If you buy this game you're going to end up with the most recent version, which is v1.4 The 1.4 patch was mostly put out for multiplayer balancing and functionality. It also COMPLETELY BREAKS some parts of the single player campaign! Specifically, enemies will be able to detect you through (opaque) tent walls. This bug is one of the biggest reasons people complain about the unfairness of the AI's vision. Google a fan-made patch to downgrade the game from v1.4 to 1.3. Like I said, the only things you'll be missing out on are multiplayer related, while you'd be improving the single player considerably.
Shadow Warrior isn't the worst game to use the build engine, but it's also far from the best. The enemy design tries to be 'unique' but often falls flat with monsters that are not very fun to fight, many of the maps turn into lame key hunts when they aren't devoting themselves to gimmicks that feel duct-taped into an engine not meant to house them, and the majority of the weapons err towards being wacky instead of being useful. If you've played Duke Nukem 3D and Blood and you are desperate for something that's sort of like that but not as good, it's worth playing... ...with the voice samples turned wayyyy down. This game was uncomfortably racist for 1997, and by now it must look like Song of the South. It's one thing to be 'politically incorrect' for the sake of a joke, but the only way you're going to get away with it is if the joke is actually funny. Instead the game regurgitates the "AH SO I ROVE YOU RONG TIME ME SO SOLLY FUH-GIV-I-NUSS PUREASE" voice you may remember from the 1940s. As a result it's not so much funny as it is grating and then immediately depressing.
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.
Blood 1 pretty much rules, but this one is just awful. Aside from the fact that they completely dropped the weird setting that made the first one interesting and unique in favor for a bland and forgettable techno-future (reminiscent of Daikatana of all things) the game just stinks The level design is aimless and meandering in that crappy late-90s way. The Doom/Quake era had some amazing maps, but sometime around Quake 2 everyone decided that wandering around aimlessly looking for keys was a means to an end all by itself. Crates, sewers, cardkeys, jumping puzzles, switch puzzles, doors blocked by laser grids... they're all here. It would be alright if the shooting didn't suck. Damage varies wildly. Sometimes my starter pistol takes down monster-tanks in literally one hit, sometimes it takes 23 headshots. You get dual uzis early on, but then "upgrade" to an assault rifle that is actually worse? Cruddy rapid-fire hitscan baddies will drain you from 200hp to 0 in nanoseconds, so you need to keep one finger on quicksave at all times. Melee enemies oftentimes hop onto your head and then spin around until you move. Great. Oh, and it crashes a lot, too!
A competent enough platformer, but for whatever reason they decided to replace the cool mystic atmosphere of Rayman 2 with zany cartoon voices and lame self-referential humor. As a game it falls only a bit short of the first two, but it completely lost me with the "Mascot 'Tude" that I thought died with Bubsy. It doesn't help that the PC version is... not great. A better port than Rayman 2 for certain, but it's certainly a cheaply produced console to PC port from back when publishers put even less effort into those than they do now.
