I played through The Bureau: XCOM Declassified's entire floundering tactical shooter campaign wondering how it planned to pull off a plausible prequel backstory to the freshly rebooted XCOM universe. When I got to the end, it didn't even seem to try, content to let us wonder why this 1960s version of XCOM didn't bother to tell 2010s XCOM (of XCOM: Enemy Unknown) that hostile aliens exist and that there's a closet full of working plasma guns somewhere. Not making sense doesn't seem to bother The Bureau, either in story or in its flawed attempt to use permanent death mechanics and strangely shoddy construction. But it sure bothered me.
If the alien-invasion plot could keep its act together for the course of its roughly 15-hour campaign and work as a stand-alone alternate universe, I'd be totally willing to ignore that admittedly nitpicky continuity issue. Alas, despite one really good idea that cleverly toys with the way we experience games through characters, it completely falls apart. The way main character Agent William Carter reacts to a major revelation is pretty much the exact opposite of what a sane person would probably do in that situation. It's to the point where I have to wonder if a bug might've caused the wrong dialogue option to be selected. This isn't the only inexplicable moment in this baffling story, but it's the most spectacularly weird.
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