I've played more of The Bureau XCOM Declassified. I'm having lot of fun with it. Like I read up on here it plays very similarly to Mass Effect but in a XCOM universe. It's a squad based third person shooter with cooldown abilities.
Just like in ME you have a power wheel but here it's called a "battle focus" where you order your teammates to use their powers and abilities. The twist is that you have to order them around to move them in and out of cover around the map. They have an AI but it's rather dumb and they scream all the time for you to give them order. You have a three characters team all the time. Outside of the main character the other two are generic recruits you hired and are bringing along. Depending on the difficulty level, they can die permanently if you don't revive them quickly enough or die permanently as soon as they fall on Commander difficulty.
The game has a warning pop up explaining that it's possible to create a failstate if you kill all of them and don't have anymore to recruit. You can customize everyone appearance (albeit a bit basic like clothes color and head style) and their loadout and choose which skill to choose at rank up. So far there are 4 types of recruit you can have support/recon/commando/engineer and you can choose a different background for each with grant some passive bonus like your laser turret being more resistant or taking less damage while running. You can send your extra recruits on OPS while you are on a mission where they get experience, find new recruits and discover weapon and techs.
Your main character is kind of unique class wise because he touched an alien artifact (remind you of another game?) and you get unique cooldown abilities like a group heal or the psy lift abilities. You pick 2 weapons to carry with you at the mission screen but you can switch them with those you find on a mission. Once you discover a new weapon it gets added to your stash at your base.
You have a home base where you can talk to the characters with a ME style conversation wheel and unlock side missions. There is also a shooting range to test your weapons. You can listen to audio logs and read files scattered around to learn more about the lore of the game.
It's not so bad looking for 360/PS3 game (crappy steam compressed shots).
It's really difficult. Especially the beginning since you don't have many abilities. The AI partner have a tendency to step on mines and to not move away from grenades which the enemy spam a lot. They also like to start shooting out of cover which mean death in this game so you have to order them all the time to go behind a wall. Once you get the laser/rocket turret, mines and decoy it gets much easier. You can also tell where battle will take place as battles requires waist-high walls
. The cover mechanic is a bit annoying as you stick to cover and sometimes you either went to move out or crawl behind cover and fail doing it haha.
Frankly it's not a bad game and you can do much worse for 4$. Even at full price I don't understand why it was panned so much. My guess is that fans didn't want this and chose the real XCOM instead.
Words of warning about the PC port. You have to turn off the two PhysX effect or the game crashes on Nvidia cards. It's apparently new and caused by the recent Nvidia driver update. Also turn down effect details to medium or else the game slows down to a crawl every time you go close to a light source on my 970. Otherwise you can max it and it runs at 60 FPS. You can also go up to 120 FPS. In my case on Win 10 I had to turn off cloud saving or the game would refuse to start.
That was my 2 cents about it.