Review - XIII (PS2, 2003)
XIII (or Thirteen) is a first-person shooter (FPS) based on a French comic book series of the same name, beginning in the 1980s. Like many games coming from a literary source, XIII has an excellent and entertaining narrative, but the gameplay is merely passable (I’m looking at you, Parasite Eve). The shooting is enjoyable enough, but the emphasis on stealth and the slippery controls make for a fairly mediocre gameplay experience. Luckily, the engaging story and the attractive visuals make up for those deficits, and we end up with a pretty decent game overall, and one I’m glad to have played.
GAMEPLAY - What you’re getting here is fairly standard stealth-based, gadget-heavy FPS gameplay in the style of GoldenEye or Syphon Filter. The emphasis on stealth sneaks up on you a bit. The first few levels are more outright action, so when the stealth levels start in, they are a nice change of pace. Eventually, though, you realize that they have taken over entirely, and it stays that way through most of the rest of the game. That’s not a tragedy, as the stealth is handled reasonably well, but it would have been nice to keep the mix a little more even.
The stealth levels do a pretty decent job of creating and maintaining tension, like they should, but they do so in part using that old convention, trial-and-error. Many of the levels contain an instant fail state if you are spotted by guards. This is extremely frustrating, as guards have much better vision than you do, and can often see you before you see them, forcing you to go back to the last checkpoint and try again, often not even knowing where you went wrong in the first place. These levels become tests of endurance, where each successive attempt allows you to learn the pattern of one or two guards, only to be spotted by the next. This serves only to pad out the game’s length, and no fun is had in grinding through the same encounters half a dozen times.
