XIII

While it doesn't break with any of the gameplay conventions typical to a first-person shooter, XIII does have a very unique and interesting visual style that adds interest and sets it apart from other games of this type. Story-wise, XIII follows an amnesiac government assassin who may, or may not, have shot the president. Throughout the course of the game, you will find out more about the conspiracy and start piecing together your own past to find out just what in the hell happened. Despite succumbing to some cliched storytelling, the plot is sufficient enough to motivate the action. For an FPS, XIII is a bit plot-heavy, so a more interesting story would have been welcomed. XIII wraps up in a dozen or so hours making it worth a single playthrough. XIII's action doesn't depart much from standard FPS fare. You'll start with relatively weak weapons before slowly working up to grenade launchers, assault rifles, and the like. Each weapon responds like you would expect it to. Most weapons have an alternate fire mode, like a sniper scope or full-auto fire. You'll find copious amounts of health packs lying around, as well as several gadgets that get you from point A to point B, like the grapling hook. I found a few of the more interesting levels included stipulations where you couldn't kill someone, but had to find a way to take them out without them shooting you. You could pick up chairs and bean them over the head, or sneak up behind them and knock them cold. It provided a nice change of pace to have to sneak around a bit. The one place where XIII departs from standard FPS games is in its presentation. The game is based on a comic book, so the developers decided to keep the comic book look by using cel shading. Taking it a bit further, the game is presented in a comic book style by using panels to move between scenes or showing multiple camera angles during certain mission sections. For instance, you'll see a panel of a guard's feet as he walks towards you while the other panel shows you waiting to pounce when he's close enough to stealthily kill him. Also, a lot of the sound effects have visual cues as well. If a guard is on the other side of the wall, you'll hear his footsteps and see "tap, tap, tap" move across the floor as the guard moves. Whenever a grenade explodes nearby, a large "BOOM" in comic-style text will appear alongside the sound of the explosion. These little touches do a lot to add immersion into the game and make it stand out. While, at its core, XIII doesn't play much differently than any other FPS, it's still a solid game. Due to its unique visual style and presentation, I can recommend playing through it once.

The game IMO is mediocre. The gun fights are not consistent. Some weapons do head shots in one while others in two. The boss fights are absolutely horrendous. They're just regular AI with extra HP and higher accuracy. The last boss was even worse in that regard. I couldn't beat him without exploiting a glitch. The saves are also checkpoint systems but not during checkpoints, which I learned the hard way myself. So if you thought that a checkpoint was met, you didn't have to save yourself, then ya, you'll go back to your last save, or to the beginning of the game. The graphics does not hold well even with cel-shading and the voice acting was also hit or miss. The only thing good about the game was the intriguing story that just offers enough motivation to play on. At least I finally got to experience it and for the price of $2.29 CDN, it could've been worse.

I was amazed at how good this game is. Loved it. The art style is awesome, the comic book panel intro's are spot on. Great game. Cool action, cool stealth and cool story. Put a smile on my face. Great voice acting by Adam West and David Duchovny was... well, he sounded just like David Duchovny :) Overall, I think this really hit the spot, reminded me a bit of Goldeneye.

The game's main strength is the comic book aesthetic and the cel shaded graphics. They look great! The game's main weakness is all of the gameplay which is why I dropped it only after a couple of levels. Main problems are: * Gunplay. Bullets don't go where you aim and enemies feel like bullet sponges. The game tells you at the beginning to shoot enemies in the head to kill them quickly. Well that worked fine on the first two levels, but after that I needed to unload half a clip into an enemy's head to take them down (with half of my bullets going someplace else despite aiming at the head). Weapon switching is incredibly slow and is not usable in fights. While the switch animation plays out, an enemy can take off half of your hp & armor. All in all it is frustrating and winning a fight does not feel rewarding at all. * Save system. I could live with atrocious gunplay if I were able to save scum through the game. But no, every time you die you seem to have to start at the beginning of the level and go through the tedious fights again.

First off, I couldn't even properly play this game without the All-in-One Patch/XIII+ mod. I remember trying to play XIII way back in the day and not having luck, either, so it's actually impressive that I can get it running on modern hardware when I was unable to even on the proper hardware in its release window. So, on to the game. It's firmly 'meh' in my opinion. Given that I was surprised this came out in 2003 and I had played it a few years later, I had to go back and look to see what other FPS games were out surrounding its release time frame. Soldier of Fortune was a few years earlier, Red Faction was, too. Postal 2 came out the same year and Far Cry 1 came out like 4-5 months after. All of these are much better games, in my opinion. So, XIII is just okay to me. It nailed the art style, but everything else after playing for a couple of hours is rather boring to me. Maybe if you are more into spy thrillers, this will be up your alley. I'm glad GoG was giving it away for free.