XIII - PS2 Review

21 Apr 2008 at 18:31:34 by Paul Younger
Systems used to review this title: (PS2)

At the start of XIII, the French comic behind the game, our wounded and washed-up hero is tended to by a kindly old couple. He pieces together his story over a few weeks of recovery in an idyllic shack.

The interactive world has different priorities: you can't expect a game-player to sit and "recover" for very long. Hence the old dears are ditched for a Baywatch babe who gets gunned down within seconds of providing her curves for our distraction. She dies, you gain a weapon, and from that point onwards you're back in the world of First-Person Shooters. Welcome to XIII, the game.

While the storyline and setting are rooted in the glitzy spy movies of the 1960s, the game-play is pure 1994-vintage FPS. Shotgun? Check. Rocket launcher? Yep. Alternate Fire? Of course, and the bazooka rocket that doubles as a club is a nice touch. Jumping, strafing, holding breath underwater, "swimming"...there are even end-of-level bosses with health meters. But where DOOM had machine-gun-toting giant spiders, XIII has to contend with crazed surgeons, irrational generals, and mad conspirators.

In fact, all the baddies in the cast behave like comic-book villains in the worst possible sense of the term. No-one ever expresses doubt about what they're doing; everyone is foaming at the mouth with enthusiasm. The pantomime behaviour is in keeping with the far-fetched plot; besides, who wants to shoot someone in the head if they're not completely evil?

King of the ham hill is none other than General Carrington, a good guy, no less. He is voiced by TV's first Batman, Adam West. He is best of the bunch, bringing a manic element of senility to the role of your kindly boss. If there's one place where you want some scenery-chewing over-acting, then a comic book video game is it.

Major Jones, your occasional female side-kick, is voiced by s***-faced hip-hopper Eve. She's the coolest sounding character, and makes every appearance interesting. To her credit she manages not to laugh at lines like "Tighten up yore panties, 'cos we're going supersonic".

David Duchovny (who can't be terribly busy making real movies) sounds merely bored, as if reprising his Fox Mulder should be enough for our amnesiac spy. It isn't, although his nasal tones make an encouraging departure from the boring line of hoarse, deep voices we normally see in hero-type games.

Beyond the creak of the conventional plot there are groans where the game world misbehaves. Can we please not have any more bullet-proof chain-link fences? XIII can fit his hand through a gap in the fence, so why not a speeding bullet?

Enemy combatants can be just as comical: a crack trooper will yell "Grenade!", throw a grenade down a stairwell and then jog down behind it just to make sure it was a grenade and not, say, a lottery ticket. A guard snaps into existence right in between you and another guard who is already firing.

Don't worry; there are logical holes, too. At one point I tripped an alarm and blew the mission: the secret meeting was cancelled. Would that be the same secret meeting I had just sat through, and whose attendees had just disbanded, leaving me in an empty tent? Unfortunately yes; it is apparently possible to cancel meetings that have already happened. Fair enough; this sort of mishap can be expected when you have a basic victory condition and an even simpler failure condition. But this exposes the main problem behind XIII: the missions are linear, the gameplay basic.

At times the game will bend the rules of reason and logic to get you past a check-point. For example: the only way out of a medical facility is with your arm around the neck of a hostage - in this case a nurse. Hostage-taking is a game feature heavily hyped but rarely used. Anyway, what if the "open door" action is the same as "knock out hostage"? Your reviewer found out the hard way, going for a door but instead seemingly snapping the poor woman's neck. Never fear: the game will still funnel you out of the building and out of the mission. Another nurse, this time nowhere near you (and in fact on the other side of a counter) starts screaming for you not to hurt her. The flustered guard at the door will still let you out as if you had a human shield, even though you're all alone. Oh, and the post-episode cut-scene features a conversation out in a canyon with the same nurse you knocked to the ground and left behind in the facility.

The canyon episode is an on-rails trek which highlights some good action sequences as well as graphical design short-comings. It seems that the artists lost their nerve when trying to depict outdoor environments in a truly comic-book style. Instead we have large texture maps that might well belong in a mediocre (and old) FPS. It's a half-way house that doesn't convince. The abandoned pueblo American Indian village in a vast cavern, on the other hand, is impressive. It looks modelled on a real archaeological dig.

When is a door not a door? When it's a beeping heart monitor near an empty hospital bed. Whenever you approach a door a little hand appears in mid-air. This normally means you can open the door or cupboard, but in this one aberrant case it meant exactly nothing. A baffling bug or a game secret I failed to unlock? Who knows?

No such doubts about when I got stuck in a clump of tree-stumps. This is a historical danger with first-person shooters: designing a 3D world which has unintentional traps for the curious and unwary. In this particular case I was unable to free Mr Duchovny from his accidental cage of logs, and had to restart from the last save point.

Your playing style might be a PC-honed save-every-second twitchiness or a console-trained "Wait for the check-point" confidence. XIII's state saving lands somewhere in between. It's possible to fire up the PS2 and continue from your last check-point. You can also save at what seems to be anywhere in the game, but in fact this just stores the last check-point. Until this mechanism became clear your reviewer was even more slack-jawed than normal. OK, so it's no big deal, but it is confusing.

Once we leave the quite impressive environs of the first-person story, multiplayer reveals the core game for what it is: a colour-by-numbers FPS. The split-screen multiplayer games are all I managed to test - there are also online modes. The basic death-match and capture-the-flag levels are quite mundane, whereas the Freak-hunting mode is silly enough for a while. In this mode you have to chase and kill a miniature Death figure, which shrinks with each shot. It's a nice touch that all you get is a hunting rifle, but the action quickly palls. In all multiplayer modes there are bots of varying abilities, from indestructible maniacs to complete wimps who will stand and let you shoot them. None of them are particularly good.

XIII is a game of first impressions, and it sells itself well. The packaging and presentation are all impeccable, and the storyline - although hackneyed and ridiculous - is comic-book, bordering on comical. We should welcome this sort of innovation in any game, and particularly the staid FPS genre. Unfortunately the innovation is skin-deep. Cel-shading and comic-book panels do not make a ground-breaking game. The more you play XIII the less you'll care about the gimmicky graphics, and the more you'll feel the drag of the "same old, same old" action.

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