XIII

 

XIII is a game developed by a little know company known as Southend Interactive, who never really made anything else of note besides this game.
This is a standard level based first person shooter where you go from point A to point B to progress through the game. Usually it has some objectives here and there that you have to do such as the typical finding keys or destroying certain things. However (unfortunately) a large part of the game isn't spent doing shooting action, but rather slow tedious stealth crawling about, which i'll go into more detail later.

What sets this game apart from its contemporaries is its artstyle and graphics. The game is very old, from 2003, but unlike some other games from the era, it still holds up graphically, thanks to its unique comic book artstyle. I think this is the game where other games like Team Fortress 2 and Borderlands got its inspiration from. Take one look at the game and you can tell its doing something different. It has a 'cell-shaded' based approach where everything has a black outline like a comic book, it works quite well.

And its not just how it looks either, these comic book style art plays a big role in the gameplay too. For instance, when enemies are walking around, you can 'see' their footsteps, by a big comic text popping out of them saying "Tap, tap, tap' as they walk around this text shows up in 3D space to help locate them.
As well as when you get headshots or certain events happen, a comic panel will pop up on your screen highlighting the events. It's a nice touch, and makes it feel like you're inside of an actual comic book.

The gun models look pretty good and are well animated for the era, they feel pretty good to use and have a certain skill to utilizing them properly. The recoil and shooting reminds me a bit of Counter-Strike, where you have to shoot in small bursts to hit accurately, and guns have specific 'spray patterns'. I also think if you stand still and crouch, you're more accurate too,but I'm not sure.
There's the standard arsenal of weapons, pistols, m4, shotgun, etc.
They all have certain use cases and theres good variety of situations to use them.
The magnum pistol in particular is very effective in its accuracy and ease of getting headshots.

The level design takes you on a plethora of locations and adventures, many modern type offices and facilites, banks, military complexes, snowy outposts, deserts, hospitals, and a military silo base which reminds me of locations from Half-life or even Goldeneye.
Infact, a lot of the game shares similarities with Half-Life and Goldeneye. Many levels and objectives remind me of Goldeneye, the objective based gameplay, the Spy Espionage angle, the music especially, and one level in particular that is very similar to the Control level from goldeneye.
It has levels similar to Half-life with the underground sprawling complexes, as well.

Another thing thats unique to this game, for the time period, is the fact that theres no Quick Saves. It uses a modern style autosave system where you must progress to certain points and get checkpoints.
I actually like this approach, especially in a game this old, as I feel like quicksaving is far too easy to 'cheat' the game.
I like the stress and suspense of actually really having to try, or else I lose progerss and have to re-do the past 2 minutes.
Sometimes, it can be extremely annoying (Mostly the stealth sections) but overall the lack of a Quick-save actually helps the game.

Another thing thats quite entertaning about this game is that it has quite a few Boss fights. These are also sort of unique, in that they have health bars and usually a big arena to go around to try to duke it out. Pretty fun and a nice addition. Sometimes they are quite bullshit in their 'aimbot' hitscan shooting though.

Unfortunately, the major thing that drained my enjoyment of this game is that maybe half of the game (or more) is spent doing this awful stupid silly stealth missions where you crawl around picking up chairs and random objects and hitting guards in the back of the head and then dragging their bodies around to hide them.
You slowly crawl around, find guards, have to wait for their stupid scripted dialogue to end in order to actually put them into position where you can take them out or avoid then, then you do all the effort of sneaking around, and then some guard (or camera) spots you from a mile away, screams "Alert!!" and then you instantly fail 5 seconds later because I got spotted.

In the last half of the game, it seems like almost all of the game is these awful stealth missions.
When I said the lack of quicksaves was good, I generally mean it for the suspenseful shooting action
But in the context of these stealth missions, it becomes extremely grueling fast.
Because you have to constantly keep sitting around and waiting for the enemies to finish their lines of dialogue or wait for their scripted events to stop, over and over and over.
One mission in particular was insanely stupid the 'SSH' base level, where you crawl around and then have to avoid being spotted by cameras and guards, then you get to a point where you have to use a gadget to listen in on some important guy, but the objective and conditions are so vauge and unintuitive that I kept failing over and over without really knowing why.

At one point you start to get  four, five, six stealth missions in a row and its just like, what the fuck? this isn't what I came here for.
It wouldn't even be that bad if the stealth parts were more enjoyable, but they're not. It just feels like filler and I find myself just waiting for it to be over to go back to the shooting. Very disappointing in an otherwise pretty fun game.

So other than that, you have the story which is a sort of spy amnesia espionage where your  character is some secret agent that forgets his memory and you team up with some government officials to do whatever they say and figure out some mystery or something. Its fine for what it is, it works to support a decent narrative, but its nothing you'll remember in a week or two.
There's some pretty funny cutscenes and campy voiceacting too, which I enjoyed.
And its funny how the game ends on a cliffhanger twist, with a big "To be continued..." then credits. But the game sold so poorly, and no one really cared, that the plans for a sequel were cancelled. So thats the legacy of XIII.
There is a recent 'remake' of this game, but apparently its so awful that no one should bother touching it and is a complete mockery of the original, so thats that.

Overall the game would have been much more enjoyable without the plethora of shitty stealth sections, potentially an 8/10, but as it stands now I probably have to put it quite a bit lower..as I'm not sure if I would be that thrilled to replay this game in the future, knowing that a significant portion of it is gameplay that I just dont enjoy.

6/10