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This live-action trailer for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified shows Lost and Lord of the Rings star Dominic Monaghan in pursuit of an enemy while on the phone with a man that needs to shut his fridge door. The game is slated to launch on August 20 for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

If you’ve been watching the YouTube series attached to The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, you know that agent Ennis Cole is obsessed with hunting down the aliens among us for very personal reasons. Well, in this latest episode, he finally tracks one down. Then he probably wishes he hadn’t.Read more...

So, I told you the kid would buy the farm. That seemed obvious in the first installment of the live-action YouTube series for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Then we found out it was Agent Cole's wife and boy. Since his life is one big country music song now, what do you think he's going to grab, the .38 or the likker? Read more...

You can take the agent out of the shire, but you can't take the shire out of the agent. Ennis Cole (aka Lost and Lord of the Rings star Dominic Monaghan), like any good hobbit, finds himself drawn to the drink in this follow-up video, but only just.

If you'll remember, Monday's The Bureau trailer asked viewers to tweet hashtagged voted for Cole to either grab the bottle or the gun Two days later, the bottle proved victorious, but with only 51 percent backing.

What does it all mean? We're not really sure, especially since Cole grabs the gun anyway... but at least we get to see him bang a bottle about. This vid teases some sort of follow-up on Friday, July 26, but we're more looking ahead to August 20, when the game proper hits PS3, Xbox 360, and PC

A new live-action trailer for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified partakes in an incongruous mixture of top-secret government information and large-scale social network marketing. Still, it will be interesting to see which way the public goes on the fate of Special Agent Meriadoc Brandybook, or Ennis Cole to give him his XCOM codename.

The video asks users to tweet hashtagged votes for what Cole should do in the aftermath of a classified incident which left him without his wife and child. Votes can be registered until Wednesday, July 24, when the video revealing his determined fate will be released.

That's all well and good, but the date to remember is August 20; that's when The Bureau opens its doors to Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

I can tell you what the hell's going to happen after this video. Little Kevin is going to get vaporized by aliens. Seriously, I can't figure out why the clown is in hot water with the G-Man. Or why it'd be prudent to close down a kid's show this way.Read more...

Nope. No, no, no. Clowns live in sewers and eat children. It also appears from this The Bureau: XCOM Declassified trailer that clowns are scared of aliens. So ... the enemy of our enemy is our friend?

Drop in on this footage-filled discussion of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified and learn how classy vests and buff-granting backpacks can save the Earth from extraterrestrial peril.

If you'd like to venture beyond the brief chat above, have a look at our impressions of The Bureau's on-foot tactical combat, and see how its Cold War setting strives for authenticity within reason.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is due on August 20 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

For my first-ever preview on Kotaku, I sat down with The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. If you played XCOM: Enemy Unknown and weren't happy with the lack of three-piece suits, or Mass Effect style conversation wheels, then this is the XCOM you've been looking for. Read more...

The first shot of the game is historically inaccurate, but not without good reason.

"As much as possible, I try to stick to history," says Erik Caponi, the narrative designer. "There's actually a huge pet peeve I had that I finally gave up on. It's the first shot of the game. Sputnik is there. Sputnik should not be there in 1962. Nobody recognizes the Vostok 12 satellite, which is what should be there, so we stuck with Sputnik because it's iconic and recognizable."

The Russian satellite becomes a subtle lie in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, a game by 2K Marin that has endured several revisions throughout its history. It's not a first-person shooter (it's third-person now), warfare isn't waged in polite turns (time slows while you're issuing orders), and it's not about overseeing the modern XCOM organization, which acts as Earth's weaponized umbrella when the aliens rain down.

