XIII

Nice story, music and graphics, but holy is the comabt bad

XIII has a wonderful cell shaded style, a wide range of weapons to toy with, varied environments, a fun scat-jazz inspired soundtrack, and it promises a griping conspiracy-based spy thriller plot. Unfortunately, the weapons end up bland despite their variety, the enemies hitscan so combat is just a game of 'choose a range appropriate weapon and click on their head for a bit', and the plot is more of a set of mashed-together tropes than anything coherent. The big problems IMHO are threefold. 1 - It's mostly a FPS, and the shooting is kind of lame and overly easy. 2 - It couples checkpoint-only-saving, forced stealth sections, and AI / Hitbox jank together into a series of horrid "replay the last ten minutes AGAIN, for the fifth time, because this guard randomly saw through a wall this time around" experiences. 3 - Extremely linear. Not just in that the game requires the player to go from A to B to C, but in that you can lose missions and be booted back ten minutes because you didn't trigger a positional flag, in ways that don't make sense narratively or gameplay wise. There are other issues - Duchovny either phoned in his line reads or only had isolated, out of context snippets to read. (If released today, I'd assume they used a TTS AI to 'read' his part.) Lots of almost Xen-esque jumping puzzles. You can defeat the conspiracy really, REALLY early on, and you get a game over for doing so. Lots of unskippable cutscenes, including in the middle of stealth sections. It ends on a never-to-be-addressed cliffhanger. For all that, it does have a strong, nigh unique presentation that keeps things relatively interesting from start to finish. Remembering the limitations of the hardware it was originally designed for, it's an impressive piece. 3 out of 5 as a game, ~4.5 out of 5 as an artifact of its time.

Though the great is THE BEST and lovely,and now Windows 7 compatible,i give it 4 stars...why not 5?...there's NO SPANISH in the language...i've got the retail copy when it dropped to 10$..but it's NOT compatible with Windows 7 even with the google methods Whenever you guys get the game into spanish i'll download the hell out of it To the rest who knows english,i rate the game 5 stars..but my spanish opinion remains there until further notice

I liked the game when it came out years ago. But let's talk about this port: The maximum resolution is 1600 x 1200. The mouse movement is not smooth (very jittery). The default controls don't let you look around with your mouse. Reconfiguring the keys to get normal FPS controls isn't fun. People have made patches on the internet to fix these things. But I feel like this is too problematic to be sold. I'll be asking for a refund.

The presentation of the game is pretty slick, but without wide-screen, high resolution support, the cutscenes and game overall just looks very dated. It's a very typical shooter with a cheesy story-line and the occasional "don't hurt these people" objectives that at least makes you think before you shoot. I was kind of hoping for something more along the lines of the mid 2000's 007 games with interesting mission setups and objectives. But it's a fairly standard shooter with a sleek presentation. I find it hard to recommend as there are just better games that do most of what it does now, but it plays well enough, so if you just want to tear through an acceptable arcade shooter, go for it.