XIII - Remake

I have not played the original enough to compare this remake to it. Having said that, XIII (remake) is pretty poor on its own. Visually, it looks great. Fallen Aces has a much more distinctive, interesting visual style, but there are plenty of gorgeous moments in XIII Remake. Enough to make it visually appealing and engaging. Storywise, there's nothing that interesting. Yes, it's the classic tale of betrayal and blah blah but nothing really interesting is being done here. Characters are flat (and boring), story beats don't seem to connect to the gameplay at all (except the odd "do not kill the hospital staff" message, but they don't pose any threats so you can only really kill them accidentally), and the plot is overall just meh. What upsets me the most, though, is a bunch of design decisions that make no plain sense. For starters, unskippable cutscenes right after respawn points. Ridiculous. Then comes the walking and crawling speed. GODAWFULLY slow. Deus Ex this isn't. Awkward character interactions and strange triggers (e.g. conversation starts only once I walk past some characters and suddenly I'm pulled back to standing in front of them). Jones throws a grenade at a building in a cutscene, which explodes totally. One dude runs out of it on fire and 4 enemies waltz out UNHARMED. XIII is positioned right in the open and cutscene switches to combat. ??? NO visual indicators of low health. No reddening or blackening of screen borders, nothing. XIII often dies, out of nowhere. There's plenty of examples of such INANE game design that the momentarily tense and well-scripted moments in between lose all their effectiveness. To be fair, this is hardly on the developers, who were pushed to develop a game far outside their experience with barely any source code from the original, so it's a mangement problem for sure. But a problem, nonetheless, it is. 2/5.

Its ok.

SUPER

I really wanted to like this game. I didn't encounter any bugs. And the graphics are unique and interesting. But what ended up ruining this game for me was the "checkpoint" save system conbined with the game's un-skippable cutscenes. Every time after I had to turn off the PC in the middle of a level, or after I made a crucial mistake during the mission, I would have to re-watch repeats of the same unskippable cutscenes and conversational dialogue again. That quickly became annoying. Especialy in the beginning of the game where I'm just trying to get used to the control and the game mechanics.

gut