Instead, you're where the real Sputnik would be in the early 1960s: on the ground. Playing as pragmatic agent William Carter, you assist in the birth of the XCOM defense organization, jolted into premature operation by a manipulative alien race dubbed "The Outsiders." You also learn of Carter's motivations and the fate of his family - the kind of story you couldn't quite make out from the perspective of a commander in XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Death or defeat in a video game is normally something to be glossed over, brushed aside as you continue (or repeat) a stage on your way to inevitable victory. A quick "GAME OVER" screen, maybe a prompt or two, then you're back into the action. Where's the realism in that? The sense of consequence? Life doesn't give you instantaneous do-overs. If you make a shitty bed you gotta lie in it, so I always appreciate when a video game does the same. 2012's XCOM, above, had a good "game over" sequence that really revelled in your failure, but these days such sadomasochism is rare. And that's a shame. It used to be much more prevalent in games to really see the results of your failure, show you the things you were trying to save/protect burn to the ground. Maybe it was the stick behind the "happy" ending's carrot, maybe it was just a form of punishment for sucky gamers, but it really helped to lend your actions more weight when your losses were as celebrated (at least in terms of production value and cutscene length) as your victories. The masters at this were probably Chris Roberts' Origin flight games, whose emphasis on story and player choice meant that each game's story had to be seen to the end, even if that story had an unhappy ending. Witness Wing Commander III's "bad" ending, below, which came about if you failed too many missions. It's about as far from a basic GAME OVER screen as you can get. What's your favourite game over screen or sequence? One that actually gave you a proper end sequence?

Below you can find a livestream with new gameplay for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, straight from the developers. It'll last thirty minutes to an hour.

The XCOM shooter is looking less like a shooter and more like an XCOM every day. In this new trailer for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (now that's a mouthful), you can see some of the game's third-person, fedora-stuffed, XCOMish tactical combat in action. For more on the game, check out Evan's hands-on preview.

Here's The Bureau: XCOM Declassified being played without the main player firing a shot. It's all squad tactics and powers through the demonstration, which happens to be one of the longest ones we've seen released publicly.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is scheduled to leak onto retail and Wikileaks August 20.

Publisher 2K Games announced today that The Bureau: XCOM Declassified will have pre-order and post-launch downloadable content, which is about as shocking of a revelation as knowing Marmite will divide humanity into the two groups of the next great war.

"We're excited that our stories will provide a new perspective on the war effort, much like how our critically acclaimed Minvera's Den DLC for BioShock 2 allowed us to present a unique perspective of Rapture," said Morgan Gray, development director at 2K Marin.

The game's pre-order bonus is the "Codebreakers" side mission. In it, Special Agent Carter and his squad must reestablish contact a top-secret government communications facility, eliminate any threats and decrypt the employee's combined lunch order. There are no details about the post-launch DLC, but the first pack "will be available exclusively to Xbox 360 players."

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified will fight the future on August 20 and 23 in North America and internationally, respectively.

Unearthed from a crate thought lost to Hangar XCOM, this gameplay trailer shows how 2K Marin meshes real-time shooting with strategy in The Bureau. Time can be slowed down while players get tactical via a radial menu, from which they can command Special Agent Will Carter and his trusty squadmates.

Also, it shows us that if you're going to see off an extraterrestrial invasion, you may as well do it dressed to the nines - Carter is the definition of dapper in that vid. Independence Day could only have been improved if Jeff Goldblum had boarded that spaceship in a tux.

The fashion of alien warfare aside, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified touches down on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC on August 20.

The developers at 2K Marin working on The Bureau: XCOM Declassified say that they're going to be throwing serious challenge at you. And from what I played a few months ago, this 1962-set prequel to last year's hit release isn't the kind of game that you just coast through. Good thing this newest trailer covers some of the tactics and abilities that you'll be able to wield in your fight against extraterrestrial Outsiders. You're not getting any hints about how the story's going to unfold in this clip. But if you still had questions about camera angles, encounter space layout and enemy classes, you'll get more insight on all of that here. If that's not enough, head over to the game's Facebook page for a 12-minute gameplay video.

The folks over at Twitch have been streaming live gameplay demos from E3 all week. I know this, becuase every now and then over the course of the past few days I'd completely cut-off contact with my coworkers to enjoy a particularly compelling segment, like this one for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. I've been intrigued ever since Evan spent 30 minutes with the game a while back. I love the original XCOM, but I am no tactical commander — I'm want to be in the line of fire. I also want to be in the 1960s. This is perfect. Hit up Twitch for a ton more live gameplay demos direct from E3 2013. Watch live video from TwitchTV's Official Channel on TwitchTV

The makers of BioShock 2 present you this glimpse of a top-secret government unit called The Bureau.

