XIII

XIII is one of my favorites. Great story, unique art style, solid gameplay, terrific voice acting, etc. And yes, so sad there was no sequel. Love it, love it!

The art style for this game is top-notch, plain and simple. The fact that this game still looks good 17 years after release is mind boggling. This is, to me, the best example of cell shading in a game. Everything looks like it's right out of a comic book. The age of the game is hidden completely because of how well the cell shading was done. Though, the graphics were really the only thing I enjoyed about this game. The game play is lacking. Levels are a mixed bag of forced stealth, "you should maybe do stealth here," and guns blazing corridor shooter levels. The stealth systems that take up a large portion of many levels are underdeveloped and feel slapped on last minute just because a comic book Bond-type thriller needs stealth. If they were going to make a stealth game, they should have made a stealth game, but this is the worst of corridor shooters and stealth put together. Couple that with some really bad AI, damage so unbalanced that you almost can't die, and XIII becomes a real slog to play. I remember playing this when I was younger, and I really wanted to like it, but the poor gameplay led me to drop it roughly 75% of the way through.

I bought XIII on sale with the expectation of having a new mediocre FPS to play through, and if it weren't for the (fairly broken) mandatory stealth segments and some really cheap moments it would be just that. The controls feel a little bit clunky, half because it's a bad console port, and half because the guns tend to have a large amount of spread... although of course the AI doesn't seem to have much trouble handling them. There is a level of slowness to everything from movement to switching weapons to opening locked doors to a strange Halo-esque moon jump... almost as if they were trying to make the game feel as blocky and chunky as it looks. Speaking of the stylized graphics, it was probably really cool-looking at the time, but with games like Prince of Persia 2008 and Borderlands out there now it's kind of hard to use that as an excuse to ignore the sloppy gameplay. The "iconic Hollywood voice acting" is a joke. David Duchovony, who voices the protagonist, sounds like they recorded his lines in the middle of a morphine high. The story, dialogue, and characters are stupid, but not even the fun kind of stupid. Imagine if the Bourne Identity was written by the most formulaic seven year old ever, basically.

I got hyped about the game when it was released but was unable to get it back then. Now I joined the party pretty late and I am just disappointed. Mouse lags in menus and in game, changing my mouse's polling rate or modifying some .ini files did not help as well. On top of that, manual saving (a function which I miss in most post 2010 games) is broken. After some time I created a save file and quit the game. When I wanted to continue, I was thrown back to the beginning of the story. Maybe it is due to incompatibility with Windows 10, however this would be the first time this happens with a retro game bought on GOG and seems unlikely since I also have some mid 1990s gems which work perfectly.

I love the game. I finished it more than once