XIII

I used to LOVE XIII back in the day, both for PC and consoles. I played the Xbox version when it came out, but lost it long ago. The graphical style attracted me, as did the intriguing story line. The comic-like insets of closeups when you shoot at enemy far away, superb (yet sparse) voice acting by David Duchovny and Adam West, the dramatic and adaptive music, it truly was ahead of its time. By today's standards and viewing habits, we may look back at this and find the animations crude, the cutscenes pixelated and the aspect ratio of 4:3 on a 16:9 monitor seriously out of place. At the same time, we can see how far video games and interactive entertainment has come in over 15 years, and I for one think that preserving a version like this is an important step in video game history. Granted, for the current PC version here on GOG.com (Version 1.0) there's no native 16:9 support, but like a previous reviewer suggested, there are easy to add patches from the PC Gaming Wiki (thanks for the tip, Rodrigues520). Cloud saves are enabled though, and without patches you'll get resolutions between 640x480 and up to 1280x960. PCs and consoles couldn't handle much more than that in 2003 anyway. We also get Multiplayer support, but whose servers are used to play with others I cannot tell you. I'm not a multiplayer kinda guy. Sadly there's no native game controller support in this version, so if you'd like to play with such a device (like I do), you'll have to map the keys with a utility like Xpadder. It's like pressing the keys with your game pad. Not ideal, but it works. Although far from perfect, I'm so glad that this original version is available again for those who care. I've been looking for years to get my hands on a legal version, and I'm glad we have it here on GOG.com. I give it 4 out of 5 stars for lack of controller support and lack of higher resolutions beyond 1280x960. Other than that, it's a magical experience I'm glad to re-live.

This game oozes style, and it's worth playing just to see what it would be like to live inside a spy-action comic book. The graphics, music, and story are all pretty good. But as a first person shooter, it was lacking even when it was released. Controls are fairly standard, but the gameplay itself is repetitive and boring, and if I remember correctly you have to play through checkpoints instead of just starting from saved games. I recommend trying a demo if you can still find it, or buying it if you love the style so much you don't mind thoroughly mediocre shooting action.

This is a game a part of me wanted desperately to enjoy. The story, while a bit cliche, is engaging enough that you want to see what happens next. You want to know the story behind whats happening to both your main character, and at a more global scale. The voice actors are good, but I appreciate any game that uses Adam West as a VA. These factors makes the insultingly obvious cliffhanger ending even more of an annoyance than cliffhanger endings already are. The cel-shaded art style, while not as polished as the later released Borderlands, was incredibly well done for the time, and the limitations. It gave the game the comic booky feel it tried for, and desperately needed. If I were to go off those two factors, and rate this as a comic or a movie, I would probably give XIII a glowing review, instead of the mediocre score I gave it. XIII's biggest failure is its badly designed, and infuriating gameplay. This is obviously where my opinion of the game fell apart and in most circumstances would have caused me to shelf the game, never to go back to it. The weapons are basic, boring, and in some cases redundant. The guns I will hold up for the sake of this review are the Assault Rifle and the Kalashnikov. The crowning difference between these two guns is one has an under-slung grenade launcher and full auto fire (AR), the other has burst fire (Kalash). This makes the Kalashnikov essentially worthless, as its one difference can be emulated by not holding down the fire button. Yet the game forces you to use it more than once by taking away your guns every mission. To add to the woes about the weak weapon selection, XIII suffers from what I like to call twig-leg syndrome. The guy can't fall more than 3 feet without breaking both knee caps. Apparently, they never teach a man how to fall in the school where they teach Secret Agents so you don't hurt yourself. Add painfully stupid AI, a complete lack of a difficulty curve (the game is more like a roller coaster difficulty wise), and forced stealth missions in a game obviously not designed for stealth, and you have a recipe for disaster. Unless you're really a fan of Adam West, or the comic book art style, avoid this game. Watch some Batman, or X-Files and toss in Unreal, you'll thank yourself later.

I have to say, the game keeps you guessing, however, for what else was available in 2004, you can see why this game was not all that well received. It is a great 4 to 5 hour romp and with some friends, you can get a multiplayer game going. Be warned, the shooting is nothing special. I had to a bunch of things to get the game running well however, here are the things I had to do: - Install game from GoG. - Install custom patch 1.4.2.1 (?) - Install dgVoodoo 2 graphics shim and force the game to use DirectX w/ my resolution and high ref. rate in windowed mode. - Go to my graphics control panel (nvidia in my case) and nudge frame-rate and refresh rate settings until the game finally ran above 65 fps. - Edit some ini files and turn mouse smoothing off. - Create new profile and finally enjoy the game. Check out the PCGamingWiki article for the classic XIII game to do most of those listed things. Honestly, with the way the game ends and with how dated movement and shooting (in an FPS) feels, the game is more of a 3.5 imho, keep in mind, there are other issues that play in to this, like an awkward checkpointing system and buggy audio from some "cut scenes". Honestly, this game was intended to have a sequel and it deserves one too. All of it's issues are technical and some game-feel, both thing you can expect to be better in a sequel, but it never got one. Oh well. On a sale, def. worth it.

...but it's simply not good. It feels like this game does absolutely everything wrong. Well, almost everything. XIII actually has a somewhat interesting storyline, some cool spy-action music and a stylish cell-shaded art style…but beyond that the game is broken. The controls are slow and the inventory system is cumbersome. The game has tons of odd glitches, plenty of poor game design and some truly horrendous AI. The game also has poorly defined NPC paths as enemies will slide on the ground rather than run to the next location and other crazy things like that. The lack of a proper quicksave feature is also bothersome and really shows the age of the game. Unless you enjoy slogging through a broken game with endlessly spawning enemies and terrible guns, avoid XIII at all costs.