Well, Steam Early Access, anyway. Seeing as X-Com has been abducted and replaced by the magnificent (but still quite different) XCOM: Enemy Unknown and snazzy 1960s hat dress-up simulator The Bureau: XCOM, Xenonauts is sort of the original’s closest living relative. So now’s your chance to return to the present’s past while clad in the graphics and interface from a past-inspired portion of the future. In other words, Xenonauts has potential to be one of the very best things. But you – and perhaps only you, but probably not – can push it past alpha and into top humanity exterminating form. Details after the break.

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For a brief few seconds while playing through a 30-minute slice of 2K Games' upcoming XCOM game, I thought I was in 2010. Now, you might say, 'waitaminnit, The Bureau's set in 1962, isn't it?' You'd be right. But, there's an unmistakable whiff of Mass Effect—specifically ME2, when the series became much more combat-centric—around The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Main character William Carter isn't Commander Shepard. At no point during the half-hour session did I feel that I was shaping his personality in any given way. But I did take Carter and two other characters into battle against an invading alien army, alternating between engaging the enemies directly and stacking tactical commands for my mates to execute. I knelt down and healed them when they were downed. And both the branching dialogue choices and squad controls were handled via a segmented wheel UI. Right now, those similarities don't necessarily feel like a good or a bad thing; they just exist. But it's the ways that The Bureau is dissimilar to BioWare's sci-fi franchise that hold the most hope. My first hands-on taste of the prequel to last year's Enemy Unknown felt more tactical than any installment of the Commander Shepard trilogy. I played the Mass Effect games as shooters primarily, content to let my AI partners fight however their algorithms told them to. I'd heal 'em when they needed it, of course, and would aim biotics or special weapons attacks at particularly nasty foes. But, mostly, I let Garrus, EDI, Legion or whomever do what their behavior code dictated. The Bureau isn't going to let you get away with any such laid-back squad management. When I tried the laissez-faire approach, Carter and his boys got cut up fast. The mission I played was called The Signal and it had the fedora-wearing agent taking Engineer and Commando-class operatives to Pima, New Mexico to hunt down missing explosives expert DaSilva. The pre-mission briefing said that DaSilva might have intel crucial to helping repel the threat of The Outsiders, which is what The Bureau calls its extraterrestrials. I got to put some of Carter and the AI characters' skills through their paces as we picked our way through the semi-intact remains of the southwestern suburban town. Carter's melee punch was fed energy from the backpack on his arm, showing how some of the tech harvested from Outsiders gets repurposed. Players can use alien weaponry like a scatter laser or laser rifle along with human grenades and firearms. I could command my Engineer to hunker down behind cover in one spot and tell him to place the turret in another nearby location. Then, I triggered Carter's Pulse Wave ability, knocking enemies out of position from behind cover so the turret could blast them. After that, I could have DaSilva remotely set off charges he'd planted while hiding from the Outsiders. Once those orders were executed, I could switch things up as needed until all waves were dealt with. Enemy classes have varying levels of armor, intelligence and firepower, with the predictable mix of heavies, grunts and snipers all on display. Cover-based shooting, real-time tactical commands, deployment of squadmates' special abilities… the mechanics I experienced were all familiar from what I could do in other games. Things felt tense in each firefight, though. In the last combat sequence of the preview, a big hulking Outsider stomped towards Carter and crew and I had to scramble to space out my squad so they weren't easy pickings. There was the sensation of having to flick a mental switch between two mindsets through the demo, too. As satisfying as it is to mow down Outsiders yourself, the combat chatter of your allies constantly drove home the idea that they need to be told what to do. And while I was in slo-mo Battle Focus figuring out commands, enemies were still bearing down on me. Squadmates' dialogue let me know where enemy advancement was happening so lines like 'they're coming in on the right' helped my brain go from shoot mode to strategy mode. There was a bit of fussiness to the cover implementation. At times, I wasn't actually sure when cover-chaining would trigger and Carter would unexpectedly pop up to catch a laser right in the fedora. It's the kind of thing that I chalked up to playing a build that was still a work-in-progress. But that twitchiness is also the kind of thing that will ruin The Bureau if it's still present in the final game. Still, for me, the main draw for The Bureau is going to be how well it executes as a period piece. When the game first came out of the development shadows, much was made of its proximity to popular entertainments like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Mad Men. The voice acting reminded me of the tight, clipped cadences of old-school tough guys like Lee Marvin and my eyes feasted on the mid-century architecture and graphic design language. Seriously, the art direction kicks ass. Carter's vest-and-slacks ensemble, the fins on the cars used for cover and the grainy film-stock effects used in some of the cutscenes all felt appealingly retro. You'll be laser-sploding your way through a catalog of classic American cool looks. And I saw a few signs that The Bureau would be poking beneath the shiny, happy mirage of America's golden age. Audiologs, collectible notes and visual puns each exposed some sort of turmoil beneath the perfectionism of the 1962 setting. When you catch up with him, DaSilva's bleeding from his eyes and nose, trying to fight off some kind of biological subjugation that threatens to rob him of free will. Along the way, Carter and crew encountered other residents of Pima who fell to the plague—which was reminiscent of The X-Files' black oil—and those poor townsfolk could only soullessly repeat the words and actions of their former lives. Overly familiar though it might be, I can't deny the game's sparked a desire to control a character dressed like Eliot Ness and guys in original G.I. Joe fatigues and vintage mechanic's coveralls. I didn't have either of them die on me, but the game's supposedly going to make you ache when that happens. Based on what I've seen so far, The Bureau might not be a whole new revelation on its own. However, there might just be enough to make it a retro-slick variant of already extant experiences. My half-hour session with the game has me imagining an episode of Dragnet where strategically complex shootouts happen with aliens instead of mobsters and where you find out that the guy you smoke Lucky Strikes with has a none-too-kosher secret, like being gay. That's a game I would play. That's the game that 2K Marin has to deliver.

