I love Time Crisis games and this game makes me appreciate them even more. The mouse controls feel off. The reloading mechanic is completely pointless, because it's instant. You just press two buttons at once instead of one to fire and ammo restrictions cease to exist. The visuals make enemies blend into the background and get hidden by particle effects. The music sucks. Bosses require so much spamming of the fire button you might genuinely injure yourself fighting them. The camera keeps moving in the worst moments, throwing off your aim when you barely get any time to react in the first place. There's a lot of cheap reaction time tests that you'll need to memorise because they're way too tight to actually respond to on your first couple of goes. Enemies are invincible for the duration of many animations. Sometimes you need 2 headshots instead of 1 to kill a zombie. Sometimes popping their head off doesn't kill them, and I don't think it's at all predictable when it will happen.
XIII was borderline unplayable on PC due to issues with mouse support and a lack of any gamepad support to speak of. The remake has functional controls, which already makes it the only feasible way to enjoy the game. I encountered no bugs in my playthrough, or none that would affect gameplay at least. The visuals suffer a major downgrade only when it comes to the character models. The levels look more or less exactly how you'd expect a modernised verstion of the classics to be. The biggest issues with the game are things that actually carry over from the original: the absolutely awful checkpoint placements (critical fault of the original) and some sections where you can't tell what triggers a fail state (some NPC can't see knocked out or dead guards, but you're not told what body they noticed and they're out of your view). This game has a terrible reputation, but it really is just okay. A 3 star rating sums it up exactly.
The game can be fun and is at its best when it is difficult but fair, where you could reasonably get a perfect run the first time through. But then there are the moments when you're meant to shoot faraway, invisible moving objects, with slowly moving projectiles, without a crosshair and while putting up with how the game doesn't let you jump if you're on a sloped surface, misleading visuals and annoying level design that relies on memory, because things happen too fast for your weapon's shot to reach their targets or register. The game also has a narrow field of view just to make sure you're not comfortable playing it.
This game looks amazing and would be kinda cool, but this version is unplayable. There is mouse filtering you can't get rid of - you're not going to hit any moving target. There is no proper gamepad support if you want to go that route either. You have to dig through .ini files to change the sensitivity to something reasonable, disable vsync, change the field of view, basically anything - and then create a new profile, wiping your saves, for half of the changes to apply. NOTHING has been done to make this a good experience. I honestly, no joke wish they just sent you a ROM for you to emulate instead, because I could at least get a gamepad to work properly. Such a shame.
