XIII

I just finished XIII. It's an old, cel-shaded first person shooter based on a Franco-Belgian comic book of the same name. It's a spy game, more along the lines of Jason Bourne than James Bond and it was totally fucking awesome! This is a spy game done right. You plant bugs, blow stuff up, sneak around, stab people in the eye with bottles, and save the president. It has a grappling hook. If your spy game doesn't have a grappling hook, it doesn't count. Speaking of stabbing people in the eye with bottles, improvised weapons are done fantastically well in this game. There's a relatively limited number of items that can be used as weapons, but they're available when they're necessary, and usually hanging around somewhere when they're not. It is exceptionally satisfying to throw a shard of glass into someone's face for a stealth kill. Also used to great effect in this game, throwing knives. I guess if I had to choose one thing, XIII does stabbing people in the face the best. My only complaints are that it's a little short, and the cel-shading led to some interesting artifacts. The game moves along at a pretty fast pace, but the levels never feel too short or too long. The locales are varied and you spend enough time in each area to enjoy it without overstaying your welcome. The cel-shading is used very well in the game, but it resulted in some abnormally thick black lines in unusual places, like the corners of the nostrils, or around the rims of eyeglasses. The nose thing is a little distracting in in-game cutscenes, but the eyeglasses thing really sucks. Characters wearing eyeglasses look like they're wearing some kind of sci-fi goggles. These effects, however, may be a result of eight years of hardware progress, or a variation in how my graphics card presents the game. I've seen screenshots of the game from other people who do not have the same weird artifacts. I'm really glad I picked this up. It is totally worth the price if you're into stabbing people in the face.

Main technical issues in the unpatched version: 1. A clean install of the GOG version doesn't let you use 1080p. 2. The mouse was completely broken in the main menu, it felt like there's a huge deadzone on both axes before any movement is registered. Feels absolutely terrible. Solution: Download the latest unofficial patch (1.4.2.1 as of my review) to fix the mouse movement and get 1080p support. -> https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/XIII About the game itself: I played the demo back in 2000 and loved it, sometime later a friend lent me his copy and I played the full game. So I was going into this with some nostalgia. I've replayed it in May 2020 and I have to say this game hasn't aged that well, mostly due to its game mechanics. The main factors for me are the bad gunplay, frustrating stealth mechanics and to some extent the level design. Savegames didn't work for me (you can save, but you can't load them), therefore you have to rely on the checkpoint system. So when you die, you usually get set back to a checkpoint that's way too far back and often makes you replay annoying parts of the level, which can really test your patience. If you didn't play XIII back then, you might want to wait for the remake and see how that turns out. I'm definitely not saying it's a bad game, it's just that the gameplay is a bit lacking from today's perspective.

XIII is a game that exudes coolness with its cel-shaded graphics and '60s spy movie soundtrack, but is unfortunately let down by its simplistic and dated gameplay. If you're looking for something on-par with No One Lives Forever, then XIII will disappoint you. The levels in XIII revolve around combat and stealth, but neither aspect feels particularly well-developed. Like many other FPSes from the time, guns are completely inaccurate in the player's hands yet have aimbot accuracy in the enemies' hands. Location-based damage is non-existent save for one-hit sniper rifle/crossbow headshots. Combine this with the poor animations and sound effects and you've got a game where nearly every gun feels like the Klobb from Goldeneye. The poor combat could've been saved if the stealth was any good (like Deus Ex), but unfortunately the stealth levels are even worse than the run-and-gun levels. There are no darkness, sound, or peeking mechanics in place, so stealth boils down to waiting behind corners for minutes at a time while watching the visible "Tap" comic SFX through walls. Enemies range from being blind from five feet away to spotting you across the map. Should you get caught, you'll wind up playing minutes of the same levels and seeing the same unskippable cutscenes over and over due to the awful checkpoint placements. Despite these faults, I still recommend purchasing XIII if only to preserve it in your account when the rights eventually expire again. The janky gameplay is entirely in service to the storyline, which is presented in stylish comic fashion with top-notch voice acting by David Duchovny and the late, great Adam West. The setpieces are also really fun and memorable in contrast to the drab, muddy environments in today's AAA shooters. Grab yourself a copy of XIII and head over to PCGamingWiki to get it running in widescreen with the proper FOV. Don't forget to save after every level, either, as there doesn't seem to be any autosave feature.

Came for the unique style of the game and in the end it was the only thing that dragged me thru it... The gameplay itself is completly linear with not much highlights, some parts are just anoying and the save-system is a joke (there are checkpoints, but you have to press quicksave to really save. If you forget this and close the game you're thrown back to the last checkpoint at which you saved also manually - lost quite a few hours of my life because of this. Also: Some of the checkpoints are just unfair, e.g. you survive a boss fight or espacially hard part of the game and than die from a minion and have to do it all again). And most disapointingly: The game ends with an cliffhanger, that doesn't get resolved...

As a fan of the XIII comic series I really wanted to enjoy this game. But couldn't. Level design, progress and overall feeling is at most mediocre. But the finall killer was the save system. I understand checkpoint-based save system. I can even to some point understand annoyingly rare checkpoints implemented in this game. But giving a player a "save" option which regardless of when and where you "saved" pushes you back to last checkpoint is really disappointing. Up to the point of "uninstall and forget". Shame really, because the visuals are quite ok. Maybe too polygony for modern standards but still quite good. Cel-shading makes the game not age that badly. But the gameplay just doesn't deliver.