You always remember your first alien invasion. The Bureau: XCOM Declassified puts you on the ground in 1962 as William Carter, a crucial member of what will eventually become the planet-guarding, all-caps organization known as XCOM. The game brings it own brand of agency to the revitalized strategy series, though not in the drastically simplified form you might expect from a third-person shooter.

Once Earth becomes unwilling host to "The Outsiders," a race of aliens that have enthralled other extraterrestrial creatures, Carter and a crew of two are ordered to investigate the fate of a fallen agent in New Mexico. The Outsiders have a few slaves up their sleeves, including XCOM's classic sectoids. To compensate, Carter has a dapper vest that effectively says, "Everyone, listen to me, I am going to use some tactics on these aliens."

How the new XCOM spin-off went from a first-person horror game to a tactical third-person shooter.

I love free things, especially when they are free strategy games from Firaxis, the development studio that brought us XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Civilization V, among many other great games. Firaxis's next game, the spooky, free-to-play strategy title Haunted Hollow, is out today for iOS. Our very own Mike Fahey downloaded it this morning, and he'll be posting thoughts in the near future. But if you can't wait, you can get it right here. To contact the author of this post, write to jason@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @jasonschreier.

The Bureau is set in 1962 against the backdrop of the Cold War.

It’s alive! The name change from XCOM: Mad Men Edition to The Bureau had been anticipated for some time, but we weren’t entirely clear as to whether the former first-person reboot would retain any trappings of its original title. Moments ago, a video and press release revealed that 2K Marin, they of Bioshock 2, are indeed working on the game and that it will be called The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. It’ll also be out on August 20th. I’m glad it’s a period piece and I’m glad it still has XCOM in the name because I’d enjoy seeing at least some of the transition from men in fedoras with retrofitted alien tech to hovering super-snipers. Here’s the trailer. It’s live action.

