10 Video Game Developers That Stupidly Ditched Popular Genres

8. The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

The Change: Turn-based strategy to third-person cover shooting.

The name "XCOM" is synonymous with slow, turn-taking strategy; of assembling a squad over time, knowing their strengths, alongside how and when to deploy them.

Few things are better than slowly tightening the net around a slew of aliens, only to lay out a handful of bodies at once, as you'd already planned to intercept a handful of escape routes or A.I. scripts.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, then, was initially meant to be a reboot of the franchise. After a lengthy development and various cancelled release windows, 2K Marin eventually turned out something that was still turn-based in terms of placing units and watching damage percentages for the time to strike, but felt like it had been put through a Gears of War blender.

See, this was the era of the stop n' pop cover shooter. Every dev and their distant cousin was trying to get in on the action, and although The Bureau had some neat conceptual ideas, its gameplay didn't feel remotely natural.