XIII

"An excellent game with minor flaws."

XIII is a cel-shaded first person shooter released in fall of 2003. What makes this game different from other first person shooters is that it is ''cel-shaded'', which means it's almost like a comic book. But this game also takes it into the point where it's almost like you're actually playing a comic book. You will get windows that pop up when you shoot someone off a building, and instead of someone just yelling when you shoot them, a line of someone yelling “AHHHH” will pop up above them, just like in an old comic book. The game also stars famous actors in the voice-overs for the game. Adam West, from the old batman series will be starring as ''the general''. Eve, A famous rapper will be starring as ''Jones'', and David Duchovny from the X Files will be playing as the main character of the game, ''XIII''. As you can probably tell already, Ubisoft, the makers of the game put quite a bit of effort into making this videogame. It is very original, and very different from most First Person Shooters these days. This game has a mystery type of storyline to it. You barely know anything about yourself or anything else at the start of the game, but as you proceed through the game you will find small bits of information on your way.

Gameplay- 8/10
You are a man named XIII. You don't know who you really are yet, that comes later in the game. All you know when you wake up on a beach is that you have a tattoo of the number thirteen in roman numerals on your chest.
The controls in this game are very well put together. You simply have your shoot, alternate fire, crouch, jump, action button, reload, and change weapon buttons. There is also a sensitivity control and an invert axis option. The control layout is especially good when you have your friends over who have never played the game and they don't know the controls very well. They can easily just jump in the game and start playing. There is also a blood and gore setting in the options so that if you older folks out their are letting your children play at young ages, at least they will know that when they grow up if they shoot someone’s brains out, then they will just drop to the ground with a bullet through their head with no blood...heh heh heh...
You will have lots of fun with this game, and you'll probably really like it if you are into first person shooters. the weapons range from ashtrays, yes ashtrays, to rocket launchers. Also everything in between, like crossbows, shotguns, spear guns, and shovels. The thing is about the weapons in this game is that if you see a big blast in the wall that is leading into another room, there is probably going to be bricks nearby the hole. You can pick up glass shards, beer bottles, clipboards- just about whatever is sitting around. Something else that adds a bit of realism to the game is that if you are carrying around a rocket launcher, you will go slower than if you are walking around with a 9mm.
Sometimes a shard of glass in the neck will be more effective than emptying a magazine of 30 machine gun bullets on a heavily armored soldier. Stealth also takes a big part in this game. If you're in a room with no way out but a long hallway with armored soldiers, you can either run in like a mad man throwing grenades around and blowing everything that moves to hell with a shotgun, or you can slowly sneak in with a silenced pistol, carrying your dead enemies away into a room where the other guards hopefully won't look. And remember, this is not Duke Nukem. This game relies on being stealthy and knowing how to get around silently.
You will almost never see the same thing in this game. In one level you may have to blow up individual circuit breakers to gain access to a military base while sneaking around and trying to avoid the guards who will run for the alarm when they see you, but in a different level you might have to use whatever means necessary to eliminate an enemy helicopter preventing you from reaching your contact point. You will end up in many different locations, outside in the cold winter, or maybe in an insane asylum awaiting your ''check up'' by an insane doctor. You will also come along flashbacks to what you had been doing before you woke up on the beach, and you have to put them together piece by piece to find out what is really going on with what is happening with you and the strange things going on around you. But this is no cheesy storyline either. It is a very mature and you may even have to play it through one or two more times after the first time around so that you know what's going on. You never know what will happen next. You may think that when you are 5 levels from the ending of the game you may well think that you know that it is a typical ending and you already know what is going to happen. This game is not like that. There are many turning points in the game and you can usually only have an idea of what's going on if you have read over every file and piece of data that you know of, from one of the sections in the game where you can look through the files and such you have picked up through the game.
It is quite easy through the first few levels of the game, but then when you progress it gets more harder and you will need the skills you have learned along the way to make good work of your enemies.
Sometimes in different levels you will have to use a gadget to make yourself past a point in the game, such as using a grapple hook to repel down a building like Adam West from batman would, or use a lockpick to gain access to a jail cell to release a prisoner, just like Agent 47 would do in the game Hitman.
There are some low points to the gameplay though. You have to manually save after each checkpoint in the game, and if you make it past 10 levels in one day and forget to save, then you'll be starting back over from the start when you turn on your game next morning only to discover you have no game saved from the day before. You also cannot choose a level from a screen like you can in games such as Halo, or 007: Nightfire. You have to refer to your saved games to play a level, which makes it very confusing when you have some game saves on hard mode, some on easy all mixed up in between different levels.

Story- 7/10
At the start of the game, you wake up on a beach, and discover that you have a tattoo of the number XIII on your chest. The lifeguard that found you laying on the beach escorts you down the beach slowly to the main office. You see a helicopter fly by, and you have a sudden flashback of when you were on a boat, and some people are shooting at you. You quickly jump off the boat and swim away. You then return to the beach, where you continue walking towards the office, but you are too disoriented, and you collapse. You wake up in the office when the lifeguard calls an ambulance to come and pick you up, but a sudden attack from some mysterious agents puts you on your feet and running for cover.
The storyline in this game is very nicely done. You can tell that Ubisoft, the makers of the game made sure to make it perfect right down to the pin. There are 20 people who were put on a mission to do something that is not of your knowledge at the start of the game, so I won't spoil the game for you, but along the way of the game you will uncover each one of the conspiracors and their identity. There are many turning points to the story, and it will probably keep you playing non-stop until the end of the game. The ending however is VERY disappointing. By the way the story was going, I didn't think they would end it like this. Of course I am not going to tell you the ending, but this is the main reason I am taking points off for this section.