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The XCOM we got last year wasn't supposed to be the one leading the rebirth of the beloved sci-fi strategy franchise. No, great as XCOM: Enemy Unknown was, it was a Johnny-come-lately. Back in 2010, there was another XCOM shown at E3, a game that re-imagined the humans-vs-aliens conflict as a first-person-shooter set in the 1960s. Fans wondered at how a game like that would be XCOM at all. Then, Enemy Unknown was announced, after a long period of silence surrounding the 1960s game. Excitement grew. Expectations were met and, for many, exceeded. Kotaku named Enemy Unknown as its 2012 Game of the Year. That other XCOM went silent. After a longer while, it went dark in a way that seemed to presage a cancellation. That's not what happened, though. A transformation happened in that silence. In went XCOM and out comes The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, a single-player multiplatform title due out in August. The game's set in 1962, during John F. Kennedy's presidency. The action happens at the height of The Cold War as fears begin to peak that Russia may overtake the U.S. as the dominant world power. There's an nuclear arms race happening across the globe and dozens of government agencies were trotted out to the public as yet another measure to keep the Soviets at bay. But they were also manipulating information and circumstances to quash any perception of American weakness or impropriety. The Bureau is one of these agencies. Like COINTELPRO, the Bureau's true purpose is another clandestine war is being waged in the shadows. At first, the real raison d'etre of the Bureau is a secret even for the people who work there. "They soon figure out that they're not there to protect us from the Russians," said 2K Marin associate producer Andrew Dutra. "They're there to protect us from an outside alien force." Players will inhabit the character of William Carter, a man recruited to lead squads into the field at sites of extraterrestrial incursions and grasp victory from the jaws of defeat. 2K Marin Creative Director Morgan Gray then jumped into to talk about gameplay elements. He called the Bureau a *JARGON ALERT* "third-person, squad-based tactical combat expression of the core pillars of the XCOM franchise, which we define as team, tactics, technology, tools, terror, tension." Carter wields a special ability called Battle Focus which slightly slows down the action and lets him issue commands. Players will be able to control squadmates in battle and will recruit, customize and upgrade them as well. "It's pretty hardcore," Gray told me. "We're not trying to make a hyper-accessible game. We're trying to keep XCOM tied to its roots as a game that demands skill. Some people might say 'ahh, that's hard.' Hard's not the same. It's a game that requires you to use your brains and your bullets to win. Picture a modern, small-unit tactical combat game set in the '60s with technology that NASA should've made back then and your opposition are aliens.. That's what we're shooting for." Gray also made it sound like there might be some time-shifting in the game's storyline, where players get to be there at the day-one stage of the organization and they also get to be part of the government covering up The Bureau's existence. And what about permadeath, the most haunting element of last year's Enemy Unknown? "Bad decisions on the player's part can result in permadeath for agents in the field. So this guy you’ve customized for hours is now gone and you're screwed. And, unlike the turn-based strategic games where you can pull away from the main campaigns and kind of pull somebody off the bench, [the Bureau's] campaign is constantly moving forward. So our expression of the consequence of agent loss is even more brutal. But kind of awesome, too." I asked Gray if there'd be any kind of reward mechanism in The Bureau that would benefits players who bought Enemy Unknown. "We do not have a mechanical tie-in explicitly in the game," he answered. "Although we have been investigating various ways to acknowledge that someone's a franchise fan. But we don't have anything where having an install of Enemy Unknown produces something in our game or vice versa." So why the change from a first-person perspective, which was what XCOM was when it was last seen? "When we first showed in 2010, the focus was on a different side of XCOM. It was a focus on investigation," Gray explained. "In 2011, we had decided that XCOM was an organization that was built on going out and kicking alien ass, not necessarily researching it as a primary game mechanic, per se. So we began to show the hybrid which was first-person navigation and third-person tactical squad combat controls. We then decided to go third-person all the time since the game's all about tactical combat. There's inherent advantages to third-person: I know where I'm at, where my team's at and where the enemies are at." Gray said that the decision to move away from the isometric, top-down view was to create a different sense of battlefield awareness and engagement. The campaign structure of The Bureau isn't like that of a shooter. "It's not level-cutscene-level-cutscene-credits," Gray explained. "You'll always have the map of the battleground, which is all of America, and players will pick and choose between primary mission types and side missions." While all these changes were being wrought on The Bureau's design, Enemy Unknown came out to much acclaim. I asked Gray how the success of the Firaxis-developed game impacted the corporate cousins at 2K Marin. Did it change what they trying to do? "I don't know what 2K's meta-expectations were," he began. "But, as a classic XCOM fan—and not just a 2K employee—I expected it to blow up because classic XCOM is one of my favorite games of all time. I thought they did a great job!" "What it did for us, philosophically," Gray continued, "was show us that not only are there a lot of classic XCOM fans with money in their pockets, but there's also a generation of gamers that is ready to play games like we used to play them back in the day. Games that are a little harder, less forgiving and demand more skill. Finding that out was awesome for us. We then were able to say that we're going to balance and tune our game for a specific type of gamer." "We don't need to be a watered-down everyman super-accessible kind of game. We can make a creative statement with what we're trying to achieve," Gray told me. "Usually, in development, it's 'how do we try to get everybody in the world to like what we're doing. That's not happening here." The people the dev team are aiming at might feel a little underserved by the games they have to choose from. "Maybe they're Ghost Recon fands, maybe they're Rainbow [Six] fans. People who dig a little harder into third-person games. We can make a table for them to sit down at and check out what we're doing." Because they're both XCOM games, there were things from Enemy Unknown that The Bureau's dev team were able to benefit from with regard to design. "Things like aspects of visualization of tactical awareness," Grey told me. And what about the focus on story and characters glimpsed in The Bureau's previous outings? Is the closeted gay scientist still going to be in the game? "Absolutely," Gray confirmed. "The idea of telling a very character-focused narrative is a first for this franchise. The other games have been more strategic sandbox types of games with a high-level story that wraps around it. In this one, William Carter's your viewpoint character and it's through him that you meet other characters and find out why they're in this war and how they're developing." "We did BioShock 2 here at 2K Marin and that was a toolbox kind of game where we focused on player agency—letting you play how you want and a lot of tools to do it with—combined with a more directed story. We don't ever want to be too on-the-nose. We're in the 1960s in The Bureau and subversive subtext is what interests us the most as a studio." If The Bureau turns out to be worth the wait after such a long incubation period, that might be the biggest subversion of all. The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is scheduled to come out for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on August 20th in North America and on August 23rd internationally. Look for more coverage of the game in the coming weeks.

