This is a game a part of me wanted desperately to enjoy. The story, while a bit cliche, is engaging enough that you want to see what happens next. You want to know the story behind whats happening to both your main character, and at a more global scale. The voice actors are good, but I appreciate any game that uses Adam West as a VA. These factors makes the insultingly obvious cliffhanger ending even more of an annoyance than cliffhanger endings already are. The cel-shaded art style, while not as polished as the later released Borderlands, was incredibly well done for the time, and the limitations. It gave the game the comic booky feel it tried for, and desperately needed. If I were to go off those two factors, and rate this as a comic or a movie, I would probably give XIII a glowing review, instead of the mediocre score I gave it. XIII's biggest failure is its badly designed, and infuriating gameplay. This is obviously where my opinion of the game fell apart and in most circumstances would have caused me to shelf the game, never to go back to it. The weapons are basic, boring, and in some cases redundant. The guns I will hold up for the sake of this review are the Assault Rifle and the Kalashnikov. The crowning difference between these two guns is one has an under-slung grenade launcher and full auto fire (AR), the other has burst fire (Kalash). This makes the Kalashnikov essentially worthless, as its one difference can be emulated by not holding down the fire button. Yet the game forces you to use it more than once by taking away your guns every mission. To add to the woes about the weak weapon selection, XIII suffers from what I like to call twig-leg syndrome. The guy can't fall more than 3 feet without breaking both knee caps. Apparently, they never teach a man how to fall in the school where they teach Secret Agents so you don't hurt yourself. Add painfully stupid AI, a complete lack of a difficulty curve (the game is more like a roller coaster difficulty wise), and forced stealth missions in a game obviously not designed for stealth, and you have a recipe for disaster. Unless you're really a fan of Adam West, or the comic book art style, avoid this game. Watch some Batman, or X-Files and toss in Unreal, you'll thank yourself later.
