rid of research and engineering and the metagame fine, but then actually get rid of them. There is an entire research section which I was excited about until I realized it is just a plot element that occasionally gives you some new toys. The first one you get is supposed to allow you to steal alien weapons if the alien is still alive, though doing this is impossible. Finally, the base tries to mimic series such as Deus Ex in leaving files and such around that allow you to read up on characters and the Bureau itself, but this also fails in miserable fashion.
Once you finally get out of the base and on to your missions, the game picks up a little with the XCOM mechanics. The concept of permadeath stays, so if your level 4 recon dies you can no longer shoot thousands of bullets at one area. However, to keep the game from being a slog when a teammate dies, there are areas that allow you to fly in new teammates should one die. This is a nicely thought out feature. Also, one improvement over Enemy Unknown is alien classes, of which there are many that are very diverse. This makes fighting fairly non-repetitive
Presentation is another major problem with the Bureau. While the graphics look fairly good and have a defined style, and the game does an admirable job of making things happen in the background to make things feel believable, the animation in the game is terrible. You rarely ever actually push the button or grab the door handle, the lip sync and dialog cut scenes are horrible, and the game has problems with wall glitches. These problems occur in many games, but I have not seen a critically acclaimed game in almost a decade with so fricken many of them. It totally degrades from the experience. In terms of plot, the game does a good job of explaining the Bureau and making things feel plausible. However, the plot turns into just a reason for you shooting more aliens and rarely ever aspires to the plots which Enemy Unknown laid out. Also, the characters which you can spend a whole hour reading up on in the base are all way to unoriginal and have little in the areas of secrets or double motives. Basically, everyone is good except the aliens, who are bad. I think modern day writing should be past this by now
Overall, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a fun and exciting tactical shooter that is dragged down by the shadow of its predecessor. You'll have fun playing it, but in many cases the drag of the dissolution of the metagame and the poor plot and presentation can outweigh the quick combat.