Whatever happened to the other XCOM, the 2K Marin-made shooter which was revealed long before last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown made everyone, except you, happy? It’s a question we’ve already asked several times here. We ask it because we don’t know the answer, and unless anyone involved feels like getting their Talpidae on and sneaking us some info, we won’t know until 2K reveal all. Which appears to be something that will happen rather soon. There’s a viral campaign of sorts, there’s a mysterious package being sent to games sites which aren’t us, and, well, there’s a blog post. That kind of undermines the air of mystery, I guess.

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2K Marin's XCOM shooter recently had all its official assets removed from the internet, which now appears to be prep work for the re-reveal of the game later this week. 2K Games posted this morning that in the coming days the XCOM "squad-based tactical shooter in development at 2K Marin" will be shown again.

It was a little surprise back in February when Take-Two (2K Games' parent company) announced during its financial call that the XCOM shooter was still in production and expected before March 31, 2014.

Firaxis' refresh of the original strategy game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, launched last year to "critical and commercial success." Conspiracy theories circled that the ever-delayed XCOM shooter, announced at E3 in 2011, was merely a marketing ploy to show how good players had it by the time the strategy game was announced. Apparently we're about to live in a world where two genres of XCOM live in peaceful coexistence (for a time, anyway).

"The XCOM universe is expanding," boasts a recently added post on 2K Games' official blog. It seems we can expect more information on the continually delayed XCOM shooter soon—a welcome change after the complete silence following the sudden disappearance of the game earlier this month.