Agent William Carter peeks around a backyard wall, surrounded by the buoyant remains of a scattered birthday party. Straight-faced in an evacuated 1960s suburbia, he is the man who shouts against the alien invasion on America's porch. "Draw their fire!" he tells his two colleagues in arms. "Put a mine there!" And finally, with a bold pose and a deep cache of air in his lungs, he screams the scream that won the war: "DEPLOYING BLOB!"

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a game about shooting aliens, coordinating offense under duress and, in some cases, deploying blobs in a tactical fashion. As a dapper CIA agent and pragmatic not-on-MY-watch type, William Carter rejects the lexicon of XCOM, a secret organization that now finds its Cold War paranoia rerouted to deflect "The Outsiders," slender grey men from outer space. Carter's blob is actually a "silacoid," a mercurial pet formed from magnetically bound lumps of inky material. The scientists back at HQ delight in describing its fascinating properties and how they repurposed it from our would-be conquerers, but to Carter it's just a roving tool meant to distract enemies in battle. (The alternative sound bite on this order is "Blob out!" which sounds like an instruction to lie in bed and inhale a gallon of Ben and Jerry's.)

Carter's role in the action itself is to anchor your strategies, and that's what makes The Bureau a more arresting third-person shooter. There's the usual knee-high detritus that serves as cover in firefights, the pop-and-shoot gunplay, the evasive roll - and you've gotta have a melee attack, so Carter gets a huge electric bracelet that looks like it stuck after he punched through a desktop computer.