Graphics-9.5/10
This graphics in this game are all about cel-shading. Cel-shading is when shapes of different colors are put into blocks that are boldly outlined in black. You may have also played other games with cel-shading. Games such as Auto Modellista on the xbox and playstation 2, and Jet Set Radio Future also feature cel-shaded graphics.
In this game you will get a constant 60fps or higher in most places. The only slowdown I found was when I'm in a place with a lot of AI jumping around or if I throw a grenade or a flashbang and the smoke from it slows it down. When you shoot someone, blood will spurt out of them, but none will actually create a puddle of blood on the ground. When you pick up a chair and smash it on someone, a little word section above their head will have ''CRACK'' written on it, and the same goes when you shoot someone to death, they will scream ''AHHHHHahahhhh'', both out loud and in a little word sequence above their head. Another feature I liked about this game is that if one of your friends or the AI has a bullet-proof vest or a helmet on, you can actually see wheter they have it on or not, so instead of trying to kill someone who has a ton of armor on, you can go after the weak one by telling if they have any armor or not. There is also a lot of detail in this game. I remember one time when I was playing in one of the first few levels, I went into a room with a punching bag and I shot it, and some material actually came out of the bag and kept pouring onto the ground until the bag was empty and all of the material was on the floor. In another room an LCD machine was set up pointing against the wall, and when I went over to it and pressed the action button, the light actually turned on and it projected onto the wall. Just little details that don’t really have a point in your objectives of the game, but you can tell the makers of the game took some time to scan over each level and maybe add a little thing here or there.
Overall, the cel-shaded graphics really add a boost to the game's style, and The details and little graphical features really add a lot to the game. I am also giving it credit for the originality of the graphics, as you don’t see cel-shading in very many games these days.

Sound-6/10
The sound is definitely not the best I have seen over the past years of gaming. A lot of weapons sound underpowered, and many of them sound almost nothing like a real weapon would. Take the Assault Rifle for instance. It sounds really died out and if there was no picture of the gun in front of your face, you would probably think you were sticking a piece of paper in a fan blade. The pistol sounds like a cap gun with no caps in it, and the grenade explosions sound like someone nailing an axe through a plank of wood. The only gun I did like the sound of was the spear shooter, which made a sort of dampening type sound when it was shot, and when another rod was loaded into the gun, it sounded like a real stick of metal being slid inside a pipe. The heavy machine gun has a really nice sound to it when for example an AI bot in multiplayer uses it, but when you use it sounds like someone repetitively throwing a box at a wall. I also remember one time I was playing a level though, I walked up to a guard, and he simply just stood there and kept saying “****” over and over again.
One of the things I really liked about the sound is that... THERE IS SWEARING!!! Then again, they didn’t give this a M rating for nothing. The swearing goes as far as using the “F” word, which really improves the gameplay, and even may stir up a laugh or two.
When you use a med kit, you’ll get the same sound every time, “Ohhhhhhh”. After all, who takes out a box of bandages when they are riddled full of bullets, throws it away, and makes a relieving noise?

Multiplayer-8.5/10
Feel like having a few friends over to play a game of XIII? Or maybe even having a party? Well, good luck for you because this offers every form of multiplayer that I know of for the xbox.
You can choose from four different multiplayer modes, all enabling up to four players split screen, eight players on system link play, and eight via xbox live. You can also simply have a 1 player match against the AI bots. The game modes are: Deathmatch, where you just pick up whatever form of weaponry available, and use it against your enemies. The person who reaches the kill limit or gets the most kills within the time limit wins the match, and bragging rights. Team Deathmatch, is the same as Deathmatch except each set of players are put on a team and each player on each team is color coded to your team color so that there will hopefully be no friendly fire. Capture The Flag, is when each team is color coded, just like Team Deathmatch, but this time around each team will have a flag at their base. You and your team have to try and capture the other team’s flag and bring it back to your own base while defending your base and making sure that the other team doesn’t capture yours. Sabotage, is an xbox exclusive mode. Each team is color coded. There are three bomb sites, one team defends them while one team has a respawning bomb at their base which they have to use to destroy the “control points” at the other team’s base. There is a time limit in which if the attacking team does not blow up all three control points the defending team will win. You can also choose between four classes in this mode: A sniper, hunter, soldier, and heavy soldier, each with their specific armour and weapons.
One of the things I would have liked to seen in the multiplayer are the objects that are in single player, such as the shards of glass and beer bottles that you can pick up to knock an enemy out. On top of that, you cannot choose the weapon settings, or your character, which makes it confusing at the start of a match when you and your friends are struggling to figure out who you are playing as.

Replayability-8.5
The single player doesn’t offer too much for replayablility because of its level select style, but it does offer a choice between easy, medium, and hard modes, so that it is a challenge even if you have already beaten it on a lower difficulty. The multiplayer however does give a lot of replayability because of the xbox live, the ability to have a system link match, split screen, or if you are just bored of have no friends you can have a 1 player match against some AI bots.
Overall you will probably get about 5-6 hours out of the single player, and a lot of fun afterwards on the multiplayer, but the single player will get boring after a few times playing it over.

Overall-
This is one hell of a game. The graphics are amazing, the single player has over 30 levels and a difficulty setting to keep you busy. the sound is a let down, but at least there’s a good side to being deaf. The multiplayer is great, and I had a blast playing it with my friends. Overall, I’m going to have to give this game a 7.6, giving it a final 8 out of 10. Nice work, Ubisoft, and keep the good games coming.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/05/04