XIII (2003)

I don't see how any human could manage to defeat The Mongoose without spam healing through console commands. That's certainly what I did.

Anyway, this game was decently cool but it suffered from a lot of bugs. The cutscenes between chapters had no audio. I also found the difficulty a lot at times. Especially when facing the final boss, I really could not ever have beaten him without discovering console commands.

The story Bourne Identity-esque, a secret agent with amnesia has to stop a plot for world domination. I played the original 2003 version on GOG and was surprised to discover that you couldn't use a controller with it. But then, mouse & keyboard is easier for FPS for me.

The last time I played was some odd rental back in time.

For a $2 impulse buy, I am feeling a rare sensation of care-free fun.

It appeared sometime after WWE chairing a bank guard along the story unfolding with a pace as gripping as the music and presentation. Stunned!

The only struggle is the strange mouse feel in the menus and the game locking up, refusing to update on GoG.

Average FPS game but hasnt aged too well quite linear and sort of empty overall. Shallow weapon and gadget selection also. Environment variety was fine but the cell shaded graphics was a bit of a surprise to me that they hadnt aged better, the game looks quite fuzzy like a Wii game and you never really feel any sort of connection with the scale/size of the environment aside from indoor areas tbh.

The gunplay is one of the worst i have seen for a game though aside from the magnum and harpoon/Crossbow weapons everything feels like youre shooting way off target. It might be to encourage stealth more throughout initial play which i must say is overall well balanced throughout the game with the game being 50/50 between stealth and action but it does leave a bad taste in your mouth to not have a satisfying hit detection in a fps game, it sort of makes it feel like a console/joypad fps game too much aswell.

Not the worst game can be played through once but its kind of a one and done game that could have been so much better or with a sequel.

The audio in this game might overall be the best part of the game. While David Duchovny´s voice and appearance feels like a complete miscast to how the character look. The female lead character that pops up now and then to help you seem to have some sort of audio problem though where it sounds like she is way too close to the microphone or without filter throughout the game which is a bit strange as none of the other characters in the game seem to have the same problem. However the music is really good throughout the levels it felt a lot like some spy movie or games like Goldeneye/No One Lives Forever audio wise but its one of the few strengths of the game and that really not enough to make this more than a game to pick up if you have run out of fps games and just need a quick fix for the 7-8 hours it takes to complete it.

6.5/10

Made it to the last boss fight and bailed out there. Not only is a huge difficulty spike, but it's also not fun and it takes more than 30 seconds to get to it from the last checkpoint.

But the rest of the game is really good. The graphics aged wonderfully and the gameplay is solid. The stealth systems are primitive, but they do break up the pace between shooting-all-in-sight missions. I didn't follow the story at all, but luckily is not really important and cutscenes are few and short.