The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

I got this game as part of the Humble Bundle a while ago but didn't have a chance to play it till now.  Which turned out to be a good thing.

Unfortunately, the game isn't very good.  To be fair, it's not bad and it has a couple of interesting ideas.  It's just very very average.

With that said, there are two things about the game which are bad.  Naturally, I'll talk about that here.
:)

Voice Acting
If I was being generous, I would describe the voice acting as wooden.  Most of the lines are delivered flat.  Those that aren't flat are delivered in a gritty annoyed tone - mainly because those lines are being delivered by the main character.

To be fair to the voice actors, I'm not sure if the bad voice acting is due to poor voice actors or if its down to poor voice direction or poor writing.  Which brings me to my next point.

Writing
The writing in this game is atrocious.  And I mean really really atrocious.

To illustrate how bad, let me give you an example from near the start of the game.  At this point, you have gone through the first mission and have just gone to your new XCOM base.

As you explore the base and talk to people, you very quickly realise that they are still scrambling to get the base fully operational as there are a lot of signs of chaos.  Corridors are blocked with boxes.  Entire sections of the base are unreachable as they haven't been powered up yet.  Also, someone tells you that they are scrambling to get the base operational.

While you wander around, someone tells you that one of the scientists has gone missing.  In addition, he took a bomb with him so people are concerned with what he might be up to.  However, agent Nils, one of the agents who helped you in your first mission, is tracking him so hopefully, we will find him soon.

At this point, you get a call from that other agent.  He says that he tracked the scientist to the morgue and that there is no way out other than through the main door.  He tells you to hurry.  You tell him that you are on your way and then hang up.  Then, you say in a really anguished and desperate voice "Hang on, Nils!"

Wait, what?  Why the anguish?  Did Nils get shot or something?  As far as I know, he was just tracking a scientist, found him and was now waiting for me to go over there.  Why the (melo)drama?

This moment is a perfect example of narrative failure.  I'm actually fairly forgiving of plot holes and will breeze over most of them without question as long as I'm having a good time.  However, occasionally, the plot is so badly written that it pulls me straight out of the story.  At that point, I start asking questions instead of enjoying the story and unfortunately, things just fell apart for this game once I started doing that.

By the way, the reason for the melodrama is that agent Nils goes into the morgue after the scientist, who turns out to be an Alien Outsider and promptly gets killed by said Alien Outsider.  Natureally, your main character knew agent Nils would go in on his own despite Nils not giving any indication of this during the call.

You see what I mean about poor writing?