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.
I normally play RPGs and live off a diet of skill trees, character customization and that delicious nonlinear exploration experience. This game has, however, caught my attention. Only played a bit so far, but the story, the characters the setup, the action - they all have some kind of creative spin on them, and I can't wait for more. Mondo is a fascinating protagonist, with an air of mystery wrapping his suave, badass look. Nothing makes any sense, of course, without the potential 2 hours of exposition that'll probably be dropped onto my head like a small ship somewhere down the line. But until then - Moon River, Dark Side of the Moon, Stylish kills, SUPER-stylish graphics - I'm drawn in. If only to see what it's all about. And that's honestly my only complaint about this game - it feels relatively linear to the extent that levels seem to have (so far) a linear path through. I may have just missed the branches, but a game that hides its complexity too well is perhaps, in my view, not such a good one. And that's where I'll leave it - if you come in expecting a super self-aware hack-and-slash, with intriguing characters and story, you'll probably enjoy this a lot. If not, well.....
